How Lack of Metrics Sunk Healthcare.gov

It has been well documented that the initial launch of healthcare.gov was a disaster.  This great article in forbes.com diagnoses some of the main reasons why, focusing on their lack of strong project management.

Error Rate report for healthcare.gov established AFTER launch

The rules of project management broken are as follows:

1. Unrealistic requirements
2. Technical complexity
3. Integration responsibility
4. Fragmented authority
5. Loose metrics
6. Inadequate testing
7. Aggressive schedules
8. Administrative blindness

Usually, just one of these mistakes could spell disaster for a project.  But the 8 of them combined lead to utter failure.

But since this an analytics blog, lets focus on metrics: "The government said in a report released on Sunday that it has made “improvements in the site’s key operating metrics over the last several weeks,” which is a tacit admission that it didn’t initially have adequate ways of measuring progress."

Without establishing these proper metrics from the beginning, how would government officials know that the schedule was too aggressive?  Or that the requirements were unrealistic?  The answer:  they had no clue.

I believe that since these metrics were not established from the beginning of the project, this led to a snowball affect that ultimately led to one of the worst "go-live's" in the history of project management.  Lesson moving forward for healthcare, government, and any complex project:

1. define operating metrics in detail from the beginning.
2. determine how these metrics will be communicated to stakeholders.

Too little, too late, this report was released detailing the newly instituted metrics for healthcare.gov.  If these metrics were prioritized by the project team and instituted from early on in the project, we would be discussing the healthcare.gov launch in an entirely different way today.