Lessons of the Healthcare.gov Fiasco

Fundamentally, Agile requires a rethink of the organizational aspects of planning, delivering, testing, and managing any IT project. The entire effort must be tackled iteratively. Stakeholders should be involved at every step. Testing must take place in every iteration, in order to lessen the testing burden as the initiative approaches delivery.
First, we allow a fanatical right wing minority to shut down our entire government because they didn’t want American citizens to get affordable healthcare – even though most other developed countries consider healthcare a right rather than a privilege. We finally resolve the shutdown (at least temporarily) only to find that the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rollout – the Healthcare.gov Web site – suffered from severe flaws. Seriously, can’t we get anything right?

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