Introduction
The launching of the healthcare.gov website was unsuccessful. The website crashed on its first day when the Obamacare program was being launched. Upon its launch, several Americans visited the healthcare.gov website to shop for health insurance on the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. The website, however, was strained by the high traffic causing it to crash leaving a lot of people frustrated and uncontended. The Obamacare program was one of the most lucrative and big projects that focused on improving healthcare services in the United States. Essentially, the United States government contracted 55 contractors to create HealthCare.gov (“Healthcare.gov Case Study”). It is the most complex and highly sophisticated software established for the United States federal government. Nonetheless, the launching of this website was unsuccessful and the cause of this failure is attributed to the project management. This paper will discuss the project scope management and project quality management issues that resulted in the Healthcare.gov website launch being unsuccessful.
The failed Healthcare.gov website launch was caused by certain project scope management issues such as making unrealistic requirements. The website was developed in a unique way that no one has ever tried by developing a single website whereby different users could create an online identity, access various health insurance alternatives, choose a particular plan and also identify how eligible the federal subsidies are in real-time. Traditionally, people have normally been visiting the insurance agent to accomplish these tasks and get all these worked out in a couple of days (“Healthcare.gov Case Study”). It was therefore unrealistic for the project planners and developers to expect many esoteric functions to be accomplished in a short period of time by various users who majority maybe lack advanced computer skills and also high-speed internet connectivity. Moreover, all these many tasks and requirements to be accomplished in one website which is meant to serve all states thus having high traffic of visits would probably overload the website and cause it to crash. The developers ought to have considered this in the project’s scope management, and eliminate the unnecessary requirements in the website.
Another factor that contributed to the unsuccessful launch of the Healthcare.gov website is the integration responsibility issues in the management of this project. The United States government has been experiencing difficulties sustaining organic expertise in information technology since the private sector always takes up the best talent by hiring them (“Healthcare.gov Case Study”). The government lacks highly skilled and proficient website developers to maintain and ensure that the website operates smoothly and efficiently (“Week 2 Masy1-GC1250_2019”). The website is quite complex, it needs highly competent experts to maintain the website and ensure that it works best by always monitoring and conducting regular operation assessments on the website. Since the government lacks adequate experts, it is certain that the website would fail.
Issues associated with project quality management are another probable cause for the unsuccessful launch of the Healthcare.gov website launch. Software testing is important for an efficient operation of a website (“Week 1 Masy1-GC1250_2019”). Despite several warnings from the contractors that the website needs to be tested frequently, the United States failed to test the website. Due to the inadequate testing of the website, the website was likely to experience malfunctioning and that is why the website ended up crashing when it was being launched (“Healthcare.gov Case Study”). Actually, the government never conducted an end to end software testing before being launched to operate because the vital information regarding the website was still being implemented a few days before the launch date. And for that reason, a lot of software bugs were identified later to have caused the website to crash and had to be fixed.
Actually the most essential aspect for ensuring that a project is on track, is the project managers have to use vigorous, ambitious performance metrics to measure the progress. However, the project managers of the Healthcare.gov website had loose performance metrics to use n measure the progress of the project (“Healthcare.gov Case Study”). As a result, the progress of the project was inadequately monitored thus creating loopholes which caused the website to crash. Therefore the lack of reliable metrics, explains why the United States federal officials failed to determine until when it was too late that the HealthCare.gov website may not be ready to operate.
Conclusion
To sum up, it is evident that the key cause of the website launch being unsuccessful is due to the project management. Most specifically, the project scope management and project quality management issues significantly contributed to the unsuccessful launch of the website. Therefore, this shows the significance of paying attention to the project management aspects from a project’s development to its implementation stage to ensure it is successfully launched and operates efficiently.