TITLE: Agile Thoughts, Healthcare.gov Edition
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 21, 2013 3:06 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Clay Shirky explains the cultural attitudes that underlie
Healthcare.gov's problems in his recent essay on
the gulf between planning and reality.
The danger of this gulf exists in any organization, whether
business or government, but especially in large organizations.
As the number of levels grows between the most powerful decision
makers and the workers in the trenches, there is an increasing
risk of developing "a culture that prefers deluding the boss
over delivering bad news".
But this is also a story of the danger inherent in so-called
Big Design Up Front, especially for a new kind of product.
Shirky oversimplifies this as the waterfall method, but the
basic idea is the same:
By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with
subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method
amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything
while doing the actual work.
You may learn something, of course; you just aren't allowed
to let it change what you build, or how.
Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will
understand best how things should work before accumulating
any real-world experience, and that planners will always
know more than workers.
If the planners believe this, or they allow the workers to
think they believe this, then workers will naturally
avoid telling their managers what they have learned. In the
best case, they don't want to waste anyone's time if sharing
the information will have no effect. In the worst case, they
might fear the results of sharing what they have learned. No
one likes to admit that they can't get the assigned task done,
however unrealistic it is.
As Shirky notes, many people believe that a difficult launch
of Healthcare.gov was unavoidable, because political and
practical factors prevented developers from testing parts of
the project as they went along and adjusting their actions
in response. Shirky hits this one out of the park:
That observation illustrates the gulf between planning and
reality in political circles. It is hard for policy people
to imagine that Healthcare.gov could have had a phased
rollout, even while it is having one.
You can learn from feedback earlier, or you can learn from
feedback later. Pretending that you can avoid problems you
already know exist never works.
One of the things I like about agile approaches to software
development is they encourage us not to delude ourselves, or
our clients. Or our bosses.
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