Bulldozer00's Blog

To promote their infallible expertise, fathead consultants love to present apples-to-oranges comparisons as though they were apples-to-apples comparisons. One such prominent consultant (hint: a famous Forbes columnist) recently gushed over the success of music provider Spotify.com; contrasting its success to the team that built the buggy, slow, initial, version of the healthcare.gov web site.

As is almost always the case, these clever dudes leave out the oft-hidden, process-independent, contextual, forces that relentlessly work against success:

To imply that the Healthcare.gov team would have been successful if they simply employed agile practices (like Spotify.com) is to either be naive, disingenuous, or both.

Have you noticed that the press isn’t clamoring over the inadequacy of the healthcare.gov site anymore? Obviously, the development team must have righted the ship by morphing into a high performing juggernaut under the tutelage of a cadre of agile process consultant(s) – regardless of whether they did or they didn’t.