The General Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a report detailing the failures of the healthcare.gov website, and the findings are astounding - starting with the billion (yes, with a B) dollar price tag. Regardless of your thoughts about the policy, the report provides some great lessons learned for IT Project Managers.

The biggest culprits that the GAO study identifies are ineffective planning, ineffective oversight, and ineffective contract management.  I've written about this to some degree before, when a study completed 9 months prior to the website's rollout identified numerous issues that weren't resolved. The GAO study dives a bit deeper into these issues.  

CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, undertook the website development project.  They incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality due primarily to changing requirements that were exacerbated by oversight gaps.

The study concludes that the efforts by CMS were plagued by undefined requirements, the absence of a required acquisition strategy, confusion in contract administration responsibilities, and ineffective use of oversight tools. In addition, CMS did not adhere to the governance model designed for the process, resulting in design and readiness reviews being diminished in importance, delayed, or skipped entirely. By combining that governance model with a new IT development approach the agency had not tried before, CMS added even more uncertainty and potential risk to their process. The result was that problems were not discovered until late, and only after costs had grown significantly.

What does this mean for you?  Well, besides having to pay the price for ineffective project management, it also provides a lessons-learned opportunity when pursuing your own IT projects. If you have any hesitation on launching your new IT projects, it pays to have experienced professionals guide you on the front end as opposed to suffering a public meltdown and significant cost overruns on the tail end.  

If you have an IT Project on the horizon, Paintrock Consulting can help you manage that project effectively and efficiently.  From helping you shape your scope requirements into information that is logical to developers, to determining which project management methodology is best for your goals, to implementing and managing your project and helping you secure additional short-term resources that can come together to help your organization reach its goals - let us help!

Microsoft has released a whole slew of free e-book downloads, including Windows 8, Office 365, SharePoint, Lync, Azure, Powershell and more from Microsoft Developers Network. There is no need to be a developer - these resources include quick and easy user tips, too!

Here's the link to the blog site that provides a little more information on this annual giveaway.  Take a look to see what e-books might be of interest or use to you!

You are probably too wise to fall for this, but since everyone is online these days - from children to seniors - tech support scams and their impact are an unfortunate growing industry.  Keep about this threat so that you can protect your friends and family.  

Imagine getting a cold call from an unknown phone number.  The person calling you says that they're calling from Windows or Apple or Microsoft, and advise that your computer seems to be infected.  Then they advise their certified technician can help you.  

If this has happened to you or someone you know, you have been a victim of scamming.  How severe a victim depends on whether or not you believed the caller, granted them access to your computer, and provided your credit card information.  

These kinds of tech support scams have been around for almost a decade, and while the FTC is aware of them, it is not very effective at stopping them.  This article from Malwarebytes expertly summarizes the variety of tech support scams out in the wild.  They range from cold-calling, fraudulent toll-free numbers that fill up search results, and fake pop-ups.  Once you are talking with a phony tech support agent, you will be requested to grant remote access to your computer, during which a whole new set of scams are applied to make it appear your computer is infected.   

During a remote access session, the scammer can implant anything onto your computer -you effectively grant them full control.  So, you provide your credit card information to have this issue cleaned up.  You are then held hostage to this scam which will continue to charge your credit card to keep your computer "safe", or relaunch the spammy software that it paused previously.  

The main point I stress with elder relatives is this:
No legitimate technical support entity is going to phone you out of the blue to assume your computer is running slowly.  If in doubt, take down their contact information and tell them you'll phone back. In most cases, that will end the call right there. 

If you are having a computer problem, here is what I suggest:

• Take your computer to a trusted computer service entity - a physical place with actual people that you can discuss the problem with to determine if you really are having a problem. 
  
• Do not Google or Bing search your problem unless you have some technical skill and the awareness to bypass the spammy links with those that actually provide information.
  

• Do not ask a friend or relative to help you unless that friend or relative is very computer-savvy.  Just because you ask someone you know does not mean that the information you receive will be valid.  

The Malwarebytes article is an excellent resource with screen shots of what fraudulent "tech support" people may show you, along with an explanation of what you are actually seeing.  It concludes with a Tech Support Black List of known fraudulent "tech support" resources.  

Stay safe out there!

NPR's All Tech Considered today reported on a fascinating look at the some of the issues plaguing the rollout of the Health Care website.  The biggest takeaway from this is that the risk assessment - a very comprehensive one - wrapped up 9 months prior to the website's rollout.  Code issues notwithstanding, many of the analysis' recommendations could have eased the implementation. 

The article does a good job of summarizing two common IT Project Management processes: Waterfall (dump all of the requirements into the development team's lap, go away, come back later to see everything laid out at once) and Agile (outline the requirements, deliver the project in phases that can be adjusted to address issues along the way). 

The Healthcare.gov site was developed using the Waterfall approach.  This might have worked if the product being developed were being done so by a team of experienced coders, by an IT firm with deep development and testing experience, and had the scope been developed by equally deeply-steeped experts.  None of that applied here. 

Add to those issues the deployment of a website to an entire nation at the same time, with the addition of state's marketplaces added to the interface.  Mix in the lack of clear leadership, failure to perform end-to-end or regression testing, load testing, and you have a recipe for disaster.  

Often, disasters like these can be prevented - by internal stakeholder reviews, testing phases, and at least utilizing an Agile development method.  In this case, the project knew early on that it was facing issues, and called in consultants to adjust course.  Those consultants, from what I can glean in the article and associated materials, seemed to have done a thorough job.  Their report foresaw many of the issues that the website faced after it went live.  And, their observations were provided 9 months prior to the launch of the site.  What is not clear, however, is why those report recommendations and red flags weren't heeded.  In the main image from the report (seen above), the Ideal Situation even seems to describe an Agile project, while in reality a Waterfall project was executed. 

If you have an IT Project on the horizon, Paintrock Consulting can help you manage that project effectively and efficiently.  From helping you shape your scope requirements into information that is logical to developers, to determining which project management methodology is best for your goals, to implementing and managing your project and helping you secure additional short-term resources that can come together to help your organization reach its goals - let us help!

How connected is IT within your Business?  I mean more than connected...to the internet.  A new Forrester Research survey commissioned by Effective UI (User Interface) finds that approximately 39% of the IT Executives polled believe that their internal IT organizations deliver projects on time, and on budget.  

Think about that for a minute.  Thirty-nine percent of anything, for most people, would represent failure. Let me illustrate that another way: 

The eye-opening part of the above statement is that this is considered pretty normal.  Other studies peg that success rate at closer to 30%.  Several reasons are cited for this, and I can second many of them from my own experience.  

Notably, larger companies have a lack of Business and IT alignment internally.  This creates an us-versus-them mentality, particularly when budget dollars are closely held.  It creates walled little cube-lands where information is hoarded rather than shared, and self-preservation ranks higher than collaboration.  

Drilling deeper into some of the issues are continuously changing requirements midstream (this is where Agile or Waterfall IT Project Management techniques can help), overburdened in-house IT organizations, and lack of big-picture project management skills or experience in house for IT projects.  

Paintrock Consulting Services can help you beat that paltry 39% success rate across the industry, because we allow you to focus on your core business.  We work with stakeholders at each level of your organization to help shape your IT project.  We can manage a portion or an entire IT project, including development and testing process, security, collaboration platforms, cloud services, coordinating local and offshore teams, new technology deployments, communication and training planning, and stakeholder engagement.  

This work should be done in alignment with your business's goals and objectives, using your brand and voice for consistency to communicate your changes, and in collaboration with - not in opposition to - your existing departments.  

Forbes reports that for inspired or forward-thinking organizations involved in cloud computing, cost savings and efficiency are just the icing on the cake. What they really are pursuing is something deeper to the business– to develop high-powered analytical capabilities. They look at cloud and see analytic opportunities.

My experience in supporting multiple organizations in moving to cloud services is that without strategic governance, cloud services aren't so much better at enabling analytics as opposed to provide additional repositories for data to be stored and managed.  If you're just shoveling e-junk from one repository to another, analytics won't help you.  

A move to the cloud requires a clear strategy and a strong governance policy to ensure that strategy is met.  As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out".  Moving to the cloud allows you to purge your files of what your company is no longer required to retain for documentation, and to create a clear classification taxonomy that will allow your employees to find the relevant information that they require to perform their jobs.  And that doesn't begin to address the requisite security aspects that must accompany your data.  

Once you do move your content to the cloud, and ensure it is clear and classified, you can utilize analytics to help you in any number of ways, including identifying further opportunities for your core business. 

Paintrock Consulting can help you plan your cloud move, as well as the governance and security policies your organization needs to manage your data.  

Many interesting takeaways from "Sustaining Change Momentum", Human Resource Executive Online. By Kecia Bal, September 16, 2013.

Employee engagement doesn't always filter down to managers, so you have to train them on how to keep employees engaged -- asking for input, involving employees in the change and going first via role modeling. You also need to help managers understand why people resist change.  Because of this behavioral need to adopt a change-supported groundswell, e-learning or online training for handling change are ineffective.  

Yep, I said it.  I have seen e-learning pushed throughout an organization as a means to drive adoption to change, and this fails consistently, from the word "Go". 

Humans are habitual creatures, and as such, change is difficult for most of the population.  That includes your employees.  Requiring them to sit through an online video and test module, when they feel they could be doing their work - for you - just creates a forced and unnecessary conflict. 

Additionally, I don't agree with the HR trend to train managers to speak better about topics that are unclear to them.  This would rather illustrate the first line of failure in effectively communicating change from the top down, via speaking at your employees, rather than speaking from a personal perspective, to them, about the coming changes. Managers can better usher change in through personal rollout sessions than through recorded speeches.

Towers Watson research report, Critical Human Capital Issues 2013, indicates 3 of the top 10 issues with employees involve dealing with change.  Encouraging employee support of a change initiative is best met through communication - early and often - and employee engagement through interactive training.  

This is one of the services Paintrock Consulting can provide your your firm, large or small.  From working with key executives to develop the Communication plan, to development and implementation of Train-the-Trainer plan through the Management ranks, through workshop-styled full scale employee engagement sessions and town hall meetings.