When the government’s startup tech team assigned to fixing the Healthcare.gov website decided it wanted to operate in an “agile” way, the government agreed.
The powers that be liked “agile,” one of those Silicon Valley buzzwords that roughly translates to being open to fluid deadlines and goals during the work process. Agile would work.
So when the government came back with an “agile” schedule for fixing the site, the tech team was surprised to see something that was not fluid at all,The Atlantic reports.
“And I’m like, how is that agile? That’s a three-month plan—down to like, a plan every day of those three months. ‘What if you learn something on like the third week that changes the rest of the plan?,’” Loren Yu, a member of the tech team, said. “And they were like, oh, well it’s the rest of the plan, so it can’t change.”
That tech team, known as Marketplace Lite, was the core of the force that in many ways saved the Affordable Care Act from itself. And as much as it did so with small, iterative bug fixes and website builds, it also reformed the government’s understanding of “agile,” and, more significantly, taught the feds how to deal with the modern Internet.
“So the team that started by performing bug fixes on a sprawling, struggling mass of code ended by writing critical, efficient infrastructure for the government,” The Atlantic writes. “Yet what the MPL team accomplished philosophically may be even more important: It helped teach government bureaucrats how to think about building websites in 2015.”
Date: July 13, 2015