Is it a black swan event?

An IT project with a cost overrun of 150% or more is in the black swan category. Such projects seriously disrupt businesses and costs some workers their careers, he said.

“You can’t really forecast which [IT projects] are going to blow up,” said Budzier, though in hindsight reasons like too tight deadlines may become clear. A tell-tale clue of problems ahead is a categorization of a project as “unique,” he said.

“If your system integrator, if your in-house IT, if everybody tells you that this project is unique, that’s a clear sign that this is going to go massively wrong,” said Budzier.

As Bruce Webster notes in email:

Of course, the natural tendency on the part of HHS & the Administration will be to minimize [as opposed to underpromise and overdeliver] the estimates of how long it’s going to take to fix things — and those estimates will almost certainly be wrong. So what we may see is the ‘Never-Ending Story’ pattern, where for several months they’re perpetually 4-6 weeks away from having Healthcare.gov working properly.

If I were in charge? I’d pull the plug completely and give no completion date at all until the website reconstruction was at a point where I felt comfortable opening it up for public alpha testing. Based on how the alpha testing went, I might announce a subsequent date for beta testing; and if that went well, then and only then would I announce a planned date to go live.

But they’ll find it politically impossible to do that. They’ve put themselves in a box with this legislative atrocity. It’s a Rubik’s cube that someone took apart and put back together to render it unsolvable and, so far, ObamaCare has caused far more people to lose their insurance than to get it.

I hope this costs more than “some workers their careers.” It should be an asteroid slamming into an ideology.

[Update while later]

More from Bruce Webster: ObamaCare and the Project of Doom:

Let me start by saying: there is no royal road to software. Good intentions, earnest efforts, and noble causes don’t count for jack. As I told John Fund over at National Review, saying (as SecHHS Kathleen Sebelius did), “We needed five years but only had two” boggles the mind. It is an admission, inadvertent or otherwise, of profoundly irrational and childish thinking, of magical thinking, if you will. “Clap! Clap to keep Tinkerbell alive!” That type of thinking.

There’s a lot of that type of thinking going on in this administration.

[Bumped]

[Afternoon update]

Kirsten Powers isn’t in denial. The ObamaCare roll out was a disaster for “progressive” politics.

Good.