8A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2016
Cover Oregon: Weakness in management led to unnecessary delays
Continued from Page 1A
Both sides in the ongo-
ing litigation have struggled
to explain the massive scope
of the Cover Oregon failure,
which came despite a lengthy
head start and extra funding
from the federal government.
The reality, according to
Walsh? Compared to other
large projects, “It should have
been easy.”
One of the roving breed of
professional consultants who
bounce from state to state
for months or years at a time,
Walsh is typically the top-dog
“systems analyst” who either
leads or troubleshoots large
IT project design or is paid to
watchdog those who do, says
Shari Benkiel, a longtime IT
consultant who has worked
with Walsh on seven large
projects in ive states.
“He is usually the irst per-
son I call” to ill that role, she
says. “I call him ‘The Bor-
derline Genius,’” she adds,
because of his insights into
complex health care technol-
ogy projects.
With a Ph.D. in econom-
ics, and a resume that includes
IT expertise as well as a stint
as head of Medicaid for the
state of Illinois, Walsh brings
a level of technical, inancial
and management expertise
that normally requires three or
four hires to match, says Lou-
isa Moore, who has worked
on large technology projects
with Walsh, including in Cal-
ifornia. “He’s a true profes-
sional and he really knows his
stuff.”
‘That’s not going to
work’
Walsh heard about it from
a friend. The Cover Oregon
project would be a one-stop
health coverage shopping site
that would allow consumers
to compare health plans, qual-
ify for lucrative tax credits
and enroll in a single sitting.
The federal government was
supplying Oregon with tens
of millions in extra funding
to serve as a model for other
states.
Excited by the vision,
Walsh applied and went to
work on it in April 2012 as a
consultant.
The warning signs were
immediately apparent, Walsh
says. He moved into a cubi-
cle with the state’s IT team in
a Salem ofice building.
Rather than sitting among
the workers, top management
was rarely to be seen — which
Walsh characterizes as “very
abnormal … There were a
lot of disputes about how we
should be doing things that
nobody stepped in and took
charge of.”
The project’s top managers
employed a mishmash of proj-
ect development techniques,
adopting multiple methods
over time, but never institut-
ing the training or changes
needed to make them work,
he says.
Walsh came to realize the
dysfunction was mirrored on
the Oracle side, where work-
ers for the state’s chief con-
tractor were divided into ief-
doms reporting to different
managers. In fact, Walsh’s
Oracle counterparts some-
times warned him to be skep-
tical of the company’s work in
other parts of the project, he
says.
His job was to oversee
how the project tracked inan-
cial transactions, such as pay-
ments to insurance agents for
helping consumers.
But he and his Oracle
counterparts were repeatedly
rebuffed in 2012 when they
sought information from other
parts of Oracle that they con-
sidered crucial to the project’s
success, such as how mas-
sive quantities of data would
it together under the project’s
design, he says.
The data design would
be ready in two weeks, they
heard over and over.
Walsh began to have his
doubts. “You tell yourself,
‘They can’t be that bad … I’m
sure they’ve got something.’ ”
After a while, Walsh pur-
sued a separate data design
for his portion of the project
to ensure his team was not
held up. He credits that deci-
sion for his team’s success,
that way,” Pettit told congres-
sional investigators, adding
that when he complained to
Oracle about its design, the
response was, “Well, it wasn’t
in the speciication.”
Pettit’s retort: “Well, it
didn’t need to be in the spec-
iication. You knew you had
to keep track of changes
to records, and the system
wouldn’t keep track of it.”
Walsh echoes Pettit, that
because the project’s pro-
gramming was in Oracle’s
hands, the technical design
was arguably the company’s
responsibility.
Defects in state IT
culture
Jamie Valdez/Pamplin Media Group
Tom Walsh, a veteran IT troubleshooter who worked on
the inside of the Cover Oregon project, says the full story
of the debacle has never been told.
as the inancial side of Cover
Oregon worked ine and was
completed on time.
In contrast, Walsh still
recalls the shock his team felt
in July 2013 upon seeing the
design for how enrollment
would work for the project.
A colleague’s muttered reac-
tion: “Well, that’s not going to
work.”
Fatal law in design?
Walsh says it appeared
that Oracle managers felt they
didn’t need to do a ground-up
design, that they were just
modifying existing off-the-
shelf Oracle software.
Walsh was surprised to
hear from Oracle in fall 2012
that the health insurance sys-
tem its staff envisioned had no
capacity to process midyear
changes in a family’s health
policy, premiums or tax cred-
its after they enrolled.
Such changes — due to
a birth, death, divorce or a
wage-earner losing their job
— are common, and on mul-
tiple occasions Walsh urged
Oracle to accommodate
changes in its design. The
response? We’ll get to it later.
Not until September 2013,
the month before the project
was supposed to go live, did
Walsh and his team learn that
Oracle’s design for the health
insurance project still did not
allow changes to a family’s
policy or circumstances. This
meant Cover Oregon would
not be able to share data effec-
tively with the insurance car-
riers it worked with — a basic
problem that caused ripple
effects throughout the proj-
ect’s workings.
This, Walsh believes, was
the “fatal law” of Cover Ore-
gon, and why the exchange
had to be scrapped. Fixing the
problem would require major
changes at great cost. And the
project’s budget was already
largely expended by the time
the problem became clear.
Walsh’s diagnosis mir-
rors congressional testimony
given by Alex Pettit, the
state’s top IT manager, who
was brought in to try and res-
cue the project in early 2014,
only to realize it was impos-
sible due to the “fundamen-
tal design error” concerning
midyear changes in a family’s
policy or circumstance.
“The whole thing was
going to have to be rewritten
… It was truly unbelievable
that it would ever be designed
But Walsh says the state
bears responsibility for other
problems, including delays
and wasteful spending.
For instance, the state
spent months and millions of
dollars trying to perfect a new
type of interface to shift data
between two components of
the project. Walsh urged the
use of a standard Oracle prod-
uct instead. In the end, when
an Oracle analyst conirmed
to Cover Oregon managers
that Walsh’s idea would work,
a top oficial asked how long
it would take to set up the
solution.
“What time is it?”
responded the analyst, and the
ix was set up later that day,
Walsh recalls.
For all the criticisms of
Cover Oregon, Walsh says
parts of the system worked
well. And the nontechnical
program side of things, such
as the variety of plans offered
and number of insurers partic-
ipating, was a great success.
“It wasn’t that the whole
thing failed,” Walsh says,
adding that the project’s
insurance design “was one of
the best in the country.”
But while a state consul-
tant’s report on Cover Ore-
gon highlighted mismanage-
ment, and Pettit, the top state
IT manager, has instituted
reforms, Walsh says he’s not
sure either addresses some
of the biggest management
weaknesses he’s seen in Ore-
gon when it comes to large IT
projects.
Walsh has watched several
Oregon projects play out, and
his account of a larger prob-
lem of management culture
echoes other consultants who
spoke privately with the Port-
land Tribune.
Oregon features a top-
down management style, in
contrast with other states, says
Walsh, who has studied man-
agement. Successful projects,
however, feature communica-
tion lowing up and down the
command chain. On Cover
Oregon, this management
style led to an early focus on
schedule rather than design.
Later, management obsessed
on the website’s appearance
while ignoring the details of
how it would work.
Another problem that
seems endemic to Oregon IT
projects is cronyism, rather
than hiring the best-qualiied
staff, Walsh says.
While Oregon oficials
like to complain the salaries
allowed by the state aren’t
large enough to afford top IT
management talent, Walsh
says the real problem is Ore-
gon doesn’t use top consult-
ing talent the way it should.
And while the people running
Cover Oregon had IT expe-
rience, they lacked a record
of success in large IT project
development.
Because of the cronyism,
accountability suffered. “The
‘in’ people seemed to have
more leeway,” Walsh says.
The weakness in man-
agement led to unnecessary
delays and ineficiencies, and
likely contributed to the state’s
failure to challenge Oracle on
key issues, Walsh says. And
when problems came up, the
state did not replace nonper-
forming managers with bet-
ter ones.
“They hire people they
know,” Walsh says. “And
then, when things don’t go
well, they hire more people
they know.”
The Capital Bureau is a
collaboration between EO
Media Group and Pamplin
Media Group.
T AKE A STAND FOR COMMUNITY SAFETY
These days, I think all of us dread picking up a newspaper or turning on a news broadcast to find ou t that there’s been another mass killing and an ever-increasing number of victims of
gun violence. The horror, sadness, fear and feeling of helplessness are human reactions to what see ms incomprehensible. It doesn’t matter if you are for gun-rights or for stricter gun
controls, as human beings we share these feelings of horror, sadness, fear and helplessness. Would a gun resolution make any difference, do letters to the editor and posts on social media
help address this problem? I don’t know, but I do know that I must do something…we must do somethin g to put a stop to this madness.
Area residents have signed on to support the following letter, which I have written and am paying fo r, as a private citizen. Please contact your elected leaders to support their work for
improved gun safety.
Here is the letter:
and
tors Ron Wyden
Kate Brown, Sena
nne
za
Su
s
ive
Honourable Gov.
tat
nal Represen
sio
res
ng
Co
,
,
ter DeFazio and
Jeff Merkley
rl Blumenauer, Pe
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,
en
ald
W
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Gr
Bonamici,
Kurt Schrader,
communities in
joins with other
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tor
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The Ci
around our country
from mass killings
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this madness that
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to put an end to
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communities who
ng and for their
nti
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fo
s
rm
ea
fir
n
ow
to
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individu
ntly:
you to work dilige
protection but urge
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magazines and as
y
cit
pa
in a
-ca
gh
hi
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• To ba
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checks; and
rsal background
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ke our communiti
your efforts to ma
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k
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d raise our
fe place to live an
sa
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grandchildren.
Sincerely,
ayor
Arline LaMear, M
ia
tor
As
City of
Adriana Guerrero
Alan C. Batchelder
Alana Garner
Aletha Westerberg
Alison Coffinbarger
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