I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts: "The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to procure technical so

I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts: "The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly). But in this case, obviously we’re a third party service provider so this really has nothing to do with the President’s team’s ability to execute." It is indeed a reflection of the President's team's ability to execute when they reach out to a vendor on a Friday for a Monday call, mangle the details so that the vendor and the audience have mis-set expectations, and, most importantly, did not do testing to determine whether or not their event will reflect well on their boss and organization. They've done these calls before - for example, after the State of the Union: http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-call-after-state-of-the-union-156672.html http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-c... -- so dropping this order in the lap of a new vendor with 72 hours to go almost guarantees that some mistake will happen. I understand this is OFA, not the White House, and perhaps for a seat-of-the-pants campaign style event under normal circumstances, this would be excusable. But these are not normal circumstances. When your boss is under fire for his rollout of the most important government tech program since the Moon landing, and you arrange a call to discuss that rollout, it is imperative that you make sure the technology works. Guaranteed. No questions asked. If you can't guarantee that, then don't use that vendor, don't do the event as a conference call, or don't do the event. Why? The resulting PR mess, which might not be germane to a start-up tech audience, but is very germane to the Office of The President, will come and will be costly. The post serves to reinforce the image of a management team around the President that does not understand that making very urgent requests of technologists does not mean that the technology will automatically obey.