Just like healthcare.gov, the reality is you start with an absolutely trivial problem and turn it into a nightmare. I wouldn't call hc.gov "trivial" -- it star

Just like healthcare.gov, the reality is you start with an absolutely trivial problem and turn it into a nightmare. I wouldn't call hc.gov "trivial" -- it started with all the fun of a massive-scale website, added X12 EDI workflow, then finished up with real-time communications with high-security government systems never meant to be interoperated with and at least a few of which probably can't communicate over red-black networks. Then they started adding complexity to it. Admittedly, some of those added complexities caused major headache, such as the requirement to use ORCL IDM (which, if the hotwashes are correct, proved a constant Achilles' heel to the ops side -- who the hell put that requirement in the spec?), but the project started out high-risk. The problem with government projects by the way, isn't with "project managers and engineers;" it's with the dozens of agency stakeholders, half of whom are political appointees and the other half of whom are waging bureaucratic turf wars against everyone else. With high-profile projects like hc.gov, you also get politicians involved, so everyone starts freaking out about things like the fear that some illegal immigrant working in a Kansas poultry slaughterhouse could accidentally qualify for health insurance and end up as the lead story on FOX News. And, of course, even though the seventh floor (and, in this case, the Oval Office!) gives lip service about how critical it is that the tech works perfectly, you'll never see an appointee or an SES employee actually try to keep the ship upright. After that, add in large-scale government contractors that operate on a high-risk version of waterfall that requires every single piece to come together perfectly, on time, without errors, and for the internal specs and contracts to not shift at all -- well, it's a recipe for a massive clusterfuck, every single time. There's a reason Medicare is still running on mainframes and FERS has never gotten off paper -- the risks of failure are just overwhelming.