Zvanysse Week 11

10 Terms

1. Uptime rate: Uptime is a computer industry term for the time during which a computer is operational. (Rouse, 2005)
2. Supercomputers: A Supercomputer is a high performance computing machine designed to have extremely fast processing speeds. (Christensson, 2009)
3. Gantt chart: A Gantt Chart, commonly used in project management, is one of the most popular and useful ways of showing activities (tasks or events) displayed against time. (What is a Gantt Chart, 2017)
4. Agile software: favors small, cross-disciplinary teams that stay in close communication with each other while quickly finishing iterative improvements to a product (Robinson, 2015)
5. The Tech Surge: A group of Silicon Valley developers who rescued the website from disorganized contractors and bureaucratic mismanagement. (Robinson, 2015)
6. Client software: The software that acts as the interface between the client computer an the server. (Christensson, 2006)
7. The waterfall: A sequential design strategy. A central calendar - the Gantt chart to end all Gantt charts. (Robinson, 2015)
8. Responsive (In terms of Web Design): This is a type of web design that provides a customized viewing experience for different browser platforms. (Christensson, 2013)
9. Cloud: The term "cloud"comes from early network diagrams, in which the image of a cloud was used to indicate a large network, such as a WAN. (Christensson, 2012)
10. Static Website: A static website contains Web Pages with fixed content. Each page is coded in HTML and displays the same information to every visitor. (Christensson, 2009)

Term References

1. Rouse, Margaret. "What is Uptime and Downtime?" WhatIs.com, Sept. 2005, whites.techtarget.com/definition/uptime-and-downtime.
2. Christensson, P. (2009, September 25). Supercomputer Definition. Retrieved 2017, Nov 10, from https://techterms.com
3. "What is a Gantt Chart?" Gantt, 2017m www.gantt.com/
4. Meyer, R. (2015, July 09). The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America. Retrieved November 10, 2017, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/
5. Meyer, R. (2015, July 09). The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America. Retrieved November 10, 2017, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/
6. Christensson, P. (2006). Client Definition. Retrieved 2017, Nov 10, from https://techterms.com
7. Meyer, R. (2015, July 09). The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America. Retrieved November 10, 2017, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/
8. Christensson, P. (2013, August 20). Responsive Web Design Definition. Retrieved 2017, Nov 10, from https://techterms.com
9. Christensson, P. (2012, May 30). Cloud Definition. Retrieved 2017, Nov 10, from https://techterms.com
10. Christensson, P. (2009, June 12). Static Website Definition. Retrieved 2017, Nov 10, from https://techterms.com

Outline

Overall Main Message

• Different styles of thinking lead to better and more cost efficient results

The Introduction

• Healthcare.gov was extremely slow and buggy and needed to be fixed.

The Problems

• Site's uptime rate is 91%
• On Healthcare.gov’s first day, six people successfully used it to sign up for health insurance.
• The website was costing hundreds of millions of dollars
• The login requests were taking 2-10 seconds
• This sparked the Tech Surge - the beginning of the Marketplace Lite

MarketPlace Lite Birth

• From the problems noted above, MarketPlace Lite was born
• The goal was to fix all of the problems stated above as well as:
  • reduce the cost by 1/50th of the current cost
  • reduce the healthcare signup process by half
  • Implement new login system which would cost much less as well as not be as problematic
  • Rewrite infrastructure for website

The Process

• The work life balance was very difficult - ten hours a day, 7 days a week
• Worked at the DoubleTree
• Utilized Amazon Web Services
  • A Data center of supercomputers
  • Companies can rent out the computational power of these supercomputers at a relatively cheap price as well as makes database management easier
  • Can easily scale up or scale back
• Process took over 6 months for Healthcare.gov to accept the AWS proposal
• The MPL team utilized Akamai while waiting for AWS, a cloud provider blessed by the government already to start building the foundational/ structural aspects of the website.
• In 2014, contracts were up, but most stayed on and actual quit their other jobs to join this team
• Switched over to Chat Client help support, this eliminated the long long chains of emails
• The government tried to implement a sequential infrastructure project management approach which ultimately failed
  • It basically only wanted to move on when the software was fully implemented using a step by step process which unnecissarily prolonged the project
  • They ultimately went the "agile" way, working on multiple things at once
• Tension still rose between Government and MPL because the Government didn't understand what the MPL team was doing
• Eventually, the MPL team released the App and it had great success - as it only took 9 minutes to sign up
• Then, MPL worked on the actual website. They worked out all the bugs relatively quickly because they didn't have the Government breathing down their back

Significance of this work

• Made one of the governments' worst websites extremely more efficient and cost effective
• Demonstrated the importance of dedication and hard work and how it pays off
• Shows how alternative ways of thinking lead to better efficiency

Main Points of Process

• Outsources to Amazon Web Services
• Switched to Chat Client help support to eliminate long email chains
• Implemented fluid and "agile" philosophy to workflow
• Finished App 2.0 which took customers only 9 minutes to complete
• Reduced login request times to 30 milliseconds from 2-10 seconds
• Reduced cost from 250 million to build and 70 million to maintain to 4 million to build and 1 million to maintain
• Good to have designer in the beginning of project
• Smaller teams work better than bigger teams - better communication

Takeaways to my assignment

• Communicate and understand that not all parts of the team have the same knowledge base as one another
• Dynamically work on parts instead of waiting for one group to finish there part
• Different thinking styles are encouraged and lead to better results
• Design the workflow before actually implementing - have a designer