A few weeks back, I wrote a column essentially calling out the American corporate work process when developing products, in this case the Healthcare.gov website.
In the piece, I showcased the failure of the companies involved in building the website in properly hitting deadlines while actually producing a viable product. CGI Group and UnitedHealth Group Inc. were contracted to design and set up the website that has been in the spotlight throughout the last two weeks.
I went on to say that essentially, it’s the corporate structure that hogties the creative and production. By bogging down the production process with endless, meaningless meetings that do nothing but give justification to corporate suits, we have severely hurt American ingenuity.
Well, to the complete displeasure to my many “fans,” I have been vindicated. A group of three guys working for “the greater good,” as they said, did what millions of dollars and hundreds of suits could not … build an efficient, well-organized, fully functional healthcare website.
And the best part? They did it three days. That’s right, three days. These coders, who have worked for places such as Twitter and Facebook, showed what can be accomplished when the un-needed, unimaginative, high-paid suits are not attempting to justify their existence by mudding up the production process.
Since the creation of their website, HealthSherpa.com, the trio of 20-year old coders have since been featured on CBS, CNN and many other media outlets. George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser, said all three of them had tried using the government website to get insurance.
According to a story by CNN, “We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options,” Lang told CNN. “Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans.”
The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area.
“The Health Sherpa is a free guide that makes it easier to find and sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We only use carefully vetted, publicly available data,” the site reads. “The Health Sherpa is not affiliated with any lobby, trade group or government agency and has no political agenda.”
What this shows once again is that there are people that talk about work getting done and people that actually work to get the work done. All the talking in the world will never get the work done. You can meet and discuss and meet and discuss but at some point, someone must put on the hard hat and DO THE WORK.
We have become a society of easy button people. If you can hit the button and everything works fine the world is great. However, if that doesn’t occur and problem solving comes into play, the entire process stops. And undoubtedly, more meetings must be planned.
People talking in meetings about work, not actually working mind you, to justify their professional existence has become an epidemic. Everyone I know has witnessed that person in a meeting that lets a 10-minute discussion turn into a 45-minute snoozefest. This talking in circles ability has extended many a meeting and devoured the man-hours necessary to successfully complete the long forgotten step of ACTUAL work.
We used to be a hard-working, hard-hat society. We have become a nation of money-moving, talking heads that no longer put in 40 hours a week. I do have hope, however, as these three young men have shown us, that hundreds of people talking about work will never be worth three people actually working.