These three management rules helped fix Healthcare.gov

For weeks after its launch, healthcare.gov could barely be accessed, let alone enroll Americans in health insurance exchanges. Its failure and rapid rescue, as detailed by Steven Brill in Time magazine, shows what a difference it makes when engineers are managed well. On Oct. 17, a new engineering team—made up of external volunteers, temporary subcontractors, and engineers from contractor QSSI—started to form and the turnaround was remarkable. Mike Abbott, a Kleiner Perkins partner who was previously key in making Twitter reliable, was a volunteer present for the first critical week and participated in as many as two or more conference calls a day through December.