A lot of knowledgeable experts are weighing in with their points of view about went wrong with the launch of healthcare.gov.  A project as massive as healthcare.gov can have many possible points of failure. When I first  heard that the upcoming October 1 launch, it reminded me of the website my team at IBM built for the Atlanta Olympics of 1996. In 1995, there were not many people who knew a lot about how to build really large websites. The Olympic site was the largest in the world back then and we learned a lot in building it. We were humble about our expectations. We didn’t know how many people would come to the site, when they could come, or what they might do when they got there. We learned many lessons, but I can summarize it in a simple mantra: Think big, start simple, iterate fast. Another way to say it is to take a lot of baby steps. It appears that the direction for healthcare.gov was “think big, start big, avoid failure”.  My friend Irving Wladawsky-Berger (see his blog at blog.irvingwb.com) sent me a link to a very thoughtful analysis of what went wrong written by Clay Shirky. Clay is the author of an excellent book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which I thoroughly enjoyed. In his posting about healthcare.gov, Clay analyzes the planning behind the site, the management system that influenced it, and the interactions of various constituents. If you want to get a better understanding of what happened, I recommend reading Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality by Clay Shirky.