[lessnonymous]

It sounds, to me, like they should have created a centralised spec for talking to these external system. Then created teams to build the interfaces between that spec, and the external systems.

So for healthcare.gov to talk to Hospital Insurance Inc. it would actually talk to the Health Insurance Inc shim and THAT would talk to the third party.

Now you have a small(er) definable project that a team can deliver and that can be tested. 100 shims later and healthcare.gov can talk to anything because they all (appear to) use the same interface.