On October 21, 2013, President Barack Obama entered the Rose Garden and spent nearly an hour apologizing to the American people for the launch of HealthCare.gov. The insurance website designed by the federal government to allow consumers to purchase health insurance policies as mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, was broken. "The website," President Obama said, "is not working the way it should."

The website launch had quickly become a train wreck and threatened to upend the ACA, one of President Obama’s crowning accomplishments. In response, the government engaged some of the world’s fi nest information technology experts to fix the system and restore confidence. The new team quickly established a plan for solving the mess.

Experts are often called in to clean up other people’s messes. It should be an honor to be entrusted with such a task. In the case of the HealthCare.gov issues, the measures the IT experts took are instructive to all experts who are called upon to fi x other people’s problems. Here are some tips for what SMEs should do in this situation.

Identify the true problems independent of politics, preferences, finger-pointing, and emotion. What is the actual problem, and more important, what precisely constitutes resolution of the problem?

Identify the obstacles to resolution. There will always be barriers to fixing a problem. The expert must be empowered to perform the work required. If the necessary actions cannot be taken, then the problem will not be solved. Include the people who understand the problem and want to fix it. An expert can rarely walk into a critical problem when tension is high and solve the problem without the contribution of those who have been involved from the beginning.

Avoid blame. Finger-pointing was plentiful in the days immediately after the launch of HealthCare.gov. Republicans blamed the Democrats, government bureaucrats blamed the contractors, and so on. Ultimately, the people who solved the problem ignored the blame game and focused on the problems and solutions, not any incompetence or malevolence.

Don’t jump to conclusions. Even if you think you know what is wrong and how to solve it, don’t embrace a solution until all other possibilities are eliminated. Involve people with knowledge, not rank. Just because a person appears at the top of the org chart or sits in a corner office does not mean they know what is wrong. Cubicles hold solutions just as readily as offices do.

Focus. Triage the immediate problems and resolve them first. Organize all remaining issues and prioritize them for resolution.

Whether you love or hate Obamacare, the fact is the website launch was resolved. The right people came together and fixed the problems that ailed the initial launch. Enrollments went from twenty-six thousand to nearly one million in one month.