THE CIRCUS CAME TO TOWN. The big top appeared virtually overnight. In just a few months, the ringleaders set up 520 offices, hired more than half a million temporary ticket punchers and processed over a billion pieces of paper. And for good measure, they counted every person in the United States.

Welcome to Census 2000, the greatest show in government. Inactive and ignored for most of the decade, in the past few years the U.S. Census Bureau undertook the largest peacetime people and technology mobilization ever. With limited funds and a short window of execution, the decennial count challenged all those who strove to manage it. If you could graph the bureau's budget and effort over the decade, it would look like the human cannonball's EKG in the moments before, during and after his harrowing performance. Steady and flat in a state of anxious readiness, a short but violent spike as he is shot through the air and then a return to calmness as the adrenaline fades.

The years after the last census, in 1990, were quiet. Around 1995 the strategizing for Census 2000 got under way. That year some of what would prove to be the key decisions were first discussed, and by 1997 the blueprint for Census 2000 was pretty much complete. It included some complicated and innovative technologies and massive effort with little margin for error. Counting heads millennium-style involved an unprecedented level of IT. To collect and process information on the approximately 275 million people in America, the bureau relied on 10,000 PCs, a network with more than 600 routers and over 33 terabytes of storage at the satellite sites alone. The deployment of technology was a departure from previous censuses, when most data was processed manually. For all the data-management advantages brought on by this IT intensivity, though, it also created one serious drawback: no safety nets. Most problems in earlier censuses could be overcome simply by assigning more workers. That solution wouldn't work for software, however; inaccuracies in coding would be replicated million-fold. By automating Census 2000, the bureau sacrificed its safety nets. Even critical and complex steps in Census 2000 had no backup plans.

There was a simple explanation for this seeming deficiency, says Census Bureau CIO Rick Swartz, from his headquarters in Suitland, Md. With a project of this magnitude, plan B's are pretty expensive." And with a tight budget and no time for mistakes, most of the time, plan B was simply to make plan A work."

With just a three-month window to collect and process the bulk of the data, a major failure at any step of the project could have been fatal. The bureau realized early on that the only way to assure a perfect performance was constant, comprehensive rehearsal. Each aspect of the hardware and software involved was tested until the bureau was certain it would workand then it was tested some more. In some cases, testing lasted three years. Still, failure

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