You searched for: progress

OIT's daily standup? It's where we crack the code on incidents and plan ahead—making things better for our Veterans! Learn how we do it.

At the end of the day, I believe today’s IT organization must operate as a technology product group, and our success depends upon putting the right teams in place, giving them the tools they need to do the job, communicating to them the vision of where we need to go, and then getting out of their way.

Join Ms. Lynette Sherrill, and Ms. Carrie Lee, as they […]

Managing IT systems at VA is a massively challenging endeavor.

The Data + AI Summit is the premier event for the global data, analytics and AI community. Participation in the Data + AI Summit will provide the opportunity to hear from leading industry experts about the latest technology trends and advances.

We intend to become the best IT organization in government. We’ll do it by putting the customer first, delivering high-quality products, and focusing relentlessly on operational excellence. With our OKRs, we’ve identified the principal tool we’ll use to realize this audacious goal.

As the nation’s largest integrated health and benefits organization, job one is protecting Veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs. VA is adopting a Zero Trust Architecture to fight ever increasing cybersecurity threats to ensure our systems, networks, and data remain reliable, secure, and private.

VA embraced Zero Trust Architecture as our cybersecurity framework because it is powerful. It is comprehensive yet simple to understand. At its heart, it has a simple premise: assume you’ll be breached and then ask, “What can they get their hands on?”.

Partnerships with Presidential Innovation Fellows and the U.S. Digital Service act as a bridge for VA recruitment of future innovators and technology leaders

Too often, I see scorecards where the metrics point perpetually “up and to the right.” Often that’s because the metric tracks activities rather than actual progress toward goals. It’s easy to measure the number of features we added to an application or the number of routers we upgrade, for example. What we should be asking and measuring is what goal we are trying to achieve for stakeholders and how close we are to achieving that goal.

What doesn’t work as well in this model is holding teams strictly accountable to the tried-and-true measures of “cost, schedule, and performance.” Teams should create vision and connected product plans, but if we encourage them to adjust those plans over time in response to their progress and shifting stakeholder needs so that they ultimately hit that ever shifting “true north,” then we cannot also hold them strictly accountable to a detailed schedule that they set out well in advance.

To help Veterans apply and receive VA benefits more efficiently, VA’s Office of Information and Technology, Veterans Benefits Administration, and Debt Management Center have been working to create innovative technology solutions.