Now:

By end of 2023

We need to support partner teams' application development goals in order to validate our founding hypothesis that VRO can make it easier to build and validate ideas:

• Provide integrations to support core functionality of EE team's EP Merge App MVP.
  • BIP Claims API microservice
  • BGS Notes API microservice
• Enable CC team's use of VRO database for product success metrics monitoring

We need to invest in team health, resilience, and capacity to support the existing platform:

• Conduct VRO team knowledge transfer to eliminate siloed expertise amongst team members and share the load of platform support across the team
• Plan team alignment and working agreement sessions for onsite gathering in January

Next:

~Jan-Mar 2024

As a consistent and continuous baseline, we will always prioritize security and compliance monitoring (SecRel and Dependabot), as well as resolving any production issues that come up.

Our top priority coming into 2024 aligns with the Benefits Portfolio's top priorities of having zero silent failures and improving monitoring and alerting: We need to get tools and processes in place to consistently support the platform in its current (existing) state:

• Resolve major deployment obstacles

  • Why? = so that we can deploy consistently across LHDI environments using our existing deployment process

• Ensure observability of VRO services and partner applications

  • Why? = so that we are confident we will know when something goes wrong and we have the processes in place to respond quickly and manage incidents to resolution

• Define an automation strategy for VRO

  • Why? = We currently have a lot of automation available to the team but it is not organized or consistently implemented so we are not getting the full benefit of it, and are suffering the cost of inconsistency. Defining a consistent strategy and process for VRO's approach to automation will enable us to unlock those benefits, winning back capacity for the team to invest elsewhere

• Define a VRO data strategy

  • Why? = VRO currently has the capability to support data storage in our RDS database, but lacks a data strategy to guide implementation of data storage and handling across the platform and partner applications. We are at risk of implementing divergent approaches and standards for data storage and handling across different domains (VRO, CC, EE) which could potentially result in impacts to security, compliance, sustainability, and scalability of the platform.

Later:

~Apr-Sep 2024

👉Then, we reach a decision point!

With platform support stabilized we will be ready to look at expanding the platform to provide more value – and there are a number of ways we might do so.

At a high level, the competing priorities we anticipate at this stage are:

• Enabling partner teams to run daily automated production deployments independent of the platform team

  • Why? = so that it becomes significantly easier for partner teams to make rapid iterations to their products that allow them to validate ideas more quickly

• Making va.gov disability claim submission data available for analysis in VRO

  • Why? = so that it becomes significantly easier for Benefits Portfolio teams to measure existing products and assess new product opportunities, allowing faster and more reliable validation of ideas

• Supporting partner teams to build new applications with new integrations/features in VRO (could be either new applications from existing partners, and/or onboarding new partner teams such as Proactive Benefits team, VSO team)

  • Why? = so that more ideas to improve the benefits experience for Veterans, their representatives, and VA employees can be built and validated

The prioritization of these opportunities will be dependent on the emerging goals and priorities of VRO's current and potential future partner teams, which are not yet known and are likely to evolve further before we are ready to begin executing on this set of work streams.

How might we make this decision when the time comes?

It will continue to be true that platform reliability, security, and compliance are table stakes and will take priority whenever issues or needs arise in these areas.

Beyond the above-mentioned baseline, we intend to evaluate new platform opportunities based on:

• Impact & reach
• Effort, complexity, & risk
• Urgency & VA strategic priority

Impact & reach Assessing impact and reach focuses on the anticipated benefit to Veterans, as delivered via improvements for Veterans themselves, their representatives, VA employees, and OCTO product development teams. Evaluating this impact will require comparing the anticipated impacts of disparate initiatives with more or less direct benefit to Veterans, for example:

• Developing a new integration or feature to support a given partner team's application may have a high impact on a small subset of end users based on the scope of the application
• Broad platform maturity improvements that support more efficient development for all partner teams may have a smaller impact on a broader subset of end users based on all the applications
• New data visibility features have the least direct impact but the widest reach, potentially benefiting all teams in the Benefits Portfolio in making better informed product decisions

Effort, complexity, & risk Assessing effort, complexity, and risk will be largely a technical evaluation, but should also consider operational and service layer complexity (e.g. working across different VA organizations or heavy interdependencies with other teams, or effort related to rolling out and ensuring adoption of new processes or features by partner teams).

Urgency & VA strategic priority In cases where VRO prioritization decisions would impact partner teams' delivery, we need to consider the urgency and strategic priority of the partner teams' goals in addition to VRO's own goals. In these cases, we will work with the partner teams to produce an assessment of the different prioritization options and provide that to our VA product owners for input on weighing different teams' needs against each other according to VA's higher level priorities across the Benefits Portfolio.