How GovCIO’s Veterans Integration Team (VIT) Helps Our Customers Better Serve Veterans

“The purpose of the Veterans Initiatives Team is to obtain direct feedback from a diverse group of Veterans.  Whether it’s a survey or end-user testing, the VIT offers GovCIO a unique data collection tool that enables us to truly take a Human/Veteran Centered Design approach when developing innovative solutions to new challenges or iterating within an existing modernization journey.  While the Veterans who participate to get compensated for their time, I have never heard that be a motivating factor for their participation.  The benefit for Veterans who participate is that they get to have a voice on Veteran-facing programs and services that are impacting their own lives and their brothers and sisters in arms.”

Tim Cox
Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, GovCIO

“VIT enlists our Veteran community to support program development by supporting requirements evaluation and product testing. Our roughly 1500 member VIT…affords GovCIO teams the ability to directly engage with a wide spectrum of Veterans who have varying needs and experiences. The engagements allow GovCIO to provide end user / customer centric insights and feedback that allow us to provide more meaningful and impactful solutions for our sponsors and stakeholder community and the Veterans they serve.”

John Larkin
Vice President – Digital Services, GovCIO

“From the perspective of VLM (Veterans Legacy Memorial) program, we had requested feedback from the Veterans participating in VIT to provide feedback on the user experience of using VLM web application. There were specific questions asked on the usability aspect of VLM, and this feedback was then discussed with our Product Owner during our product roadmap discussions. Many of the suggestions and feedback provided by the VIT team has made its way into our product backlog and are being taken up as enhancements in the future product releases.”

Madhavi Rachakonda
Program Manager, Veterans Legacy Memorial (VLM), GovCIO

“My team is responsible for processing paper and electronic submissions in support of the Veteran Claims Intake Process (VCIP). Our customers are continuously striving to improve service delivery and to more rapidly adjudicate submitted claims. One recent effort (January 2022) was transforming the VCIP team’s Direct Upload capability. We engaged key stakeholders within several Veteran Service Organizations, along with several of the larger law firms that support our Veterans to help identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing capability. We are a Human Centered Design / VA Digital Services oriented product development team, and we quickly iterated through several releases. We then engaged 284 of our VIT members to exercise the systems via a limited production pilot. The feedback captured during hands-on training for and use of the next generation QuickSubmit solution was phenomenal. We were able to provide direct feedback to our customers, from our Veterans, that provided direct insight and data for analysis to our customers and their executive sponsors. The end result was the delivery of a transformed submission capability that simplified the process of uploading claims and supporting evidence to the Veterans Benefit Administration. In the first seven months since our production release, we have registered 200,000 users and uploaded 4.1 TB of documentation to support claims processing. By comparison, the prior Direct Upload solution processed 8.3 TB of documentation over a six year period. A simplified solution that is simple and meets our Veterans’ needs would not have been possible without VIT engagement. They are passionate and engaged and our solutions are better for it.”

“Our next step is receiving more targeted user experience feedback. VLM wants to engage with 8-10 veterans from VIT to be part of our user experience focus group. We would like to engage with that focus group on receiving user experience (UX) feedback on certain features, which will then become an input for our requirements , design, and development.”

“We are looking forward to extending our initial QuickSubmit solution to provide digital communications to our Veterans, and we will definitely be engaging our VIT team to help us provide the variety and scale of interactions that will best meet their individual user preferences and engagement profiles.”

“The future of VIT is bright, and I hope we see a larger and more diverse group of Veterans continue to join the VIT to provide the data needed to execute our programs and business development efforts in the most informed way. We’re all here to transform government IT and support VA in its delivery of mission critical services to Veterans.”