Platform Vision for FY2024 to FY 2027

[raywangoctova]

Description

Our vision is to create a world-class platform that empowers product development teams to build and deliver innovative, accessible, and secure solutions for Veterans. We are committed to providing a seamless and dependable product development experience by streamlining governance processes, enhancing security management, and expanding site reliability engineering. Additionally, we will modernize design and form systems, incorporate content management system operation, and improve platform automation, documentation, and tools to ensure a more efficient development process.

Our ultimate goal is to create a robust ecosystem that enables product development teams to deliver high-quality products and services that meet the unique needs of Veterans. We are dedicated to constantly improving our platform to support the delivery of accessible, reliable, and effective solutions.

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] Review and feedback by OCTO Platform POs
  • [x] Bill C
  • [x] Erika W
  • [x] Matt D
  • [ ] Mike C
  • [x] Ray W
• [x] PO suggests desired outcomes and goals for the 3 years
• [ ] Review and feedback by platform vendor leadership
• [ ] Review and feedback by OCTO DE leadership
• [ ] Finalize and share the vision with the platform teams

Subject Areas

• [X] Product
• [X] Design
• [X] Engineering
• [X] OCTO-DE

[EWashb]

Should we mention that our accessible, reliable, and effective solutions include both authenticated and unauthenticated web experiences?

[EWashb]

Slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13KC-bLfUYwyRW8u5KBwkHDTY0xFI3AeuT0pAgyfNr2E/edit?usp=drivesdk

[BillChapmanUSDS]

58453 Desired outcomes for SRE over 3 years:

• Reduction of toil through automation and appropriate tool adoption. Engineers should not be spending an appreciable amount of time on manual tasks or routine maintenance. All interactions withi production should occur via external logging or configuration as code based pipelines. Logging in to production or staging for any reason should be treated as an exceptional cercumstancew ith appropriate guard rails.

• Shared responsibility for "platform" ownership established. This means all integrations with Vets-API and website have ownership, deprecation, or ownership succession plans., Pull Requests are defined as a shared responsibility across a wider group of platform and VFS stakeholders., VFS teams have their own services that they own and maintain that run in the appropriate place insteawd of always adding features to Vet's API. Components that are not core features of VEts api are appropriately abstracted using service decomposition OR modularity.

• Support is a first class component of the platform, humans are dicated to the effort on Tier 1 and we foster a culture of collaboration and information sharing insteawd of rotating senior engineers in and out of support.

• Standardsized observability is established. All new VFS projects have dashboard visibility by default.

[humancompanion-usds]

Here is my outline at the moment. Not complete, but a start.

Goals

1. Reduce technical debt in forms & scale our form building approach.
   1. Make it easier and faster for VFS teams to turn complex paper forms into streamlined digital experiences.
   2. Make it possible for Program Offices to self-serve and deploy and iterate on simple forms that are used infrequently (less than 10,000 downloads and/or submissions per year).
2. Remove reliance on commercial codebases (Google, EHRM systems, etc.) for public and staff experiences.
3. Make the personalization experiences across benefits consistent.
4. Dramatically improve web performance for users in order to make VA.gov services available to all regardless of telecommunications access speed or device.
5. Continue to improve the stability and resiliency of the Platform.

Solutions

Reduce technical debt in forms & scale our form building approach.

1. Low/no code environment to rapidly prototype and launch new forms & updates at scale.
   1. Targeted at Program Offices who need to deploy a form as an online service, or update an already deployed form.
   2. Suitable for the 178 Veteran-facing forms that are simple, or somewhat complex, and used infrequently which do not need a dedicated VFS team to design and deploy.
2. Scale vets-api and reduce usage of Central Mail.
   1. Convert 100% of forms using Central Mail API directly to use the Benefits Intake API.
   2. Convert 25% of forms using Benefits Intake API to use a direct API that writes into VBMS, or other appropriate systems.
3. DirectFormUpload (TM) - Provide a service to Veterans to submit their completed paper form, via upload or photo capture, from web and mobile app in order to eliminate 2.5 days of USPS mail travel time.
   1. Redesign the Find a Form page to make the online experience more appealing to users and to highlight how online services are superior to paper submissions.

Remove reliance on commercial codebases (Google, EHRM systems, etc.) for public and staff experiences.

1. Data visualization components & patterns for use in customer & staff-facing applications.
   1. A model for creating and maintaining sister-Design Systems for customer and staff-facing applications.
2. A living relationship with USWDS through regular dialogue, iterative and continuous improvement based on customers greatest needs, and extending the application of USWDS patterns and impact into staff facing tools used by VA staff to make mission critical decisions for the people we serve.

Make the personalization experiences across benefits consistent.

1. Standardized, tested, & enterprise- wide patterns for customer profile management & personalization.
   1. Consistent, reusable patterns for pre-filling a form with data from a user’s profile, and updating that information from different contexts within experiences on VA.gov and the mobile application, as necessary.

Dramatically improve web performance for users in order to make VA.gov services available to all regardless of telecommunications access speed or device.

1. Meet our stated goals on performance improvements (I believe we already have something captured regarding time to FCP).
2. Set a performance budget for VA.gov.

Continue to improve the stability and resiliency of the Platform.

1. Make unit test coverage a launch blocker if below 80% (currently it is a warning below 75%).

Outcomes

• Decrease the average time it takes for a VFS team to deploy a new form/service by 50%.
  • TMF: Development time to launch a 21st Century compliant, USWDS current form reduced by 50% (or more)
  • TMF: Reduction in public burden hours estimated at 2.5 days per user, per form through launch of a minimum of 7 high impact self-service forms
  • TMF: Research findings that support these approaches to help sell stakeholders across multiple agencies on the potential impact is available from VA & USWDS
  • Supports the Benefits team goal of “Increase growth of digital over paper”
  • Fill out the Product Directory so that Business Owners on all forms we have digitized, or plan to digitize, are identified.
• TMF: 20% or more reduction in custom code and elimination of associated maintenance costs
• Reduce paper form submissions by 1% year over year.

[mchelen-gov]

Should we mention that our accessible, reliable, and effective solutions include both authenticated and unauthenticated web experiences?

@EWashb Maybe wrap this into a highlight of user experience and user-centered design? That would include accessibility as well as auth & unauth interactions.

[EWashb]

I really like that approach @mchelen-gov