“Dan McCune, the acting associate deputy assistant secretary of the Enterprise Program Management Office at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), talked about major themes in the agency’s IT modernization approach during a virtual webinar hosted by Federal News Network on July 21.”
“The VA’s modernization strategy has three dimensions – people, processes, and technology, McCune explained.”
“Because people are the most critical resource the department has, it makes significant investments to train its workforce on desktops and product management, and has augmented training processes to ‘enable that peer-to-peer learning and continue to enhance the capability of our workforce,’ McCune said.”
“On the process front, VA has been trying to get away from operating ‘siloed’ structures between software development and operations, McCune said, and has brought teams to work more closely together to prevent a loss of context that both experienced in more separate structures.”
“’We prioritized working software over the process and documentation,’ McCune said. ‘We’ve seen an increase in our velocity – a 400 percent increase over the last couple of years, to be exact. And I think that our processes improvements certainly help that,’ he said…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA Official Charts Agency’s IT Modernization Approach – By Lisbeth Perez, July 23, 2021. MeriTalk.