The Veterans Affairs Department announced Monday the first of what likely will be many reorganizations, starting with its regional map. The massive transformation is the biggest in the agency’s history.

VA said it created a single map made up of five regions that the Veterans Health Administration, the Veterans Benefits Administration, the National Cemetery Administration and several other offices will work from instead of the nine separate regional maps that existed previously.

“The Veterans Benefits Administration will move from four area offices to five area offices, but they still have the work to redraw the lines to get there. The other organizations will work to determine their next steps as well with a target completion goal of June 30,” said Scott Blackburn, the director of MyVA program management office, Monday during a conference call with reporters. “The regions when complete and fully mature will allow us to create a more cohesive and singular department from the veteran perspective. VA components will have better internal coordination and the ability to leverage shared services and experiences.”

The new regional map is part of the radical transformation VA Secretary Bob McDonald launched in September and signed the official memo Dec. 10 creating the program office.

McDonald’s initial analysis of where to start the changes began with how the agency views its customer base. He found VA employees worked off nine separate and different maps, so the first step of transformation is to have everyone work from the same page.

Bob Snyder, the executive director of the MyVA Program Management Office, said if someone would have overlaid these nine maps on top of each other, the collage of regions and facilities would have made no sense. He said this effort is all about aligning functions internally and externally, and providing a more coherent interface to veterans.

Snyder said the three VA components led the analysis of the realignment and came up with several different options. For instance, he said, they thought about having a map with 13 regions, or a map with 9 regions, but in the end, the five region map made the most sense based on the alignment of existing structures, veteran populations today and VA’s projections over the next 10 years of its growth.

Centralized and coordinated

Both veterans and VA employees should expect major changes from this regional reorganization.

Blackburn said the transformation will enhance the entire veterans’ experience with the agency.

“The regional alignment will help veterans to see one single VA rather than many different components as the regions will align each of the organizational boundaries into a single framework allowing for better internal coordination. We are also examining how to better leverage certain shared services and resources this way,” he said. “The second benefit of the regionalization will allow for the VA to begin enhancing the overall veteran experience. This will allow us to provide customer service training and enhanced veteran focused capabilities across the department through a centralized office and coordination.”

Blackburn said veterans and employees long have called for more standardized and better customer service training. The new regions will help meet those challenges.

Blackburn said VA also plans on eliminate some processes there were unnecessary and make it easier to stop and start benefits as appropriate.

Additionally, he said VA will do simple things such as putting in new and standard signage for veterans to navigate VA medical centers and clinics.

For VA employees, it’s all about a culture change. Snyder said employee participation and buy-in are critical to the four major changes that are coming as part of this transformation.

VA’s transformation will focus across four common themes:

• Improving the veteran experience
• Building a culture of continuous improvement by sharing best practices
• Developing enterprise services
• Creating strategic partnerships with outside organizations.

Snyder said people excellence is the fifth area and that begins with culture change.

“Several functions are evolving to be included in that effort to include integrating and coordinating outreach across the enterprise better, understanding our veteran and their individual information better,” he said. “We should not expect veterans to have to call VBA, VHA and NCA to change their address and phone number. We should be able to coordinate their data better than that. This office also will be responsible for improving the customer service or veteran experience training, and providing our employees with the type of training and tools that they need to really do good customer service across the entire enterprise.”

Blackburn added the changes will be a mix of consolidations across functional areas, but in other areas the employees will have more authority to make decisions. Employees also will have better coordination with the folks in their region because they will know them, and will receive the same training across the board, he said.

By creating a standard regional map, the MyVA broader reorganization can begin to happen too.

Shared services coming

Snyder said the next step would be around creating shared services for back off operations, such as technology, human resources, acquisition and logistics, real property, budget and finance and several others.

“The next phase is looking at what our support services are that need to be rethought and realigned to support this new alignment,” he said. “How do those functions fit into this alignment?”

Snyder said VA initially will have to understand the current state of each of those functions, and then figure out how best to integrate and bundle them.

“We’re also including some areas that are not typically considered to be common support services like public affairs, congressional affairs, security and preparedness and legal services,” he said. “In this work stream or this effort, we are really looking hard at our internal business processes to make sure we do a good job enabling people in the field and giving them what they need to do their job.”

Blackburn added changing VA’s culture will take much longer than make many of these other process or procedure changes. He said VA will know more in the coming months after it completes further analyses and reviews.

Blackburn and Snyder repeated constantly during the press briefing that the regional map was really the end of the beginning, and the journey toward full transformation will be a long one.

“When we talk about MyVA, we’re really looking at it from three perspectives: We want to improve our veteran experience and customer service so that all veterans that receive their services and benefits from the VA are proud to say they get those benefits from MyVA, their VA,” Snyder said. “Second, we want all of our employees to be proud to be VA employees as they serve veterans, consider the VA to be MyVA. And finally, we want the American public to be proud of the VA, be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars and have the public know we deliver quality goods and services to our veterans. We want the American people to consider the VA to be MyVA.”

RELATED STORIES:

McDonald says biggest reorganization of VA to rebuild trust is underway

VA chief vows renewed focus on customer service

VA customer-service warriors on mission to streamline veterans’ needs

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.