The Department of Veterans Affairs

Nearly 26 million living Americans have served in our country's armed forces. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) operates programs that provide health care, financial assistance, and burial benefits for these veterans, as well as for family members or survivors of veterans of past conflicts. In all, about 70 million Americans are potentially eligible for services provided by the VA.

With an operating budget of about $60 billion, 225 thousand employees (the majority of whom are themselves veterans), and field offices all over the country, the VA is a large and diverse organization.

Operations Manuals: Critical to the VA's mission

To enable an organization the size of the VA to operate effectively, employees must deal with the challenges of managing large amounts of information, much of it complex and subject to change. Much of this information is contained within operations manuals, large documentation sets that provide instructions for every aspect of program administration.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the VA's operations manuals. Employees within programs including Compensation and Pensions, Education & Training, Medical Care and others, rely on these documents in nearly every aspect of their work.

A manager with the Compensation and Pension Service told us, "The operations manual is our bible. It's about 5000 pages long, and it contains the information that thousands of field employees at our 57 regional offices need in order to do their jobs."

Problems with the Manuals

In the late 1990's, internal studies at the VA indicated that the operations manuals were not meeting employee needs and often hindered performance. There were several reasons for this.

• Information was often out of date. Due to constant changes in regulations and policies, information was often out of date, and the manuals were not organized in ways that allowed for ease of updating. Especially at the field offices, employees often weren't aware of important changes.
  
  
• Users had trouble finding key information. The manuals were also difficult for users to work with, as information was presented in dense paragraphs and key points were often buried. Quick scanning was virtually impossible. Redundancy was an issue, too. Often the same information appeared in several different places.
  
• "Paper under glass" wasn't working. While the manuals were available on the Web as well as on paper, the Web versions were simply "paper under glass," Word-based documents that had been transferred to the Web without the addition of search tools or hypertext links. Employees were now looking at screens instead of pages, but there were no easy ways for them to navigate to the information they needed, nor was it possible for them to use the Web's linking capabilities to reduce redundancy.

• Redesigned Manuals. Information Mapping's consultants used the original operations manuals as a starting point. In site visits to VA offices, they observed and analyzed workflows in order to redesign the information in ways that reflected how employees actually accomplished their day-to-day tasks. Information Mapping's project teams then applied these findings to develop manuals that supported performance and met the needs of novice users as well as very experienced employees.
  
• Web site distribution portals. In two of the engagements, Information Mapping developed Web site distribution portals based on the new manuals' design. This gave field office employees online access to the information they needed, with user-centric hypertext links that allowed for fast, easy searching. These links also eliminated redundancy, as now a single item of information did not have to exist in more than one place. The Web portals also enabled "one stop shopping," giving program managers the ability to control and update all their information, which now resided on a single site.
  
• Formatting Solutions XML enables single-sourcing. In addition, Information Mapping used its Formatting Solutions XML product to achieve "single-source" paper and online manual development. With single-sourcing, revision and updating can be done in one file, resulting in two different outputs, namely print-ready paper and online HTML, for distribution to employees. The VA now had the assurance that the paper-based and online manuals would contain identical content.
  
• Training for VA personnel. In one of the engagements, Information Mapping also provided training in the Information Mapping methodology for VA employees charged with maintaining and updating the operations manual. Because the regulations affecting the VA's programs are subject to change, these manuals will require frequent revision.