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Virtual Regional Office Overview

The Virtual Regional Office (VRO) platform is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, hosted on the VA's Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure (LHDI) platform. It is managed and maintained by the VA's OCTO Benefits Crew. Initially, the project had a very different objective when it was formed for the Rapid Ready Decisions (RRD) project. However, the original idea was re-evaluated, leading to the creation of the new vision for the VRO platform.

"The VRO platform provides teams with access to shared knowledge, processes, and tools, enabling them to quickly build and validate ideas that improve the VA's internal claims process".

As a platform team, our success is measured by the time-to-value for our partners—the product teams developing and iterating on applications within VRO. At its core, VRO is an ecosystem of services hosted on AWS Managed Kubernetes clusters offered by LHDI. Please refer to our architectural diagram below for a technical overview

VRO is a platform as a service offering, hosted on the VA's Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure (LHDI) platform. It is managed and maintained as part of the VA's OCTO Benefits Crew. Initially the project had a very different objective back when it was the Rapid Ready Decisions (RRD) platform but that idea was retried and thus the new vision of the VRO platform was born, "Teams on the platform have access to shared knowledge, processes, and tools, allowing them to quickly build and validate ideas that improve the VA's internal claims process. As a platform team, our success is measured by time-to-value for our partners, ie. the product teams building and iterating on applications in VRO" At its core, VRO is an ecosystem of services hosted on the AWS Managed Kubernetes clusters offered by LHDI. Please see our architectural diagram below for a technical overview.

Purpose

VRO addresses the need for a unified, scalable, and secure platform that allows VA partner d to deploy and manage their applications efficiently. It solves the problem of fragmented deployment practices and provides a standardized process for continuous integration (CI) tests and deployments. Please see the [LHDI Tools and Utilities](#LHDI Tools and Utilities) index below for more information about the tools, services, and support provided by the LHDI platform to facilitate these processes.

Ultimately, VRO exists as a bridge between LHDI and the flexibility that it offersDeliver benefits to Veterans in minutes, not months. The VRO project represents the vision of a software platform that fast-tracks all claims at VA by improving the accessibility of claims data and the overall claims processing time. It aims to empower real time data access across multiple siloed systems. Automate repetitive or labor intensive processes where human with repeatable workflows that cost the claims processing

Processing time – time between when a veteran submits a claim and starts receiving benefits

Touch time – the amount of time a VA employee spends working on a claim

The abd-vro repository contains the source code of multiple Benefits Management solutions. The engineering teams who depend on this repository are divided into the following teams:

Core VRO - tasked with design and implementation of the overall platform architecture, the Core VRO team also:

owns and manages the shared data services responsible for accessing various other VA backend services
acting devops responsibilities for the overall platform
aims to uphold the continuous authority to operate that is required for hosting production software applications VRO Partner teams focus on building application components, using the platform and shared services hosted by the VRO platform, to address specific inefficiencies within the claims processing process. These applications contain heavily researched business logic and are typically regarded as experiments until proven successful.

for a variety of applications that offer platform functionality and applications built by partner teams leveraging this functionality. It is designed to support multiple apps across different teams, facilitating seamless integration and deployment processes. Deploying VRO and Partner Team Quick Deployment Guide sections offer insights into its purpose and utility for partner teams.

Project Overview and Active Roadmaps

VRO Architecture Diagram
Virtual Regional Office (VRO) Platform Outline
Virtual Regional Office (VRO) Overview for Partner Teams
2024 Roadmap and VRO Priorities

Archived Priorities
- VRO v1 Roadmap

Working Agreements

Culture and Norms

VRO Engineering Team Members

Active efforts

VRO priorities
BIE Kafka Client
[BIE Contention Events User Guide](./BIE-Contention-Events-User-Guide)
[VA.gov Data Visibility Initiative](./VA.gov-Data-Visibility-Initiative)
    Problem Overview