Phase I: Before Starting Digitization Work
Last Updated: November 19, 2024
PLEASE NOTE This guide recently transferred ownership and is now maintained by the Veteran Facing Forms team. We’re working through some revisions and encourage you to submit an issue ticket if you have feedback about how we can improve this guide!
👋 Welcome to the Pre-Digitizing Phase of the Forms Digitization Process!
The goal of this phase is to help your team understand the form and its dependencies, evaluate the scope and extent of the work ahead, and build alignment and buy-in with stakeholders. Standardizing these early conversations with VA form owners leverages a HUGE opportunity to:
Set requirements and success metrics rooted in VA form owners' highest priorities.
Advocate for holistic evaluation of forms and the services they represent in a human-centered way.
Improve and build buy-in with VA form owners about the benefits of human-centered design.
We advocate that all forms undergoing ANY modification go through a holistic design process where the form can be evaluated question-by-question. During this pre-design phase, teams should understand the intent and purpose of every piece of a form. This ensures design rooted in the requirements and needs of the service, the VA form owner, and form end users. This understanding allows teams to leverage digital tools mindfully to make the process of filling out a form, processing it, and communicating decisions to form respondents more efficient and less error-prone.
Online form versus PDF form
The processes here are meant to be focused on the digitized form experience, but use this opportunity to discuss with VA form owner/stakeholders if they are willing to consider changes that would impact the PDF version of the form as well. If interested, that would include them submitting a PRA request to the OMB.
⏮️ What Your Team Should Have Completed/prepared Before Starting This Phase
🧑🍳 What Your Team Will Have by the End of This Phase
All team members onboarded
Specific form(s) selected
Who are VA form owner/stakeholders you need to work with and get approvals and/or input from.
A document that details alignment with VA form owner/stakeholders requirements, problem statement, etc. for the form
Regular contact and scheduled syncs with VA stakeholders
Use cases for the form
Alignment on creating a digital-first version of the form
Product outline for PO to bring to PO Sync (first step in the Collaboration Cycle)
⭐ Steps
Step 1: Getting to know the form
Identify the VA form owner, other stakeholders, the offices they are from, and how they interact with the form.
Spend time with the current paper form and identify possible areas for improvement/efficiency.
If the expiration date is upcoming, prepare to ask the VA form owner if extensive changes are planned for the paper form. If there are, it could be best to wait until those changes have been finalized and the new paper form is live.
Ensuring you are collecting the correct data and using the most recently approved form PDF will prevent issues downstream when the collection of data on the PDF is being processed. To determine the correct version of the PDF:
The expiration date is updated in the upper right-hand corner of the PDF.
The date the PDF was revised is in the bottom left-hand corner of the PDF.
You should subscribe to relevant calendars that will send you notifications when the OMB re-approves a form PDF every three yearschanges. (Must be logged on to the VA network/VPN to access link). In Phase seven: Monitoring & Maintenance, there are specific steps about how to respond to OMB re-approval.
Multiple forms with the same Office of Management and Budget (OMB) control number might be able to be done at the same time. Look up the OMB control number and learn if it’s in a related ICR. Be sure to ask the VA form owner if other forms with a related ICR are in scope for this effort.
Find out if other teams are working on similar initiatives and look to share knowledge. The PO Sync stage of the Collaboration Cycle will be an opportunity to get formal feedback on this, but we recommend being aware of informal opportunities to learn of similar work at earlier stages.
Step 2: Intake meeting(s) with VA form owner
Hold one or more meetings with the VA form owner and relevant stakeholders. Here are some great questions and topic prompts to consider:
Before evaluating the form itself, gather the following information from a VA form owner. Here are some example questions:
(If OMB form expiration date is upcoming) Are extensive changes planned for the PDF form when the new version is planned to replace this current one?
Are there any areas of improvement you’d like to see on this form? (Note: depending on scope of improvement, confirm with the VA form owner that they are prepared to update the PDF version of the form as well). (Remember: if these are improvements that would require changing the PDF to match, that will require a separate process)
Is there any feedback you’ve heard from form respondents or the people who process these forms that we should take into consideration?
Is there any documentation we could view that shows how intake officers/people processing these forms evaluate form responses?
Are there any related forms or processes we should know about or use to inform our work on this form?
Could we meet with anyone who processes these forms to ask them about their experiences?
Are there other forms related to this benefit that are required for this benefit to be administered?
What is the frequency of form submissions?
Go field by field with the VA form owner asking:
What is the purpose of this question?
How is it used to render a decision to the person filling out the form?
Can this question/field be combined or deprecated to save time for the people filling the form or processing it?
Is there anything outdated or confusing in the messaging or format of this question you would like addressed? (Note: if there is something, it should likely be modified on the PDF version of the form as well).
Ask specifically about the format. Does the field format best represent the information being asked? For example:
“On the paper form, I see this is a checkbox. Are you fine with more than one answer to this question?”
If certain language is confusing, align with them on what that language means and if there is plain language that could be swapped in.
We recommend only after these two steps should you bring up your teams’ questions or any recommendations for areas of improvement.
The VA form owner may assume the digitized form must match the paper form exactly. Be prepared to address this in your initial meeting with them.
In general, our online forms should not be framed as a 1:1 mapping of the paper form - in other words, what we are building are data collection mechanisms for the forms themselves, and therefore do not need approval in the same way the forms themselves do. For example, voice and tone strategy on our online pages should use plain language even if that deviates from language used in the paper form. See the design system for more guidance.
Step 3: Post-intake meeting with VA form owner
Create a document of requirements and/or a problem statement to finalize alignment with your VA form owner/stakeholders about what work your team will undertake for the rest of the process. This document shouldn’t include solutioning or designs.
If your team is doing a full form digitization, it might be difficult for your VA form owner to understand why a “problem statement” is needed if the task is just to digitize the form. You can reframe this process as creating opportunities for improvement based on the digital tools at your disposal.
Since you’ll need to do a product outline for the first step of the collaboration cycle, consider whether this document can be one and the same or if you want them separated because of the differing audiences and purpose of each.
Your requirements/problem statement document should not feel “set in stone”! Revisit and re-align with your VA form owner/stakeholders as needed throughout subsequent phases.
Step 4: Understand/build use cases
Work with stakeholders to build out comprehensive use cases to understand who will need access to the form, when, and why. This could be done during the first intake meeting or at a subsequent meeting if there isn’t time.
Questions to ask
When does the form respondent use the form?
Who is this form for? (Just Veterans, dependents, etc.)
Can someone fill out this form for someone else? (Either as an alternate signer or accredited representative)
Why does someone fill out the form?
What are the next steps after they fill out the form?
Is this form a part of another process or form?
Build a shareable document to finalize and align on use cases. One medium to consider is a Mural board because they are easy to share with VA employees outside of OCTO.
🔮 Continue to phase 2 →
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.