Employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs are deeply committed to providing high quality benefits and services to veterans as a unified Department and to have the most positive impact on the lives of our Nation’s veterans. From the time they leave active duty military service, veterans may have a variety of social, medical, and economic needs that are met through VA programs. Acting as One VA, we can best assure those needs are met through effective strategic and performance planning. We continually consult with OMB, the Congress, and other stakeholders for their suggestions on improving the strategic and performance plans. We are making significant revisions to the Department’s strategic plan, the new version of which will be completed during FY 2000. This year’s performance plan incorporates our stakeholders’ suggestions. The discussion below describes the significant changes we are making to these documents to make them more useful to a wider audience.

• VA has revised its goals to be more overarching and to better define the results we expect to produce. The five new goals are more veteran-focused and represent the shared interest of the Department’s organizations.
• VA’s revised Strategic Plan for FY 2000 to 2005 will be based on a clearer, more concise presentation of goals, objectives, performance targets, external factors, and means and strategies.
• The plan will be based on an approach that attempts to probe the future with respect to VA’s mission. What will VA look like in the year 2010; the year 2020; and who will we serve?
• The revised Strategic Plan will attempt to more clearly delineate the most critical areas in which VA intends to conduct aggressive crosscutting activities with other agencies and stakeholders that are pursuing shared goals and outcomes.

• This year’s Performance Plan is structured around new strategic goals and objectives that are more focused and outcome oriented.

• We include a presentation of resources by strategic goal so the reader can get a sense of the approximate cost to achieve each goal. As our accounting tools improve, this information will be more precise.
• One VA issues are more fully discussed, including a description of the One VA Conferences recently held, the outcomes of these sessions, and future plans and activities.
• Data verification and validation activities are more fully presented, including a more complete discussion of the role of the Actuary.

As necessary, we modified our performance goals to ensure they are consistent with final data for FY 1999. In addition, we have added new performance goals and deleted some of those shown in last year’s plan, to reflect our latest evaluation as to how best to measure our success.