From to Results: Building a Stronger Foundation for Modernization

Introduction

Effective modernization starts with a shared understanding of the business need, the work that matters most, and what technology ultimately needs to enable.

In 2024, Sprezzatura began supporting the Board of Veterans’ Appeals (BVA) Technical Infrastructure Branch (TIB) Requirement Support effort. The team worked with business stakeholders and Development, the technical team responsible for translating approved business requirements into technical solutions and software changes, to create a more consistent path from business need to development-ready work. The process gave stakeholders a clearer way to define priorities while giving Development better-prepared requirements to plan and execute.

Results at a Glance

The Challenge

BVA operates in a complex environment where business priorities, user needs, and technical work must align to support the people responsible for reviewing and deciding Veterans’ appeals. For Development to move efficiently, requirements need to be sufficiently defined and prioritized before Program Increment (PI) planning, the recurring cycle used to prepare upcoming development work.

When Sprezzatura began supporting the effort, requirements often entered PI planning before they were fully defined. Development then spent part of the roughly three-month PI clarifying and refining them before it could begin building, with project metrics estimating that requirements-related activity consumed approximately 40% of available Development capacity under the contract.

The process also carried substantial coordination overhead. Before the Requirement Support effort, approximately 20 hours of meetings per week across roughly 30 participants represented an estimated 600 person-hours of meeting time. Teams also entered planning with a backlog of 198 loosely organized items across 36 themes, requiring extensive discussion to determine priorities and readiness.

Together, these conditions pointed to the same opportunity: move requirements work upstream and give Development a stronger starting point. The need was to establish a sustainable requirements management capability that could reduce friction, improve quality, strengthen stakeholder collaboration, and create a more predictable path from business need to implementation.

The Approach

Rather than relying on Development to resolve major requirements questions during PI planning, Sprezzatura’s Requirements Team partnered with business stakeholders to define, prioritize, and prepare work before technical teams received it. Requirements were expected to enter planning understood by the business, ranked against other priorities, and developed enough for Development to act on them.

To strengthen requirements quality and end-to-end traceability, the team used Jira to connect business requirements with user stories, acceptance criteria, development activities, and validation outcomes. Detailed acceptance criteria, early gap identification, and ongoing traceability helped maintain visibility as requirements changed throughout the development lifecycle.

The team also organized the backlog by themes, grouping related requirements into broader areas of work. Sprezzatura consolidated overlapping items, clarified priorities, and created a more manageable pipeline for future PIs, giving business and technical teams a shared structure for deciding what should move forward and why.

Adoption came with expected growing pains, but the team continued applying the process with business and Development stakeholders. As participants saw the value of better-prepared requirements and clearer priorities, they became more engaged and contributed ideas to improve the process. Over time, the approach became a shared way of preparing work before it reached Development.

Applying the Approach to Caseflow

The Caseflow Baseline Requirements effort applied that discipline to a major modernization decision. As BVA considered replacing Caseflow, the application supporting its appeals work, it first needed to define the capabilities any future solution would have to support.

Over one month, Sprezzatura led eight focus-group workshops involving roughly 80 business participants and developed 188 baseline requirements for a replacement solution. The resulting requirements gave BVA the detail needed to evaluate potential solutions and became a primary source for the effort moving forward.

The work required more than collecting feature requests. Stakeholders naturally viewed future needs through the existing application. Through structured facilitation, the Requirements Team helped separate challenges tied to the current system from the underlying business capabilities BVA would need regardless of which technology came next. The team translated that feedback into actionable requirements grounded in the mission need, helping avoid recreating existing limitations in a new platform.

Results

Items still requiring technical solutioning after reaching Development fell by more than 90%, from 23 in PI Q4 of Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 to 2 in PI Q3 FY 2026. Development Refinement dropped from 14 items in PI Q2 FY 2025 to 0 in PI Q2–Q3 FY 2026.

Reaching zero did not eliminate technical collaboration; it changed its focus. Requirements arrived with the business need already defined, allowing Development to focus on clarification and technical solutioning rather than completing partially defined requirements.

Project metrics also showed that requirements-related activity fell from approximately 40% of available Development capacity under the contract to less than 2% as the process matured. The team streamlined the backlog from 198 loosely organized items across 36 themes to 122 focused items across 27 themes.

By the most recent PI, teams entered planning with ranked priorities, a defined backlog, and an established understanding of level of effort, requiring far less discussion to determine what should move forward.

The Caseflow baseline requirements extended that impact. BVA used the requirements to evaluate potential vendors, and stakeholders reported that the final requirements accurately reflected their priorities and the capabilities a future solution needed to support.

Mission Impact

Requirements work happens upstream from the end-user experience, but its effects carry through to mission delivery. By defining business needs earlier and translating them into development-ready requirements, Sprezzatura strengthened the connection between operational needs and the systems built to support them.

Connecting operational needs to technology became especially important during the baseline requirements effort for a mission-critical case management platform. Rather than recreating the limitations of the existing system, the team worked with stakeholders to define the capabilities employees needed to perform their work more efficiently.

Reducing downstream refinement allows technical teams to focus more effort on delivery, while stronger requirements give future solutions a clearer foundation for supporting the people performing the mission.

For mission-driven technology, meaningful progress starts with understanding the need first—then building around it.