VA employees return to complaint filed against suspended e-learning system

Whistleblowers inside the Veterans Affairs Department are reconsidering a complaint they filed in 2008 with the Office of Special Counsel that charged government officials with gross mismanagement and waste regarding a contract to develop a system that delivers widely used online instruction to employees.

A group of VA employees claimed the Learning Management System that the department was building suffered from "gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds and an abuse of authority by employees," according to a letter the special counsel sent to the employees in response to their allegations. Nextgov obtained the letter.

Nearly 300,000 employees, interns and health care contractors at Veterans Affairs depend on the e-learning system for training that is critical to their jobs. The courses refresh skills for health care workers in VA clinics and hospitals, for example. LMS delivers courses to VA facilities nationwide and tracks employees' progress. It also enables the department to meet federal and statutory requirements for personnel training and prevents duplicative spending.

But VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Roger Baker, the department's chief information officer, stopped development of LMS in July 2009 as part of a departmentwide assessment of information technology projects. In all, he suspended 45 projects that officials deemed were over budget or behind schedule.

VA officials said they could not discuss the complaint filed with the special counsel because of legal reasons. They said the complaint did not prompt them to suspend the system in July. Rather, officials decided to halt the project after they determined the system did not function as intended, enhancements to the system were delayed and deadlines were missed - all of which were limiting the quality of online training.

This week, the Office of Special Counsel told the employees who filed the complaint that the office would pursue an investigation of the project if the employees provided specific evidence that the LMS contractor, Plateau, is still being paid for providing services and products to VA while the project is on hold. The employees are now working to obtain that information.

VA officials on Friday confirmed that they are paying Plateau only for maintenance, support and online hosting. The Office of Personnel Management, which procured Plateau's services for VA through an interagency agreement, was not able to provide how much Plateau is paid per month.

VA has stopped further enhancements to the system until department leaders, Baker, and other office of information and technology managers meet in January or February with the project team to rework the development plan.

Course developers at VA who helped build the training system initially, but have since left the project, say a key problem with the application is that it does not support highly interactive software. They say Plateau has not configured the application to comply with advanced standard specifications that the contract stipulated.

For example, the e-training course for employees who treat patients suffering from traumatic brain injury is not engaging enough so instructors had to resort to paper and pencil to teach those skills, the developers said. The course is intended to teach clinicians, primary care physicians and nurses who interact with veterans how to handle an injury that is common among wounded soldiers coming off the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plateau, which has customers in every Cabinet-level department, said LMS is a successful project that provides value to Veterans Affairs employees. In 2007, VA awarded the company a contract worth more than $10 million to expand and expedite the development of the system.

Officials from OutStart, a vendor supplying a content management system that supports LMS, said the problems running courseware are complex and require cooperation among several groups, including OutStart. "If the technical people from OutStart, Plateau and the VA end users got together for one day, we could find a technical solution," said Massood Zarrabian, the chief executive officer of OutStart, a competitor to Plateau. OutStart provides VA with a learning content management system that helps developers design the courseware that runs on LMS.

Zarrabian's perspective is that Plateau's application, called iContent, "is part of the issue, it's not the issue. I think the reason course developers say iContent is the issue is because that's where they see it" in practice. "What you are not seeing is the beginning to end of a technical system. . . . If you look at the system as a whole, there are a range of problems.

"People are focusing on the details . . . people are going back and forth and going to the contract and then it's becoming emotional," he added. "The solution requires us to be at a table. When a customer of mine is in pain, it does not matter to me what the problem is. The only thing that matters to me is fixing it."