CAAC 13: Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference #13

Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 13

Barriers to Agile Adoption

Volunteer planning team

Full recording, 2 hr 29 min. Watch on the VSP YouTube channel ↗

1. Welcome and polls 0:00:05

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   The host polls the audience on what gets in the way of agile adoption. The top answer to what agile means is that everyone has their own idea of it (37 percent), and "individuals" is the most-picked challenge (33 percent).

2. Top Ten Barriers to Agile Maturity 0:16:02

   TJ Johnson (Agile Immersive) guest, John Boyd (Agile Immersive) guest

   Retired Army Major General John Boyd introduces TJ Johnson, who walks through ten barriers he sees holding organizations back from agile maturity and what leaders can do about each.

   • The ten barriers: organizational inertia, blind spots, too many priorities, misaligned purpose, narrow perspective, no continuity between the big picture and daily work, misaligned goals, execution disconnected from goals, an unpredictable cadence, and an inconsistent one.
   • Leaders should "go and see" (gemba): visit where the work happens rather than relying on reports.
   • Psychological safety is the foundation of trust, and agility depends on trust.
   • Aim for "atomic clock" precision in cadence, not "island time." Citizens judge an agency by whether it delivers what it promised, when it promised.
   • Leaders recreate who they are in their teams, so leaders have to learn new habits and unlearn old ones ("my way or the highway") for the cadence to hold.

   In the Scrum Guide: Scrum Values · Sprint Goal

3. Challenges from the Field 1:12:59

   Catherine Day (Virginia State Police), Lana Shelley (Virginia DMV), Inderpreet Mann (Virginia Department of Transportation)

   The host moderates three agency leaders, from VSP, the DMV and VDOT, on the barriers they actually hit moving teams to agile and what helped.

   • Resistance usually comes from people protecting their knowledge and their jobs. Respect it and keep those people: their knowledge is what the team needs.
   • Make knowledge transfer visible by putting it on the board as a story, like any other work.
   • Involve the teams, start with a pilot, and consider an outside coach.
   • Send leaders a personal invitation to Sprint Reviews. A calendar invite alone gets ignored.
   • Celebrate progress, or teams drift back to old habits.
   • Supervisors don't become irrelevant. At VDOT developers report to development managers, and VSP's coach met with supervisors for six months.
   • Where VITA's rules require a project manager, VDOT has one person serve as both project manager and Scrum Master.
   • VDOT uses "fusion teams" to work with vendors that don't work in an agile way.

   In the Scrum Guide: Sprint Review · Scrum Master

4. Conference retrospective 2:16:16

   Stephanie Williams Hayes (Virginia State Police)

   VSP's Chief Information Security Officer runs the closing retrospective on the morning.

About these pages: curated and reviewed by Michael Vizdos, on the volunteer CAAC planning team since CAAC 4 and a speaker at CAAC 5, 10, 11, 17 and 18. Summaries and takeaways are drafted with AI (Claude) from the recording's captions and reviewed by Michael Vizdos before publishing (how I use AI). This is not the official conference site; the Virginia State Police hosts CAAC (vsp.virginia.gov/caac). Last reviewed October 20, 2026.

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