Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference (CAAC #14)

Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 14

The Team's the Thing: Growing an Agile Culture in State Government

Volunteer planning team

Full recording, 2 hr 26 min. Watch on the VSP YouTube channel ↗

1. Welcome: what makes an animal agile? 0:00:02

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   Attendees rank six animals from most to least agile (the squirrel wins), and the host draws the line between agility in nature and agility in teams: balance, quick reactions and flexibility carry over, but teams also need trust, clear communication and self-management.

2. Grow Agility: Evolve Or … 0:10:35

   Dhaval Panchal (Evolve Agility) guest

   A Certified Scrum Trainer and Enterprise Coach on building an agile culture through two skills, moving from silos to synergy and practicing agile leadership, followed by questions on state spending rules, lean, and AI.

   • "It always takes one extra Home Depot trip." In knowledge work, doing the work is how you discover the work, so the plan has to keep learning.
   • Move from silos to synergy: the people who know the problem and the people building the solution work it out together instead of handing off a requirements document.
   • Asked about a quarter-million-dollar threshold that triggers formal project plans, he suggested slicing work into small increments that each deliver value, since an overrun on a small piece costs far less.
   • People need to feel included before they will challenge the status quo. That is what psychological safety is for.
   • Introduce change in steps: stabilize, experiment, and align the rest of the organization before starting the next change.
   • Care more about whether people have a good experience with a practice than whether they follow it exactly as written.
   • On AI: it makes experts much more effective and makes non-experts riskier, because they can't tell which part of an answer is wrong.

   In the Scrum Guide: Scrum Theory · Sprint Review · Product Backlog

3. Good to Great: Agile Culture in VSP IT 1:14:57

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police), Gurinderpreet Mann (Virginia State Police), Tim Roesch (Virginia Department of Education)

   Three short talks from Virginia State Police: the Good to Great program built on the Seven Patterns of Great Agile Teams, then a VSP Scrum Master on trust, then Tim on how teams get to know their customers.

   • VSP's Seven Patterns: great agile teams trust each other, pursue technical excellence, are truly cross-functional, fully engage in agile events, are self-managing, know their customer, and deliver business value. Each comes with four or five concrete behaviors, revised every December.
   • Every January each team member rates about 30 of those behaviors from 1 to 5. Each team gets its anonymized results and picks a focus for the year, which then shows up in retrospectives and Sprint Reviews.
   • Signs of low trust: micromanagement, fear of blame, and no one owning outcomes. After a missed story, one team added mid-sprint check-ins for high-risk stories.
   • Get to know customers with personas, journey maps and visits to where the work happens. When VSP developers watched their system in a gun store, the first customer handed the laptop asked, "What do I do first?"

   In the Scrum Guide: The Scrum Team · Developers · Scrum Values

4. Conference retrospective 2:11:28

   Attendees post on a shared board. They liked the guest speaker and the analogies, and pointed out audio problems and presenters unsure of their screen-sharing tools.

   • Requests: more on specific techniques, team-building exercises, workshops, and an in-person conference if possible.

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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