Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference (CAAC #16)

Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 16

Defining Business Value for Commonwealth Agencies

Volunteer planning team

Full recording, 2 hr 20 min. Watch on the VSP YouTube channel ↗

1. Welcome: what is value? 0:00:03

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   The host shows his father's old folding rule, worth next to nothing to anyone else and a lot to him, then polls the audience on what value means. The answers agree on one thing: value is subjective.

2. Business value at the DMV 0:11:55

   Gerald Lackey (Virginia DMV), Latrice Ampy (Virginia DMV), Lauren Bangs (Virginia DMV), Ava Adnau (Virginia DMV)

   The DMV Commissioner shows how senior leaders turn a vague idea of value into something teams can work toward, from mission and vision down to objectives and key results, and the portfolio team (partly on video) shows how the DMV picks its work every quarter. Attendees practice in breakout rooms by writing an OKR for a fictional state Drone Control Board.

   • Teams can't maximize "business value" until senior leaders define it: mission, vision, strategic interests, objectives for three to five years, and key results for 12 to 18 months.
   • It takes time. At the DMV the mission and vision took about nine months, the strategic interests about four more, and the objectives and key results another nine. If your leaders haven't done this, ask for it.
   • A good key result is one measurable thing to move, such as wait and service times of 10 minutes or less.
   • The DMV re-prioritizes its portfolio every quarter with a four-step model called STAR: strategy, target, analyze, rank. The ranked list is a starting point for negotiation, not a verdict.
   • Teams plan 80 percent of their capacity and keep 20 percent for unplanned work, which the DMV calls "red planes" and tracks.
   • Quarterly planning takes one day for non-IT teams and two for IT teams, with time built in to negotiate dependencies in the room.

3. Ready, Fire, Aim! VSP's firearms team delivers value 1:03:55

   George Garcia (Virginia State Police), Julie Wilson (Virginia State Police)

   The Scrum team behind VSP's firearms background-check system, with its Product Owner, the manager of the Firearms Transaction Center, talks through how they decide what counts as business value and what to work on next.

   • For the firearms transaction center, value means four things: public safety, staff productivity, confidentiality, and a system simple enough for anyone to use.
   • The Product Owner reports that the team's enhancements saved the section about 2,353 staff hours in 2024, and that Virginia handles over 500,000 transactions a year with about 15 people.
   • The team and Product Owner decide priorities together. A legislative deadline is the one thing that overrides that.
   • Security fixes, refactoring and test automation are business value even when there's nothing to demo. The Product Owner gave the team a few months for automation alone.
   • Developers learn the customer firsthand: they visited the transaction center, met a trooper, and watched the system in use at a gun show.

   In the Scrum Guide: Product Owner · Developers · Sprint Review

4. Conference retrospective 1:57:47

   Barbara Phillips (Virginia State Police)

   The first CAAC with breakout rooms. Attendees liked hearing a strategy view and then a team view of the same idea, and talking with people from other agencies.

   • Fixes for next time: give breakouts more time and simpler prompts, share the prompt as a screenshot, and avoid sending people to empty rooms.

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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