Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference (CAAC #17)

Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 17

Getting Alignment for Agile at All Levels of Your Organization

Michael spoke Panelist, session 2: Agile in Practice, Empowering Teams for Success · Volunteer planning team

Full recording, 2 hr 32 min. Watch on the VSP YouTube channel ↗

1. Welcome and the conference topic roadmap 0:00:07

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   The host uses road maps, from fold-out paper maps to phone navigation, to introduce something new: after 16 conferences the planning team has a topic roadmap reaching into 2027, revisited after every conference.

2. The Agile Advantage: a leadership perspective 0:11:18

   Barbara Phillips (Virginia State Police), Lana Shelley (Virginia DMV), Eric Goen (Virginia State Police), Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   A panel of agency leaders on how agile took hold at Virginia State Police and the DMV: getting executives on board, fitting compliance and security into the backlog, the Product Owner role, and what supervisors and HR documents have to change.

   • Compliance, security and technical debt go in the backlog from the start. At DMV the security office joins product owners in quarterly planning, so audits and end-of-life work are planned rather than dropped on teams.
   • DMV graded the Product Owner role high enough that people who actually own the strategy would take it, and put business owners through Scrum Master and Product Owner training.
   • The hardest recurring hurdle at VSP is the Product Owner role at division level; the state's HR system has no defined Product Owner role.
   • Leaders come to trust teams through sprint reviews. VSP's senior leadership sat through an hour-long team demo. Leaders also need to be there for the misses.
   • Self-managing teams still have supervisors. VSP supervisors observe standups, read the work data in Jira, and every staff member's performance profile has a section on agile teamwork.
   • The change is emotional. Expect pushback from people who used to control a system, and coach them through it.

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

3. Agile in Practice: empowering teams for success 1:16:21

   Barbara Phillips (Virginia State Police), Michael Vizdos (EdVizion) guest, Yousef Hatter (Virginia DMV)

   Two Scrum Masters and a coach on what empowerment looks like day to day: keeping self-organizing teams aligned with agency goals, handling leaders who change priorities mid-sprint, the first year of DMV's first agile team, and the metrics they use.

   • Self-organization is what empowers a team: the team decides who works on what.
   • Keep the business in refinement and reviews. At DMV the Product Owner and Scrum Master meet business and executive leaders together to prioritize against agency goals.
   • When a leader changes priorities mid-sprint, the Product Owner can say no, or say yes and name what it costs.
   • Fix time and budget and let scope vary. A working increment every sprint builds more trust than a status report where everything is green until the night before.
   • Developers should meet real end users themselves, not only through the Product Owner.
   • DMV's first agile team combined review, retrospective and planning into one meeting, and tried virtual standups but went back to in-person.
   • Useful team metrics: a burndown chart at every standup, average velocity for planning, and lead time kept under the length of a sprint.
   • Product backlog refinement is the most important non-event in Scrum.

   In the Scrum Guide: The Scrum Team · Product Owner · Sprint Review · Product Backlog

4. Conference retrospective 2:15:06

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   Attendees post on an online board, used for the first time, about the experience, the sessions and what to cover next.

   • Attendees valued hearing agency leaders, wanted more DMV stories, and asked how AI fits into agile and Scrum.

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.

Every CAAC conference and recording · VSP on YouTube ↗