Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference (CAAC #8)

8

Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 8

Change Management and Agile

Volunteer planning team

Full recording, 2 hr 38 min. Watch on the VSP YouTube channel ↗

1. Welcome and polls 0:02:28

   Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)

   On a Halloween-themed morning, the host notes that "change management" means different things to different people, and his polls on how agencies handle it come back mostly "unknown."

2. Change Management: Never Deliver an Agile Project Without It 0:13:58

   Ted Haenlein (Virginia State Police)

   Ted Haenlein, a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Prosci-certified change practitioner, makes the case that every agile project needs change management built in, and tours the main change models.

   • Agile teams deliver value every iteration. For users that can feel like constant change, and change fatigue sets in.
   • Pick one change model and make it actionable. He surveys several (Kotter, Lewin, McKinsey 7S, PDCA, Kaizen, LaMarsh, Change First and others) and favors Prosci's ADKAR: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement.
   • Change needs a sponsor, change champions (often the Product Owner) and change agents.
   • Put change-management work on the backlog as stories, and ask in every retrospective how well the team helped users adopt what it shipped.
   • Change management is the whole team's job, not just the Product Owner's.

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

3. Panel Discussion: How We Do CM (or Don't) 1:18:04

   Ted Haenlein (Virginia State Police), Tom Kramer (VITA), Richard Matthews (VITA), Sandra Magruder (Virginia Department of Taxation)

   Ted is joined by the manager of one of VITA's project management offices, the new director of VITA's Project Management Division, and the agile coach at the Department of Taxation, on who owns change in a project and what works against resistance.

   • Change management traditionally starts with the project manager. In agile, look to the Product Owner, the executive sponsor and the Scrum Master.
   • VITA requires a change management plan for category 1 to 3 projects and oversees projects over $250,000, so involve its project management division early.
   • Scope decides where change is managed: a change across a whole value stream needs a leader over all of it, while a small one can sit with a manager.
   • At Taxation, communication is the main tool. Teams picking their own iteration lengths cost transparency, so they moved to one cadence.
   • Involve vocal stakeholders early. Left out, they go to the executives; brought in, they become champions.
   • Business users want training, a place to try things, and direct support, more than technical teams expect.
   • Against resistance: communicate the vision, tailor the message to each audience, assess where people are as you go, and reward the new behaviors rather than the old ones.
   • If "change management" already means something else in your agency, use another name, such as "we do ADKAR."

   In the Scrum Guide: Scrum Master · Product Owner

4. Conference retrospective 2:21:19

   Elizabeth Conner (Virginia State Police)

   Elizabeth Conner runs a "treats and tricks" retrospective on a Jamboard. Attendees liked the tour of change models and the panel, and asked for more interaction between panelists.

   • Fixes for next time: get the slides to attendees, smooth out the pre-conference survey, and prefer quick polls to surveys.

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 ↗