Events Conference
Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference (CAAC #9)
This event took place on Friday, February 24, 2023, so registration is closed. See current training or get in touch about booking Michael.
Michael Vizdos was on the volunteer planning team for CAAC 9, Flavors of Agile, an online conference for Commonwealth of Virginia agency teams in February 2023, including a state agency team’s move from Scrum to Scrumban. The full recording is on the Virginia State Police YouTube channel.
Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 9
Flavors of Agile
Volunteer planning team
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Welcome and polls 0:00:02
Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)
The host's polls show 15 agencies attending, five of them not yet using agile, an average satisfaction of 3.7 out of 5 with agile so far, and about 38 percent first-time attendees.
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Scrum at DWR 0:14:59
Nick Minneti (Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources)
Nick Minneti shows "Scrum Harmony," DWR's adaptation of Scrum (inspired by Nexus) for a team that juggles project work and day-to-day operations.
- One backlog, organized around the team's people rather than separate projects, so everything competes for the same capacity.
- A weekly operations sprint and one daily scrum for the whole team.
- No one carries more than three priorities at a time.
- A steering committee meets quarterly. When the work exceeds capacity, that goes back to leadership as a budget question.
- The test plan doubles as the user manual, and daily scrum notes are posted in Teams.
- Eight-hour days and no heroes.
In the Scrum Guide: Product Backlog · Daily Scrum
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Scrumban at VSP 1:16:50
Barbara Phillips (Virginia State Police), Catherine Day (Virginia State Police)
A VSP team explains how it moved from Scrum to Scrumban in six steps, with its Product Owner on what changed for her.
- The six steps: visualize the work, limit work in progress to one story per person, add ready and hold columns, stop committing to work too early, stop estimating (keep stories small instead), and plan when the ready column runs low.
- Kept: the daily standup, all the roles, planning on demand, a review after every 12 stories, and a retrospective every two weeks. Dropped: the Sprint.
- Progress is measured by cycle time. Production support gets its own swim lane, and "on hold" stops the clock.
- The Product Owner values the flexibility for legislative mandates, but says epics can feel disjointed.
In the Scrum Guide: The Sprint · Sprint Planning · Sprint Retrospective
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Conference retrospective 2:18:55
David Crighton (Virginia State Police)
David Crighton, a VSP business analyst, facilitates the closing retrospective.
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.