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The Flight Levels framework represents a breakthrough achievement in the Agile community, finally living up to the promise of true Business Agility. It does this by encompassing every part of the organization and encouraging participation at every level, across all disciplines. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work—flight level three, or the strategy level, flight level two, or the coordination level, and flight level one, or the team level. Flight Levels provide a simple and clear way to connect strategy to execution—facilitating alignment and enabling innovation to occur at every level. Unlike complex and prescriptive frameworks, Flight Levels fit in smoothly with your existing processes like Scrum or Kanban and can be adopted quickly and incrementally. In this talk I will introduce the flight levels framework, focusing on the problems that it solves and how it differs from other well-known frameworks. Unlike other frameworks, flight levels can be used by the entire company—it is non-IT specific. In addition, flight levels can happily coexist with other Agile frameworks. Rather than specify what teams should be doing, the flight levels framework focuses on helping teams coordinate in value streams and connecting strategy to execution at the portfolio and corporate strategy level. Unlike traditional org charts, the flight level system maps the flow of work and helps us understand the needs for coordination–where we need daily touchpoints and feedback loops. A flight level system consists of a flight level three, or strategy level board mapping corporate strategy to our portfolio of work via OKRAs—(objectives key results and Actions) as well as one or more flight level two boards to help us coordinate the work of multiple teams within a given value stream. These boards all connect to our standard flight level one team-level Scrum or Kanban boards. This talk introduces an exciting new approach to enterprise agility that is neither vague nor overly prescriptive. Participants will come away with a new perspective on scaling Agile that they can apply immediately, no matter which Agile framework(s) their organization is using.

I am excited to be speaking once again at All Day DevOps!

What does it mean to implement zero-trust and DevSecOps principles in a serverless environment?  This is our story of hardening an AWS application based on serverless architecture.  It all began with an idea for a brand-new plugin for the Atlassian Jira Agile tool.  Our plugin uses an innovative design based on GoLang, AWS Athena, Lambdas, and DynamoDB, and the Atlassian AtlasKit SDK for ReactJS.  Serverless applications have many nice features that help make them secure.  Lambdas get their credentials injected at runtime, eliminating the need to store keys or credentials.  Our SSO solution improves security still further, by creating temporary credentials for every session, eliminating static keys and credentials.  Given this excellent foundation, we thought our MVP was ready for production!  Alas, how mistaken we were…

In order to meet Atlassian’s strict cybersecurity guidelines, we implemented security tools including GitHub’s dependabot, AWS credential management services, AWS app firewall, gosec, ZAP tester, and Nessus.  We will discuss lessons learned and what was unique to the serverless environment.  We will also cover privilege audits, data, and disaster recovery.

Using serverless architecture confers many benefits, and by reducing the attack surface, they can be inherently more secure than alternative architectures.  Nevertheless, there are important steps that must be taken to further improve security. This talk will shed light on how to get where we need to be.

The Alamo Chapter of AFCEA respectfully requests your participation in our annual Alamo AFCEA Chapter Event (Alamo ACE) to be held at the La Cantera Resort in beautiful San Antonio, Texas, November 14 – 17, 2022. The Alamo ACE will provide you access and insight to senior leader perspectives on current developments in cyberspace and future challenges in transforming to multi-domain operations strategically, and military cyber and ISR operations battlespace in the future.

The Alamo ACE is an annual event with a national draw supporting the military community. We expect 2800+ attendees at the 2022 AACE. We’ll open with our traditional golf tournament on Monday, November 14 supporting our Wounded Warrior and Military Families Endowment Fund. The ACE program will consist of two full days of expert panels and esteemed keynote speakers and panels focused on IW, ISR and human capital, followed by a full day of acquisition and classified mission updates.

AFCEA is a non-profit organization which directly supports the military and community through ethical dialogue, professional development, and educational opportunities. The Alamo Chapter has made local and national impacts by providing numerous scholarships and awards to students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Since 2014, the Alamo Chapter has donated nearly 1.5 million to STEM education and Wounded Warrior beneficiaries.