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Motor Neurone Disease Association

Squads and Agile Self-Management for Efficiency and Innovation

Problem Statement

How Might We… Adopt astounding agile and self-management results to work for a small, hard-pressed charity. How might this improve efficiency, encourage innovation, and promote radical thinking and ideas?

 

Product Story

Initial implementation of Squad (or in this case Scrum) working programme was deployed for exploratory purposes, and scale was then determined as a response to the needs of the organisation.

 

Roadmap

December 2017: Initial scope and exploratory conversations with #TeamPTHR.

April 2018: Agile methodology, manifested in the form of Scrums, was applied to problem solve a need to implement Agile and flexible ways of working across the organisation. 

May 2018: With a great deal of interest generated from the initial scrum, another project formed to address culture and communication between office-based and regional teams. 

January 2019 onwards: Numerous additional squads began to form to further tackle problems and answer questions. They took the form of self-managed, energised groups of individuals across the organisation, with the support of bespoke resources and workbooks curated by #TeamPTHR.

 

Retrospective

  • A great deal of learning from the first Scrum in particular, in that the organisation had placed people “too close” to the Product at the head of the Scrum. Which upon reflection may have hindered innovation and/or free-thinking.
  • The organisation persisted with the approach and reconstituted their entire project to move to a new headquarters using Agile Scrums, and in fact, took the methodology to scale by utilising the Scrum of Scrums approach. 
  • Through continuous improvement and energy, MNDA has now validated their need for this new working model and continue to foster this inclusive and social way of working on internal projects.