97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 95. Scrum Applied in Police Work

Sjoerd Kranendonk

Scrum is most known as a framework for empirical product delivery and for developing IT products. But it has also been applied to address other complex adaptive problems: in HR, marketing, police work, education (eduScrum), running a company, and so on.

My work as Scrum Master of a police team working on detection and prevention of cybercrime helped me explore how to look at the Increment, a mandatory Scrum artifact, in a non-IT context.

At first, the Increment feels like a tricky concept, given that most people consider it to be a product version. It is what a Development Team in Scrum creates throughout a Sprint. The Scrum Guide, however, leaves sufficient room for the concept to be applied in a non-IT context:

An increment is a body of inspectable, done work that supports empiricism at the end of the Sprint. The increment is a step toward a vision or goal.

It might come as a surprise, but in no way is the Increment described as a software or IT concept. The description is, however, also quite abstract. Ultimately, it boils down to having an output that:

• Can be inspected

• Is assumed to be valuable

• Is in a “Done” state

• Is part of reaching a vision or goal

When translating these characteristics of an Increment to the context of police work, we discovered that there is no need to substantially change our ideas of ...