Case National Dutch Police: Agile working in a police base team

The Limburg Police Force, base team Venray-Gennep, wants to work Agile. The police has traditionally been an organization with a hierarchical structure. The fact that this organization wants to switch to the Agile way of working is groundbreaking.

The aim is to reduce the workload and experienced workload by police officers in all layers of the base team. There is always more demand for police work than the team can provide. The base team is highly motivated and wants to deliver high-quality police work within the limits of its capabilities. In order to achieve the objective, a number of principles have been identified. These are:

  • The team wants to focus on the most valuable work for citizens and stakeholders within the basic team Venray-Gennep;
  • The team wants to be able to react quickly and flexibly in order to be able to answer the increasingly rapidly changing demands from society;
  • Reducing the perceived work pressure and increasing job satisfaction;
  • Focus on craftsmanship and quality of work;
  • Development of the employees and the team.

The Venray-Gennep base team consists of a total of 85 FTE: two district teams (Venray district team and Noord district team), one frequently occurring crime (VVC) intake & service team, an operational management team and a tactical management team.

Within the police Agile is already being used in a few locations. And so the police has already been working on Agile working for some time. To our knowledge, this is the first operational 'blue' base team that works fully integrated Agile. Despite thorough preparation, many things have beenintroduced as experiments to learn and develop Agile working in practice. This requires patience, resilience and perseverance of the team members and team leads. Not everything is going right the first time. We made a project film of it.

Besides the project film, the Agile coach of this project, Dennis van de Rieth, wrote a blog in which he shares the 12 learnings in this case. The concrete yields are also mentioned. 

Read Dennis's blog here!

About Dennis van de Rieth

 

Dennis van de Rieth is Agile coach, Scrum Master and certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) at AgilityMasters.com.

Dennis has completed a bachelor of policing, the course 'Intervention science' and the course 'Coaching and counseling science'. Dennis has also followed various professional training courses in the field of communication and as an Assistant Public Prosecutor.

Dennis has many years of experience within the National Police and municipalities and mainly specializes in change management and organizational development. He feels most happy when he can deal with the development and changes of people, teams or within an organization.

He can provide guidance in this by increasing the 'vital craftsmanship' within the team. Dennis's development and change approach pays a lot of attention to people and their craftsmanship. Together it is determined what the goals are that the team wants to achieve; the road to it is a joint journey of discovery with successes and learning experiences.

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