Client Context
The Ghana Police Service (GPS), one of West Africa’s largest public institutions, faced entrenched structural challenges: rising crime, limited public trust, and decades of fragmented reform efforts. With over 33,000 officers and 14,000 support personnel, modernising such a vast and hierarchical system demanded more than surface-level change.
Under the leadership of Inspector General of Police (IGP) David Asante-Apeatu, GPS aimed to become one of the world’s top ten police forces within four years, aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goal 16. The question wasn’t just what to change, but how to change in a system optimised for command and control, not learning and adaptation.
The Ask: Transformation Through Scrum
The IGP had experienced Scrum firsthand during his time at Interpol. GPS didn’t ask for training. They committed to transformation. The objective: build an empirical, accountable, and transparent system of work that could enable change at every level, from headquarters to regional commands.
Diagnosis: A System Built for Control, Not Adaptation
NKD Agility, working with regional partner Akaditi, quickly identified that the core dysfunction wasn’t knowledge or commitment, it was structural:
- Command-and-control practices stifled initiative and learning.
- No empirical mechanism for change meant reforms lacked follow-through.
- Fragmented efforts and no change network prevented scale.
- Technology adoption was disconnected from operations, limiting impact.
GPS needed more than Agile practices. They needed a social technology for coordinating learning and leadership across a hierarchy.
Approach: Embedding Empirical Change Through Professional Scrum
Martin Hinshelwood from NKD Agility delivered the first-ever Applying Professional Scrum (APS) classes in West Africa, designed not as workshops, but as hands-on, full-sprint experiences.
- Rank-and-file officers built working software, despite most having never written code. This forced practical, collaborative learning.
- Scrum was introduced as a system for organisational change, not just product delivery.
- Civilians and officers trained together, reflecting the cross-functional nature of future transformation teams.
- Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives were used to reflect on their own institution, not abstract examples.
Meanwhile, at the leadership level, NKD Agility, in collaboration with Akaditi, supported the IGP in establishing the Transformation Programme Office (TPO), a full Scrum implementation using the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework. The IGP acted as Product Owner, setting objectives for 28-day Sprints that drove transformation initiatives from drone squads to ePolicing rollouts.
Outcomes: Real Change, In Every Sprint
- New capabilities delivered every Sprint: GPS launched a public mobile app, digitised CID forms, and introduced a new website and internal SMS platform.
- Scrum Teams formed across regions to initiate change initiatives with local ownership.
- A national backlog of transformation items was created by officers themselves.
- Empirical feedback loops were embedded from the IGP’s war room to regional precincts.
Even officers initially skeptical of Scrum were converted through experience: not by persuasion, but by building, delivering, and improving.
Strategic Insight: Change Must Be Practised, Not Preached
This engagement reframed change as a professional discipline.
The Ghana Police Service didn’t wait for a perfect plan. With Akaditi & NKD Agility’s support, they created a system for learning in public, led by the IGP and backed by the President of Ghana. Their transformation wasn’t top-down, but distributed, enabled by structure and experimentation.
Final Takeaway
Scrum didn’t modernise the Ghana Police Service. It gave them a system to modernise themselves. And that’s the point.