Unlike two years ago, when my HR colleague attended a Scrum Master course, the reactions from other participants wasn’t this great when I attended the Scrum Master course about two months ago. I guess simply because Agile practices are becoming more widespread and also, it was an internal training where we invited Daniel Teng (from Odd-E) to conduct this workshop.

Although Agile has been around for a pretty long time and has flipped the entire waterfall model on its head, it hasn’t really made headway in very traditional or highly regulated practices (such as HR, Financial services, Healthcare, etc).

While there are plenty of reasons why Agile adopters can fail, that doesn’t mean traditional services cannot become Agile. From what I have learned at the Scrum Master course, I am beginning to see a clearer picture of the ‘perfect world’ where Agile HR resides. As I am a HR practitioner, the perspective that I would like to share would (naturally) be limited to this context.

Let’s look at it from a Product angle

HR does many things for an organization, some administrative, others strategic. With the importance and ever-increasing popularity of HR business partners, we can actually consider the organization as our customers.

What if the HR service is a product? And it’s features (i.e. Recruitment, Payroll, etc) are there to resolve the needs of our customers? So for example, if it comes to the end of the month and payroll needs to be done, the entire team will do what it takes to accomplish it at the end of the sprint. If the customer requires a fix to an employee engagement problem, then the team will seek to understand the situation (again doing whatever it takes – research, interviews, etc) and come up with a MVP (minimum viable policy/procedure/process) to tackle it. From real users’ feedback, the team can then iterate and improve on it.

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