a·gen·tic a·gil·i·ty

Policing for the 21st Century: How NKD Agility Enabled Organisational Change in the Ghana Police Service

TL;DR; The Ghana Police Service partnered with NKD Agility to drive real organisational change by embedding Scrum and evidence-based management, moving from rigid command structures to a system that enabled learning and adaptation at all levels. Key outcomes included new digital capabilities delivered every sprint, cross-functional teams taking ownership of change, and a national backlog created by officers themselves. The main takeaway is that transformation succeeded because change was practised through structured experimentation, not just planned or mandated, and development managers should focus on enabling systems that let teams drive and sustain their own improvements.

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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:

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.

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

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.

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