Improving the Flexibility, Speed of Delivery, and Agility of Services Resulting in More Enthusiasm Among Employees and Customers

Dutch National Police

Improving the Flexibility, Speed of Delivery, and Agility of Services Resulting in More Enthusiasm Among Employees and Customers

Transforming the National Police ICT into a high-performance organization with lean, agile working

The Challenge

The Netherlands’ National Police ICT unit came to Eraneos because it was looking to increase the speed of its responses to new technologies and simultaneously meet the expectations of citizens while guaranteeing safety in the country.  
 
Recognizing that speed ​​was necessary to respond to new digital forms of crime (such as cybercrime), the National Police had already begun the transition to agile working within the entire organization through its IT department. Where previously agile working was mainly done within software development projects, the goal was to work with Eraneos to scale up the entire IT chain and implement DevOps. And so that’s exactly what we did. 

“Central is the belief that ‘doing’ is better than talking about it.” 

Marjolein Smeets, Deputy Head of ICT at the Netherlands’ National Police

The approach

In being asked to supervise the national Police’s IT transition, we took a gradual approach to change, with special attention being paid to the five key ingredients of a successful high-performance organization (HPO). That consists of a clear purpose, an agile and lean way of working, accelerated leadership, masterful use of resources, and adaptive people. 
 
Production lines were set up where clients and DevOps teams could more easily come together. These were based on the best change goals for the business per quarter, a strong change team, guidance ‘on the job’ through coaching and training, and clear communication about goals and lessons learned. On top of this, we oversaw the training and supervision of internal coaches in a bid to enable the police to grow to the next level, independently. 

The importance of technology in responding to social changes has been recognized within the Netherlands’ National Police for some time, including recently by Chief Constable Erik Akerboom himself. Not only does the technology enable the police to carry out enforcement and investigations more effectively and efficiently, but citizens also feel like they can rely on the police more than ever.

The result

In less than a year, we helped to establish five production lines in the National Police’s production house to reach rationalization, that is, the action of making processes more efficient. Now, eighty DevOps teams work within business-oriented production lines, which help to deliver qualitatively better delivery of functionality resulting in more enthusiasm among employees and customers. 

Let’s create sustainable change together.