Challenge

I am a member of an organization that carries out humanitarian and social work activities for  people living in poverty and rural communities with various health, education and training needs.  The main challenge is to improve the flow (projects and activities) of the materials and financial  resources that this organization acquires as support and aid from institutions of different sectors  of civil society to finance and support all the needs that exist in the communities where my  organization is working on. One of the projects includes developing online training channels for  the most remote communities from urban areas, the other project is to automate the distribution  channel for all materials and resources that are acquired by the organization, these projects must  be completed within the next sixty days before the start of the rainy season in the region.

Selection

Two teams have already been formed to attend these two projects, they have already developed  some activities based on design thinking tools, the main idea is to make the first experiments for  the online training system and for the materials distribution chain and for the optimization of the  financial resources obtained also.

Application

The first team was focused in coordinating and organizing the technical team. The main idea was  to take advantage of the current internet infrastructure already installed in those communities;  the tasks were structured according to the Scrum methodology recommendations. There were  many assumptions since none of the team members knew in depth the academic level of the final  audience and the technical capacity of the internet in the different regions, the challenge was to  know these details in depth, optimize the current technical capacities, and define the complexity  in the educational material to be distributed.

The second team also joined the Scrum workshops taught to take advantage of the same sessions,  but focused on defining the supply chains, taking into account the different transportation and  facilities for each region that each team of volunteers proposed.

In prior workshops, it was detected that all activities should be prioritized, for online education  and for the supply chain of materials also, so it was necessary to carry out an anonymous survey in  each of the communities, the questions were based on the new processes suggested by both  teams to organize the online training and how to make the delivery of materials were possible,  after a couple of weeks and based on the results obtained through this survey was possible to  prioritize each and every one of the tasks that the community considered most important in order  to meet their most immediate needs.

Based on the results obtained, in the third week another Scrum training session was carried out in  order to align the tasks in both teams and define the processes to be executed to meet the  established priorities.

Insight

Although both teams were aware and open to prioritizing tasks and based on the comments of  most of the people surveyed, it was possible to establish priorities and the first tasks to be carried  out with all the communities, this progress was not enough to be able to reach the initial goal of  starting activities in the next 30 days since the dead line was to finish in the 60 days established  before the start of the rainy season in the region, which caused a bit of concern in the managers of  the organization.

Approach

According to the results obtained in both teams formed to achieve our objectives, we have all  learned that using Scrum tools is easier to prioritize and establish the processes that are needed in  each of the defined tasks, teamwork harmony and better results are obtained in each project. As  well as being sure that by applying the tools and experience obtained through design thinking in  future projects, we will have better results.

