Why we set up a Volunteer Scrum Team to support our COVID-19 response
Earlier this year, with the rising risk of COVID-19 in the UK we began to prepare for the new challenges across the country and our organisation. Starting with discoveries to collect insights and map areas of need, we prioritised our response and restructured our services. One of the most important aspects of the considerations have always been our volunteers, who are in the heart of our services. With part of our experienced supporters shielding and an astonishing amount of new keen community reserve volunteers, we set up a team, dedicated to ensuring we could create a safe environment for them to support both internal teams and external organisations responding to the current crisis.
Why did we set up a volunteer scrum?
The volunteer scrum was set up to understand the changing need for volunteers related to COVID-19 projects and address it. Not only did we need to adapt existing volunteer roles, we had to design entirely new ones that fit within the requirements and demands of the current crisis. We were also getting multiple requests from external organisations who did not have enough volunteers to fulfill the demand for their services. Others, on the other hand, had resources but were unsure on the best way to utilise them. All of this had to happen fast with the complexities of ever-changing regulation, a fall in our volunteer capacity due to shielding and a significant increase in demand for our services.
So, why a scrum?
Since multiple requests were coming every day, most of which required a very quick decision and turnaround time, we decided that an agile framework like scrum would be the best way to operate. Scrum is a flexible methodology, which helps teams deliver quick results based on constant feedback and reiteration. It helped us involve all key advisors in the decisions and implement new processes and conduct analysis as efficiently as possible.
Who was involved in the team?
The requests coming in were nationwide, from multiple teams and organisations and involved new volunteer roles that we haven’t had to support in the past. Having colleagues on board across the organisation, with expertise in comms, health and safety, volunteer mobilisation, innovation, operations, safeguarding and multiple others gave us confidence in making quick informed decisions. With all the right people in the same place results could be seen were much faster than going through the usual processes. What is more, concerns and ideas were captured right at the beginning, with learnings implemented in the projects to follow. Since requests were being filtered and discussed every day, including some weekends, everyone involved also had a deputy that could step in and take over. This ensured the team was sustainable and resilient and that contributed to the wellbeing of the scrum members.
How does the scrum process look like in a day?
All external organisations and internal teams were invited to submit their requests through a simple online form, which helped us capture the essential information needed for us to make an informed decision. These requests would then go to a backlog in the form of a ticket. Each morning the scrum team met for a 30-minute daily stand up. Here we looked into incoming requests, discussed the progress of live ones and addressed blockers from the previous day. We would then agree on actions to move live requests forward, such as evaluating capacity and feasibility, writing role descriptions, defining training and DBS requirements, updating online scheduling tools and if needed, meet with the requester to ensure we could deliver the right solution to them. This allowed scrum members to start their day with a clear overview of priorities and tasks, distributed across the team depending on their current capacity.
How has the Volunteer Scrum evolved throughout the past few months?
An important part of the scrum methodology and all agile ways of working is the regular reviews and retrospectives, looking into how well the current team and processes have been working so far and any ways they can be improved. The number of meetings has fluctuated from daily stand ups to every other day to twice per week, depending on current demand. The scrum members have also varied, depending on new requests and insights we’ve acquired along the way, such as inviting our Health and Safety advisor.
We’ve also developed some tools during this time to support us in actioning requests in a more efficient way. Our capacity model was built combining all of our volunteer data sources into one to help us evaluate whether we had enough suitable volunteers in a particular area to fulfill a request. The volunteer role prioritisation sheet, was constantly updated and captured decisions around new requested volunteer roles, such as DBS, training requirements and role description and prioritised suitability against existing roles. This helped us understand where our current volunteers might be able to meet demand or whether a new role had to be created and recruited for.
It is worth mentioning that we were not able to support every request that was submitted to the team. Signposting our volunteers to help another organisation was not something we have done before and it didn’t come without its challenges. Every request was analysed and filtered by our team members to ensure that it only involves tasks which are completed in a safe environment and would bring maximum benefit to the local communities. Sometimes we would have to prioritise projects, depending on their estimated impact or adapt our response in order to address safeguarding concerns we’ve had.
What type of requests were supported?
One of the more recent projects we’ve taken on came from our partnership with FareShare, where we are supporting them in their food distribution efforts. The aim is to provide 1.5 million meals to food banks across the UK by the end of August. To achieve this, driving volunteers from our Ambulance Support service have been deployed to help deliver food pallets. Despite the significant logistic challenges related to the size of the pallets and the limited suitable vehicles available, they’ve managed to deliver more than 15,000kg of food in the first two weeks. This equates to almost 38,000 meals that will be distributed to those most in need by the FareShare network.
In order to address the demand for more regular support roles, we also ran pilots to help recruit some of our ad hoc, light touch volunteers to formal BRC volunteer roles. Whether it was supporting pharmacy prescription deliveries in Wales or wheelchair distribution in Swindon, we discovered that many volunteers who originally singed up for a light touch role, were interested in committing to providing a long term support to their local communities through our services.
What have we learned from this process?
Forming such a cross divisional team, following a project methodology that wasn’t implemented widely across the organisation was a risk at the beginning, but it was needed to meet challenges and demands of a new scale. Multiple scrum members have found this way of working more efficient and stated that this is something they would be interested in implementing in their own projects. Even though no methodology is without its challenges, this has been an extremely positive experience for our organisation and we will be looking into exploring more agile methods of working in the future.
