Alice Ferris, founder of Goal Busters, started her Agile journey implementing Agile ideas that she found useful in her own personal productivity. She found this approach so helpful she brought the techniques and ideas to the nonprofit sector to support the clients of Goal Busters. 

Alice and her team have utilized Scrum in her work supporting major gifts and capital campaigns. While she doesn’t use the full framework she does utilize the key components that help her team with their productivity. 

What originally caught Alice’s eye? The Sprint! The idea that you take a period of time (two weeks for her) and focus solely on what you can accomplish in that sprint instead of trying to do all the things. She also started swarming more as a team to get work accomplished faster. Alice found that with these sprints, after two weeks if something changes, you can quickly pivot and focus on the next important task. This approach proved to vastly improve their team’s efficiency and productivity. 

Alice made Scrum work for her business, she found the part that added value for her team and clients and put the pieces that work for them into place. 

You can hear Linet’s experience directly about learning about Agile and Scrum in this 15-minute (free) video here: 

We can’t thank Alice enough for sharing her story and what we are sure resonated with other nonprofits as part of the larger Agile in Nonprofits Summit. Alice was one of our six fantastic speakers that day. You can view all of the free recorded videos and learn from the speakers who are nonprofit professionals IN the work every day, just like you are here.