How to transform the human resources (HR) department into a Scrum team and apply agile development throughout the organization's development?

Find out who in senior leadership actually wants this transformation to happen, and will create enough of a sense of urgency so change becomes more important than the day job.

Really interesting idea! I think getting leadership fully on board is key — without their support, it’s so hard to drive real change in departments like HR.

Follow the 2020 Scrum Guide. It is short, concise and holds a lot of information. Create the team, create the accountabilities in the team, create a Product Backlog consisting  of ordered work items. Let the team manage themselves to pick items from the Product Backlog. Reflect every sprint/iteration where the Scum implementation can be improved. 

Interesting question! For teams to be truly Agile and self managing in an organization, they need to be empowered and supported by departments like HR. It's great that you are investigating how to enable your teams by embracing an Agile mindset and organizing yourselves to make that possible.

There is a lot of reading material available about Agile HR. The common denominator (from what I've studied) is enabling self management for the teams in your organization, by adopting a mindset and a way of working that is consistent with the way the Agile teams are organized.

Scrum could very well be a great framework for your HR department. Not all HR departments thrive in Scrum though, depending on their situation. Could you tell us a bit more about what a week looks like, what sort of projects there are, how predictable the HR work is, etc?

First start by learning and understanding the benefits of the Scrum framework.  Work with it in some fashion in an industry that is well known to you.  Trying to introduce the framework into a niche market is not easy.  I know it can be done because I have worked at multiple organizations that have done it. Scrum in HR is usually a good fit because the people in that industry can understand the concepts and support the self-managing, self-organization that is needed. One of the best HR teams I ever worked with used Scrum practices. 

Most of what you will find on the internet about the use of the Scrum framework will be in software development.  HR is probably one of the most predominant secondary market for it. So you should be able to find a lot of information about it.  However, there is not a template that you can use. Each implementation will be unique to the organization and will need to developed as it is introduced.  The empiricism of Scrum is not just for the Sprints. It is also needed in the underlying implementation.