What are Impediments?
Impediments, also known as blockers, as the name suggests is a piece of work that slows down the progression of a deliverable. The piece of work could be a dependency on other teams or functions within and/or outside the organisation. It is essential to keep removing blockers as a pro-Risk Management approach.
How can Impediments management be more agile?
Impediments management framework complexity varies depending on the maturity of agile teams. The key is to start simple. Once the agile team starts working in regular sprint cadence and has a healthy sprint backlog that the team has committed to and is working on, a simple and effective starting point is to start using ‘flags’ on sprint work items to visually flag items that are blocked (Please note, the word Blocker/Impediment essentially means the same thing and may be used interchangeably in this article). If you are having a physical board, you can use some sort of red dots you’d readily find available in stationary sections/shops. If you are using electronic boards like JIRA (quoting it due to its market popularity, I don’t get paid to say this :D) you have a flag feature to do so. Every tool like JIRA, Trello, MS Planner has a mechanism to flag work items.
Once flagged, bring up the conversation during Standups. Even better, engage relevant parties who can help unblock and help team proceed and update the team during standups. Ask for assistance from Product Owner or Scrum Master if needed to unblock.
Final Thoughts
Most Impediments are a form of ‘Waste’ and impacts the system as a whole by slowing down the progress. Often, team members know the context of Impediments and can remove it on their own. Sometimes, Impediments are beyond the ability of the Team to remove and that’s where the scrum master comes in. A Scrum Master’s top job is to help and facilitate team to identify, track and remove those impediments In that case, the Scrum Master may have to get support from outside of the Team. Identifying Impediments is a shared responsibility of a team.
As mentioned above, All Impediments should be flagged during the standups. Reoccurring Impediments should be talked about in Sprint Retrospective. If an Impediment just won’t go away, the Team probably needs to spend more time doing root cause analysis – some tools that’ll help in this situation are 5 WHY’s, Ishikawa Diagram etc.
It is important for Teams to continually identify new impediments. Talking about Impediments and more importantly, doing a root cause analysis is key to Continuous Improvement.
Refer to articles on Standups and Sprint Retrospective on this website to learn more.