Impediment handling: A success factor

An impediment is anything that slows or block the agile team to get their work done. In traditional term it can be an issue or even a risk that need attention.

For example – It can be unavailability of a meeting room , unclear requirement to external dependencies that’s beyond team’s control or simply technical debt

There are few anti-patterns /traps that agile teams fall into in impediment handling

• Team member identifies the impediment, but he/she is afraid to share with a false perception that his capability may be questioned if he says it is an impediment and seek support , here the team member silently struggles to solve the impediment by himself, which may become counter-productive and impact the entire team if not addressed
• Sometimes, the team becomes too ownership averse, here the scrum team just identifies impediment in every story of their scope and puts the onus of solving it to management\external parties
• Another anti pattern is the team gets sucked into one impediment  and spend all their effort in this dark hole that may not be relevant at all in larger context, Owning every impediment so religiously as a team without seeking the right expertise. This is like starting to chisel a mountain with barren hands ..
• Getting used to the impediment and staying with status quo – like if a java deployment takes six hours every day due to poor database or hardware , you start accounting that six hours waste in your planning instead of escalating and fixing the database\hardware issue – Technical debt
• Being so considerate and submissive to all parties  . Like picking up requirements that is not fully refined, just to make the Product owner happy . This leading to higher frustration to the team as well as Product owner at the end.

Few ways to avoid above traps and handle the impediments in right way is

• Every team member is motivated and equipped to raise his voice assertively and look out on impediments earliest possible
• Use right agile governance tool like JIRA\Rally that can facilitate and radiate the status of impediments and keep it transparent to all stakeholders
• Proper ceremonies including Daily stand up\ Scrum of Scrum that facilitates impediment handling in time bound manner
• Clear impediment handling process and escalation mechanism visible to team . Example Team member> Scrum Master > RTE\Coach> Leadership
• Fear free and open retrospectives that challenge the status quo and help solve invisible impediments like technical debts and a reward system that supports it
• Enabling a knowledge sharing \seeking culture where team can continuously identify  waste [ impediment] and find out of box ways to solve them.
• Focus on technical debt reduction and accounting this in the budget \ release planning

Let us hunt down the impediments at right moment with right tools !!