The Team is Raising False Impediments
During a daily scrum with a development team where Ryan was serving as Scrum master, the team realized that some of the team members didn’t have enough work to keep them busy until the end of the current sprint. They raised this situation as an impediment to Ryan, and wanted him to find them more work.
If your team makes a request like this, you might be tempted to work with the product owner to find more work for the team. But is not having enough work in the sprint really an impediment? Nope—it really isn’t. If the team has extra time and can pull in work, they can do that on their own with some guidance from the product owner. The true impediment here is that the development team isn’t collaborating around the remaining work so that everyone has an opportunity to contribute to achieving the sprint goal. (For a refresher on what qualifies as an impediment, flip back to What’s an Impediment?.) The development team is empowered to pull work into a sprint. The team owns the sprint backlog and decides how to do their work.
Sometimes the right answer to a development team raising an impediment is simply, “How fascinating! I can’t wait to see how you tackle that issue.”
Whenever a Scrum team raises an impediment, stop and ask yourself two questions:
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Is this actually an impediment or is it a sign that the team doesn’t understand self-organization yet?
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If this really is an impediment, is it something the team can remove on its own?
Keep these questions in mind as you handle impediments. What looks like an impediment could actually be a wonderful opportunity for the development team to practice self-organization.