So Many Impediments, So Little Time

Here’s a scenario that illustrates another anti-pattern we often see: The Scrum master isn’t effectively dealing with impediments that are beyond the team’s capabilities, and these impediments are growing into blockers that prevent the team from delivering a product increment by the end of the sprint.

The development team has raised concerns multiple times about the following issues:

• A test server has been down for two weeks.

• The staging environment doesn’t mirror the production environment, but the DevOps team is too busy to deal with it.

• The organization is requiring that code reviews be performed by people outside of the development team, and the team has lost time waiting for other teams to complete these reviews.

• The architecture team is spending so much time approving new coding patterns that it’s hindering their ability to make progress.

Perhaps this situation is caused by organizational dysfunction. Scrum master inexperience could also be to blame. Regardless of the reason, one technique that can help is to create an impediment backlog.

Find a place that’s visible to the Scrum team and stakeholders where you list all the impediments that are holding back the team. List them in order by priority or severity and provide a regular update on impacts and progress. Review the impediments with your stakeholders, product owner, and development team. Facilitate this exercise in a way that allows the team to resolve these impediments as quickly as possible.

Strong facilitation is essential for this exercise to work. Facilitation involves coming up with creative ways to gather the team’s insights. Then you can take these insights and find ways to model and distill them into actionable improvements.

Facilitation also requires knowing how to co-create with the participants. Get everyone involved—get them on their feet. Use stickies and markers to build the impediment backlog, but don’t touch anything yourself! Let the participants move ideas around and generate new ones. Using an impediment backlog can enhance the conversation and help the team discover new insights and solutions.

A few notes about impediments: Impediments come in all different shapes, contexts, and sizes. They can range from a lack of funding for a desperately needed tool to getting support from an external team that isn’t responding to requests.

You’ll be tempted to immediately solve an impediment for the team. Resist! Consider these steps before taking any actions:

1. Think about whether this is truly an impediment to progress or just a temporary blocker with a workaround.

2. If this is an impediment, decide whether the team can solve it on its own.

3. If you’re sure the impediment is outside of the team’s ability to fix, then it’s time to take action and help remove the impediment.

Every situation is different. But your team needs you, dear Scrum master, to navigate difficult situations. An impediment backlog can help you get the impediments recognized and resolved.