Impediments: from the Charleston CSM class in September

As you may know, I think it is key in Scrum to aggressively attack impediments.

I think each Team should have a (mostly) public impediment list. I think the SM should be attacking the top impediment each day.  I think this ‘kaizen’ should lead to improvements in velocity. I think every Team can get better. Always.

An impediment is anything (anything) that is slowing the Team down (or stopping the Team).

So, I asked the Charleston class to list their top impediments. It was a diverse crowd, representing many teams and several companies.  Here are the stickies that they showed each other:

• Deflection
• Skill set (lack of…)
• Identifying risks upfront (lack of…)
• Market (changes?)
• Interest (by the Team??)
• Eliminating scope creep (ok, I think now they would say ‘reducing’)
• Notification of deadlines
• Communication
• Hardware defective
• Environments not ready
• Task slippage (too much)
• Too many items open at once
• Not co-located
• No project rooms
• DBA backlog
• Too much talking – too little action
• Operational responsibilities
• No staffing in critical areas
• Lack of documentation
• Status updates
• No prioritization
• Wrong product selection
• Night job; people working day jobs fit it in when they can
• Wrong Tech skills
• Too aggressive a schedule
• Not enough people
• Customer won’t accept product
• Unclear scope
• Not knowing what the customer wants
• Unclear product owner
• Risks were not mitigated
• Changing end goal mid project (and it didn’t make enough sense)
• Mgmt issues
• Poor process
• Poor planning
• No project methodology
• Market value (effort had a ‘low’….)
• Not enough $ (for effort, per what makes business sense)
• Lack of control – outsourcing too much
• Morale
• Customer participation
• Structure
• Poor system availability and speed
• People constraints (eg, tech)
• Prioritization (lack of)
• Communication
• Synch of environments (lack of)
• Control of patches (lack of)
• Improve upper mgmt focus
• Unwilling to ask for help
• Unknown requirement
• Lack of Auto testing
• Undefined goals
• Improving the ‘owner’ (maybe the PO)
• No accountability
• Managing whirlwind
• Knowledgeable subject expert not available
• Lack of procedure
• Lack of Scrum [I liked this one - smile]
• Broken code
• No installation guide
• Incorrect estimates
• Indecisive “decision” makers
• Data crash
• Time spent on non-value added tasks
• A wide variety of different things.  I recommended to them that a Team track the top 20 impediments…that was probably enough.

I hope this list suggests to you or your team that maybe there are…. one or two more ‘opportunities for increased excellence’.