“One of the biggest impediments to improving productivity in Scrum teams that I see in many companies is failure of the ScrumMaster to track and prioritize impediments.” —
Jeff Sutherland, June 2006.
More bluntly; the Scrum Master that doesn’t remove impediments is an impediment to be removed.
An impediment creates waste until removed – identified or not. That should make you very nervous; what you don’t know is out there killing your value stream.
Eventually, a big enough impediment, or enough small ones, will overwhelm a team, bringing it to a total standstill – flat-lined on the burn down. It can even start to take the team backwards, burning up without new work – a sight as pleasant as watching a two-hundred kilo man eat two burgers at once.
Randomly sampling activities around your value stream is a great way to start finding impediments. When you walk the line and see what people are up to, focus on people not working: they’re probably waiting on an impediment.
- Never assume teams can see impediments themselves.
- Never assume that they will tell you about those they can see.
- Impediments that you don’t seek out will simultaneously get more wasteful and harder to see. Rather than becoming more pronounced, big, old impediments seem to settle into the background, becoming the reality that people operate in rather than on.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself about an activity:
- Would this seem odd to a person new to the team, without some explanation?
- Would I consider this OK at another company? At a great company?
- If I were to explain this activity to an outsider, would I feel an urge to excuse it?
- Is value added throughout the activity’s duration?
It’s tempting to use the five why’s to decide if something is an impediment, but this leads to a common failing: reasoning that the cause of something helps determine whether it is an impediment. No matter how justifiable an impediment, it is still an impediment and its brethren pave the road to hell.
Big visible lists, issue trackers, and wikis are good ways to track and prioritise impediments. Whatever you use, it should always be highly visible, up-to-date, and prioritised or ranked.
Commit to yourself to take some action on each known impediment every day. I use the comment log in an issue tracker to keep myself honest on this one, because keeping up is as hard as it sounds.