As a scrum master, what do you consider an impediment?
I used to think it was only what was slowing the team down in terms of their work, such as a knowledge gap, distraction, or dependency.
Now I’m seeing a variety of items to be considered impediments including:
- the leadership focus on capacity vs estimates. It’s something my organization does where they laser focus in on the team’s capacity for multiple sprints vs their man-hour estimates (which is the standard they’ve pushed on the team) which is draining the team in more ways than one.
- a product backlog with no vision, no product goal, and not ordered in any sort of way.
- a division between the team, where folks largely consider themselves “the dev team, the product team, the QA team” rather than just “the team.”
- a lack of shared understanding with the work to be done
- ineffective refinements, and a focus to increase velocity instead of improving quality.
What about you?
These are just some examples I’ve seen within my organization.
I think when it comes to impediments that it’s important to look a bit deeper than the surface “symptom” or expression of discomfort, and look a bit deeper.
At a point Scrum, Kanban and so on can be thought of as diagnostic tools. They expose symptoms (impediments), however we want to dig deeper and expose the most likely root cause. If we don’t, then while we can treat the symptom, the underlying problem will return.
So the main impediments I tend to see are:
1. Lack of investment in leadership at every level
There’s a general lack of investment in non-technical skills, and yet we know individuals and interactions are more important than processes and tools. This is usually both within teams, and the wider leadership of the organsiation.
Core skills around conflict resolution, courageous conversations, effective communication, negotiation skills, problem solving techniques, facilitation and so on are a starting point.
We also have a lack of basic business understanding (finance, marketing, sales, compliance) and things like an understanding of organisational strategy, change and so on.
2. “Agile is for the little people”
Leadership groups are often still playing the same power-and-status hierarchy win-lose games when they are making decisions, rather than functioning as a team. That places their individual short-term goals at odds with the long-term benefit of the organsiation.
The main symptom of this tends to be a lack of a single clear list of organisational priorities, or leaders trying to work round or manipulate that list for their “pet” projects, and associated conflicting directives.
Does your leadership team set Sprint Goals or have regular Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives? Why Not?
3. Leadership Walking the talk.
At a point, while leadership may express terms like “psychological safety” and “empowerment”, they agree with these things right up to the point where it is their power they have to surrender, and they need to trust (and hence be vulnerable to) the decisions that teams are making. Until they have a transformative shift of perspective in their beliefs about work, people and productivity then performance will remain elusive.
TLDR; The root cause impediment I see in most organsiations tends to be they are stuck at the start or middle of the Hudson’s “culture ladder”; part of the Scrum Master’s accountabilities is to help with this systemic shift.