Public Impediments – Charlotte March 2014

We are a strong advocate of a public impediment list.  Why?  There are many reasons, but my top 3 are:

• Team members know when to tell and when not to tell the ScrumMaster about a new impediment
• Assuming some attempt at prioritization has been made, the Team knows when to give the SM feedback about the priorities (‘mine is more important’ is the simple version…).
• Everyone knows what the SM is working on now or next.

Of course, the real reason is to enable the best improvements to be made sooner.  But that is too obvious.

The group came up with the following impediments.

1. People issues
2. Distractions (multitasking)
3. Lack of resources
4. Arbitrary long time estimates
5. Lack of feedback
6. Black box projects
7. Dishonesty
8. Management constraints
9. Team too big or too small
10. No clear roles
11. No funding
12. Unrealistic expectations, time or $
13. Team improperly formed
14. Too many impediments (main cause of failure)
15. Inexperience (wrong skills)
16. EGO
17. Poor listening
18. Incohesiveness
19. (lack of) localization support
20. No direction
21. Stubborn people not aligned with Team
22. Budgeting not clear
23. Shareholders having diverse interests
24. Lack leadership
25. Teams not talking to associated teams
26. Lack of resources dedicated to Team
27. People turnover
28. Performance not measured – no data
29. Real product owner is not identified
30. No clear process / product owner
31. Cross-purposed stakeholders
32. Lack of stakeholder buy-in / support
33. Upstream / downstream dependencies

We hope this list helps your team get more creative about the impediments.

 

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