Halifax: Public Impediment List

April 3, 2014

As some of you know, I am a strong proponent of aggressively attacking the impediments.  It starts, I think, with a good public impediment list.

So, as examples, here are the impediments identified by the class in Halifax.

  1. Team is working on too many things
  2. No prioritized backlog
  3. Uninvolved PO
  4. Keeping everyone in the loop (not)
  5. Complexity
  6. Lack of management attentiveness
  7. Acting on retrospective improvements (not)
  8. PO not involved
  9. Lack of understanding
  10. Silo workers
  11. Lack of impediment list
  12. Lack of retrospective
  13. Increasing Tech Debt
  14. Not having vision from PO
  15. Managing people instead of work
  16. Lack of team spirit
  17. Managing interference
  18. Unmotivated
  19. Bottom down planning
  20. Too much useless chatter [from Mgmt, I think]
  21. Lack of early feedback
  22. No ending [to] project
  23. Not following process
  24. Conflicts [too much conflict]
  25. Keeping Top 20 impediments (not)
  26. Distributed team
  27. Lack of process
  28. Lack of management
  29. Communication (lack of)
  30. Too many cooks
  31. Product knowledge gap
  32. Scope creep
  33. Not defining DOD
  34. Lack Buy-in
  35. Lack of process for Development Tasks
  36. Technology group (IT) support infrastructure (not good)
  37. Testing Time
  38. Bug fixing time
  39. Not having all Scrum activities
  40. Management available (not)
  41. Lack of communication
  42. Poor planning
  43. No estimates (no velocity)

 

« « Peter Drucker on Knowledge Worker Productivity || Learning from the Toronto Scaling Workshop » »

Posted in: agile, impediments
Tagged:

3 thoughts on “Halifax: Public Impediment List”

  2. David Crowley

    Hi Joe,
    I’ve been looking around for a decent tool to help manage our impediments list. I have settled on Trello since we already use it and the team is familiar with it. The voting feature is particularly nice. I threw up our Halifax list as separate cards in Trello and asked the team to take 5-10 mins when it was good for them to quickly review and vote on the ones they thought impacted us. We will sort and prioritize when we sit down as a team to review and discuss.

    ↓
  3. jhlittle Post author

    David,
    Sounds good. Really happy!
    Also: I like the stickies on the wall. And a spreadsheet can be helpful. They each have their issues — sounds like your team is not collocated, so Trello is a good choice. Maybe the best of these 3.
    Next:
    First thing: Aggressively attack the top impediment.
    Second: Get better at #1.
    Third: Get them to give you better impediments. Ones that will lead to THAT team doubling its productivity (its velocity), in ways that it really believes it is twice as ‘productive’. This is NOT working twice as hard (that’s what they usually hear when you say ‘twice as productive’).
    Fourth: You want to soon start baking in a comparison of benefit and cost. At least a first rough guess.
    Fifth: Be sure to tell the team about the SM’s success at fixing the impediments. Or even his failures. At least they know. And they will appreciate. And they will give more (useful) impediments.
    Good job! Regards, Joe

    ↓

Leave a Reply