Category Archives: impediments

Impediment List

I just got my copy of A Scrum Book – The Spirit of the Game.  By Sutherland, Coplien et al.  Awesome book. Recommended. See: https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Book-Spirit-Game/dp/1680506714/ One of my favorites is Pattern #40. Impediment List. You must read their pages about this pattern for yourself. But let me add a few things. Metaphorically, I view this […]

The Impediments List and how to use it

I just put together a video on “The Impediment List and how to use it.” You might enjoy. You can see it here:   Here’s the KeyNote in PDF. Impediments V3 Enjoy!

Stupid Impediment Tricks – 1

I wanted to review some “obvious” ideas about impediments. Here’s a starting blog post on that theme. No problem is the problem. A lot of teams and people want to have the idea that they are “as good as it gets,” and it may be true that they are very good. In the Lean community […]

What to fix first?

One could imagine many situations… But imagine this one.  Imagine that you are trying to start Scrum, or perhaps re-start it, or take it to a new level.  You have a few teams.  But you have some of the following impediments. The project or products are not well prioritized. You have too much work in […]

A different kind of Scaling problem

In the Lean Agile Open on April 28th, one of the sessions was on “scaling.” And it reminded me that people use the word scaling to mean quite different things.  And often I or we do not think about this.  But each of the different meanings of Scaling is important, at least in some sense.  […]

Question: Is Scrum all or none?

Kevin asked: (I paraphrase and greatly simplify his question, perhaps beyond his recognition)  ….. Do you have to do Scrum ‘all or none’? ANSWER: We get this question a lot, phrased in different ways.  Here is one answer. I consider it an Agile principle that people are free.  The idea started long before the Declaration […]

Question: Explaining Impediments to the Sprint Goal that Happen

I received this email with a question: Hi Joe, I wanted to follow up and let you know how much I enjoyed the Agile class and how much I’ve enjoyed implementing it at my office. The team has really seen the improvement with their own eyes, and they are getting more and more brought in […]

Executive Action Team

Jeff Sutherland has defined an Executive Action Team. This is similar to the Management Scrum idea that I discussed. You will also notice that Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn have described roughly similar ideas to what Jeff is describing. (I will look up later the names they gave to those teams.) Jeff Sutherland’s idea is […]

Question: Automate Testing!

Dear Joe, In the course you emphasized how important it is to do many things….seemingly from the start.  One was automated testing.  This will be very hard for us to at my company.  Were you really serious that we must have automated testing immediately?!?!? Thanks, Janet **** Dear Janet, [First, I must confess that I […]

Aggressively Attack the Impediments

We can look at impediments or continuous improvement many ways. In Scrum, we usually look at impediments as continuous improvement for one [Scrum] team at a time. Note: Of course, we can think of impediments for a scaled group of teams or for the agile adoption, and for other kinds of things. Not for today, […]