Impediments And Your Agile Team’S Progress: Where To Draw The Line

Defining Impediments

An impediment is any obstacle that prevents an agile team from making progress on their sprint goals and delivering working software. Impediments can take many forms including:

• Missing or inadequate resources (e.g. people, infrastructure, information)
• Organizational constraints such as policies or processes
• External dependencies from other teams or vendors
• Technical challenges and bugs
• Scope creep and changing requirements

Regardless of their source, impediments slow velocity, reduce productivity, decrease morale, and threaten the delivery of value. As such, it is critical agile teams identify, track, and resolve impediments as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Categorizing Impediments by Impact and Urgency

Not all impediments are created equal. The extent to which an impediment prevents progress varies, as does the urgency needed to address it. Teams can categorize impediments based on their potential impact and immediacy of attention required:

Critical Impediments

Critical impediments bring progress to a halt. They block all work in a given area and require immediate resolution within hours or days in order to meet sprint goals.

Major Impediments

While not showstoppers, major impediments greatly slow progress in a general area. They can cause teams to miss sprint commitments if not removed within the sprint timeframe.

Minor Impediments

Minor impediments somewhat reduce team productivity and velocity. They may only affect narrow aspects of the work or specific team members. While annoying, they can typically be addressed at a later time without severely compromising delivery commitments.

Knowing When to Address Different Types of Impediments

When facing impediments, agile teams must balance priorities – fixing urgent roadblocks yet still striving towards sprint goals and long-term progress. Depending on the type of impediment, teams have some options:

Critical Showstopper Impediments

Critical impediments should be escalated and worked immediately as the top priority. All hands may be put on deck in a crisis mode sprint to resolve or work around the blocker. If it cannot be addressed without compromising the sprint, teams may abort the sprint and replan future sprints after addressing the issue.

Major Impediments

For major impediments slowing but not fully blocking work, teams should schedule resolution within the current or next sprint. Certain less critical tasks may be descoped from the sprint backlog if needed to free up capacity. Tactics like putting additional team members on the impediment, seeking help from specialists, or working overtime can be utilized.

Minor Impediments

Minor impediments causing annoyance but not major delays can be recorded and queued in the product backlog or impediment backlog to address later. No immediate action needs to be taken within the sprint, although tracking is important to ensure future consideration.

Setting Priorities: Weighing Progress vs Perfectionism

A critical aspect of managing impediments is deciding whether to push forward making progress or pause to resolve underlying issues. Teams walk a tightrope balancing velocity versus perfectionism.

On the one hand teams want to blast through roadblocks charging full steam ahead. But impediments sometimes stem from technical debt, architectural weaknesses, or knowledge gaps – requiring reflection rather than reaction. Pushing ahead without properly addressing the root cause risks compromising quality and incurring greater costs over the long-term.

As a basic guideline, critical and major impediments should be addressed immediately as they obstruct the path forward. But minor impediments may only slow theoretical velocity rather than actual value delivery, so charging ahead should not be ruled out.

Each situation warrants a cost-benefit analysis weighing:

• Efforts required to resolve the impediment
• Likelihood the issue will create problems down the line if ignored
• Potential velocity increases by moving ahead and bypassing

The analysis can help teams determine optimal strategies that balance pragmatism versus perfection given constraints and objectives.

Maintaining Team Morale and Communication

A team’s ability to push through impediments depends tremendously on morale. When roadblocks arise, frustration and finger-pointing often follow. This comes with direct consequences:

• Loss of trust between team members and with stakeholders
• Lack of psychological safety preventing constructive debates about problems
• Infighting rather than solidarity when confronting obstacles

To promote morale, agile teams must nurture transparency, accountability, and mission-focus when tackling impediments:

Frequent Status Communications

Team members should convey blockers, efforts to resolve them, and their impacts through daily standups, sprint reviews/retrospectives, and informal discussions. Bringing such issues into the open and regularly talking about them helps build shared consciousness.

Blameless Postmortems

Rather than accusing certain people when things go wrong, teams should perform blameless postmortems. These constructive meetings aim to simply understand why impediments emerged and how to address them without ascribing fault.

Renewed Focus on Goals

If progress stalls, the team should realign on shared objectives and how each member contributes. This avoids a downward morale spiral where individuals only see how impediments affect their own productivity.

By emphasizing the team’s overall mission and priorities, the group can rally together around finding creative solutions – turning roadblocks into opportunities for learning, innovation, and strengthening relationships.

Creating Escalation Pathways and Accountability

Persistent impediments often require help from outside the team. Organizations should create escalation pathways so team know who to go to depending on the impediment source and area affected. Potential escalation routes include:

• Technical Architects: Guidance resolving complex technical impediments
• Project Management Office: Support removing dependencies with other projects/teams
• Engineering Leadership: Attention and resources addressing talent/skill deficits
• Executive Sponsors: Highlight policy/process changes needed from senior leadership

Escalation pathways provide a channel enabling agile teams to unblock themselves. But organizations should also set expectations that teams first exhaust impediment resolution tactics within their sphere of influence before escalating. Setting these accountable escalation boundaries encourages teams to own and be empowered solving their own problems.

Tracking Impediments and Progress Over Time

Data drives decisions – and impediment management is no exception. Quantitatively tracking impediments lets teams assess root cause patterns, monitor resolution rates, and correlate impediments with reduced velocity:

Impediment Backlogs

Teams can maintain a backlog capturing all current impediments, persons responsible, dates raised/resolved, priority, and which sprint commitments the impediment affects. These provide quantitative visibility allowing fact-based rather than emotion-driven discussions.

Retrospective Metrics

Metric #1: Impediments open at sprint end versus those closed during the sprint

Metric #2: Average days impediments remain open

Trends in these two metrics over multiple retrospectives highlight whether the team’s impediment resolution capability is improving over time.

Velocity Metrics

Metric #3: Frequency of lowered velocity and associated open impediments

Correlating lowered velocity with open impediments reveals pain points recurringly slowing the team. Addressing the most frequent offenders pays dividends.

Leveraging impediment data provides vital insights determining how well teams identify and overcome obstacles in their path. When backed by numbers not just gut feel, organizations can implement systemic processes promoting continued flow.