Impediment Removal Process

Recently I have written an article on Feature Refinement Process that helped one of my clients to understand what are the basics for starting the process.

After establishing base for the feature refinement process, we have started to look at how to address all the impediments that teams are raising. One of the benefit of Agile Transformation, and prerequisite at the same time, is transparency. Pains, inefficiencies, bad decisions, poor tooling, absence of licences, unclear agreements are starting to flash out as you start to make the system transparent. Identifying a problem is a first great step to improve. The question is how to deal with them and do not have feeling of despair from all of the issues that people starting to talk about.

So let’s look at Impediment Removal Process that can help your organisation consistently deal with road blockers on the way to success.

Visualize Impediments

The first step to deal with problems is to visualize them. Putting them in one place makes a good overview of the current situation, and also allows to prioritize what to focus on.

Simple Kanban board is a good start. And I really mean Simple, like in the example below, where you have only three statuses for impediments.

I have experience of working with impediments in over-complicated Kanban board, where we had more statuses: Analysis, Refinement, Broadcasting, Waiting, etc. At the end we have spent quite some time on discussing where impediment should be on the board, instead of focusing on how to resolve it. Another point, is that Board should be open for all in an organisation. And simpler it is, it is easier to understand.

Drivers

Visualising and sticking impediments on the board will not make magic of resolving them. You need someone who will look at them. And I call them drivers.

Here to mention the difference between Driver and Doer. It doesn’t mean that drivers will resolve the impediments on their own, rather it means that they:

• making sure that there is someone who is looking into impediment;
• checking progress and supporting doers with defining next steps in case they’ve stuck;
• escalating when there is a need.

Apart from looking after impediments, drivers are owning the process itself. Keeping an eye on the board, making sure that it is up to date, that impediments well described, each impediment has driver, thinking how to improve the process, etc.

Who might be good drivers in your organisation? Anyone who has passion for resolving road blockers, who is engaged in improving or in removing obstacles on teams’ way.

If you are working in Agile environment, then most likely you will find volunteers among Scrum Masters as causing removal of impediments is one of their purposes in team and organisation.

For example, in one of the companies, that worked in SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) such drivers were Release Train Engineers (aka Scrum Masters of Scrum Masters).

Operational Rhythm

Great, we have visualised impediments, we have drivers to keep an eye on them and look after the overall process. What is next?

The next thing is to let drivers decide on how often they are going to meet and look at Impediments Board. It doesn’t mean that the work on removing impediments is done on these meetings. Working on impediments in most cases is time and energy consuming activity, but the relief and happiness you get when road blocker is removed is something to strive for. Be prepared that resolution of some impediments may take more than an year. See it as a great training for your patience :).

I had an experience of operational rhythm, where we looked at impediments twice a week. It took us 10 minutes to check the progress, share news, look at new ones, offer help and align on the next steps.

Template for Impediment

Unless there is an agreement on how impediment should be described, there is a risk that your board will be flooded with impediments that are hard to understand or that don’t look like impediments at all.

To minimize this risk, you can wrap agreements into template. Template should be close to or on the board, so it can be easily found when someone would like to create a new impediment.

The most important thing I see in description is expressing cost or price of having this impediment. And it should be expressed in the currency that all can understand. Usually this is money or time.

For example, you have slow login into the system every morning. You would like to reduce it from 5 minutes to 1 minute. Let’s say you have 500 employees, and average salary of 5K$/month. You can easily calculate the cost of this impediment: 4 minutes * 500 employees * 20 working days in a month = 667 hours in a month. Taking 160 hours/month for an employee, you lose around 4 employees productivity just due to waiting time to login into the system. Or 20K$ in a month.

Now you can understand if it is worth to resolve this impediment. It might be that you need to pay 25K$ in a month to have more powerful machines in order to reduce login time to 1 minute. Then you can also count the impact on happiness of employees.

Once we have tried Improvement Kata approach as template for impediment. It has benefits of giving frame for describing the current and target conditions, the value of resolving, what are the obstacles and what are the experiments to conduct in order to move further.

Not an Escalation Board

I have seen Impediments Boards that quickly transformed to Escalation Board. This happens when issuer raises impediment on the board and expects that someone in management will take care about it. Such behaviour doesn’t promote ownership for resolving the problems and making management as a bottleneck in organisation.

Owning resolution of the impediment can be done by anyone in the organisation. And here Drivers are the ones that help out with facilitating the progress.

Sure, some impediments should be and will be escalated, but it is not the only purpose of the Board. The main purpose is a transparency of the inefficiencies in the system, and visualization of the progress on removing them.

It is important to work with stakeholders and sponsors, so they understand the value of Impediment Removal Process. They should support and be engaged in resolution of escalated impediments, that cannot be resolved without their involvement.

These 5 aspects will help you to start a good Impediment Removal Process in the organisation. And as with any change, there is no final destination, it is a journey, which with time and right mindset can only be better.