Focus On Impediments

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

The adoption of lean thinking or agile principles should not be approached as a project with an end, but rather as a journey of continuous improvement based on experimentation and developing problem-solving skills. And the concept of “impediments service” is a key component.

This article is the second in a series of excerpts from Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum (Addison-Wesley Professional, January 2010) by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde [ISBN 0321636406, Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.] For more information: www.informit.com/title/0321636406.

One of the pillars of lean thinking is continuous improvement — lean adoption is not a project with an end. Similarly, a group has never finished adopting Scrum — the framework implies inspect-and-adapt every iteration, without stop. Therefore, organization should not establish an agile change project; rather, they should build a permanent system for improvement. And rather than framing what managers do as managing the agile change project, they should experiment with framing what they do as impediments service.

In the latter case, in the lifelong agile or lean journey, the team members and Product Owner create an impediments backlog of their impediments — policies, structures, environment…

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