Three Tips for Removing Impediments the Agile Way

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

Impediments will occur on any project; agile projects are no exception to risks. Agile succeeds because you are more likely to see the problem before it becomes a disaster.

Two developers got the flu. Your tester has jury duty. The team can't figure out what the design should be for a specific feature and it's a week late. You have automated test technical debt. Your product owner can't make time to work with the team.

So then, has Murphy (1) arrived on your agile project? What can you do about the impediments? Yes, the simple answer is "remove them." That can be more difficult than it sounds. Here are three tips for removing those impediments…

1. Learn who can solve the impediments. What are the impediments? In one six-person team, the members realized during one week of their two-week iteration that three people would be out. Yes, they had two developers out with the flu and the tester on jury duty. Not what they planned.

First, they explained the problem to the product owner. The UX designer said, “We can’t finish anything this iteration. It will all be in progress if we decide to continue with what we thought we could do. As a team, we developed these options:

• We can work on writing small stories.
• We can use a kanban board to…

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