At ACE! 2019 I’m doing a mini-workshop where you can practice effective techniques for dealing with impediments.

Problem? What Problem? – Getting rid of impediments quickly and effectively

If your organization wants to become agile and lean, your teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively. In this game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they can hinder your team, and decide what can be done and who can take appropriate action by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices.

An agile way of working doesn’t guarantee that there will be no problems. Most probably there will be; working agile will make them surface. Agile teams need skills to deal with impediments to be effective and be able to deliver and satisfy the needs of their customers and stakeholders. Agile teams are self-organized, nobody will solve their problems for them. They can decide how they want to do their work. Having the authority to decide comes with a responsibility: you have to solve problems that the team is facing. You cannot rely on management to solve them for you. That may sound like a disadvantage, but it actually is an advantage since you are allowed to solve them in a way that is most suitable and effective for you.

The impediment game that we will play in this session will teach you the five steps for handling impediments effectively:

• recognizing impediments
• understanding how they are hindering the team
• find effective solutions to deal with them
• decide what to do and who can do it
• learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments

The steps suggest that they have to be done after each other, which is often preferred in most situations. But this is not a waterfall process.

Usually, the steps take little time, you can go through all steps within an hour (for instance by doing a retrospective) or in less time (e.g. doing the steps during your daily stand-up). If you are stuck in one step you can decide to proceed to the next one, but then be prepared to go back and repeat the steps once you have more information.

Want to attend ACE? Ask me for a discount code!

Increasing Agility with Retrospectives

On the 22nd of May, I’m giving a full day Master Class at ACE!: Learn to achieve agility through retrospectives. Ticket sales has started.