RE: Impediment Reporting
2004-09-30 23:44:58 GMT
When I don’t get a good response to a question, I find a completely different way of asking. So, if my 8-year-old daughter doesn’t respond to “What did you do at school today?” I will try “Who did you talk to at lunch today” or “What did you study in history today?” I suggest the same approach with the scrum teams. Try asking the question in different ways, “What could I do to help your team?” (assuming you want to know because you might be one to help them) or “I have some free time this week, I’d like to spend it helping. Is anything slowing you down?”
Additionally, my guess is that some of the impediments you have are either long-term or institutional type impediments (not the one-timers like “I need RAM for the build server”). Try getting at those with a “sprint retrospective.” Perhaps gathering all teams into one retrospective. I like to keep these lightweight and I only ask three questions (well sometimes a fourth):
--What should we start doing?
--What should we stop doing?
--What should we continue doing?
These are called, logically, start/stop/continue meetings. We look at what we want to start doing in our process (“We want to start doing more early testing.”) or what we want to stop (“I want to stop freezing the database design in mid-sprint.”)
If we get a healthy list the fourth question I ask is “which do we want to focus on in *this* sprint?” and we’ll narrow the list down so we make noticeable progress against a small set of items. This will probably bring up the bigger, longer-term impediments and you can systematically remove them.
Good luck,
--Mike Cohn
Author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development
From: Clinton Keith
[mailto:ckeith <at> sammystudios.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004
10:42 AM
To: scrumdevelopment <at> yahoogroups.com
Subject: [scrumdevelopment]
Impediment Reporting
I am seeking some advice on how to better coach Scrum teams to report impediments more frequently.
We are on our sixth Sprint since starting Scrum. We have seven Scrum teams up and running.
The problem is that we don’t have as much impediment
reporting as I feel we should. The impediments are definitely out there
and people are happy to privately complain about them, but we need all the
teams to see these impediments and either take ownership in solving them or to
pass them along to those that can. One idea is to ask each Scrum Master
to report their top four team impediments at the Scrum of Scrums, but this
seems to be a bit of a forced process on something that should be happening more
naturally. It seems that this probably boils down to the teams not quite
understanding the ownership/self-organization principles of Scrum.
Any advice from the more experienced Scrum Masters out there?
Thanks,
Clint
CSM
Sammy Studios.
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It would certainly aid the ScrumMaster in learning to deal with
certain types of impediments.
Mark
--- In scrumdevelopment <at> yahoogroups.com, "Mike Cohn" <mike <at> m...>
wrote:
> That's great. I feel sorry for anyone who takes their ScrumMaster
training
> from here by mistake: 
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