Impediment Workbook

Karen Greaves and Samantha Laing

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/impediments

This version was published on 2013-10-02

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing
process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools
and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build
traction once you do.

©2013 Growing Agile

Contents

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What are impediments? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Noticing impediments? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Other Places To Look . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Two Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Problem Solving Tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Listen to your Instincts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Sharpening your pencil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

About Growing Agile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Growing Agile Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

About the Authors

Sam Laing (left) and Karen Greaves (right)

We have worked in software our whole lives. With Type A personalities and a strong work ethic,
we have both done our share of overtime on death march projects. Eventually we knew we had to
find another way. Agile brought us together when we worked at a company trying to do Scrum
for the first time.
In 2012, we took the plunge and started our own business, Growing Agile¹. Since then we have
been doing the work that we are passionate about. Best of all we have an impact on other people’s
lives.
If we have one principle at Growing Agile it is continuous experimentation. We love trying new
things and don’t let fear of failure get in the way. This book is a workbook to accompany our first
online video course on impediments. We hope you enjoy it, and use it to grow agile. As always,
we love feedback, so don’t hesitate to send us your thoughts via email info@growingagile.co.za
or Twitter @GrowingAgile.

¹http://growingagile.co.za
Introduction
Welcome to the Growing Agile Impediments Workbook. This workbook is intended to ac-
company our Impediments training course. It contains pages to complete all of the exercises
mentioned in the course. We recommend printing this workbook before you begin watching the
course.
The online video course can be found at Udemy:
https://www.udemy.com/growing-agile-impediments²
The online course is one module from our very popular Advanced ScrumMaster course. If you
enjoy it and get value, please let us know so that we can convert our entire course to video.

• email: info@growingagile.co.za
• twitter: @growingagile
• website: www.growingagile.co.za

²https://www.udemy.com/growing-agile-impediments
What are impediments?
Definition
An impediment is anything that prevents your team from going as fast as possible.

Exercise
Write down 10 things that come to mind when you think about impediments.
Noticing impediments?

Exercise
Watch the skit and see how many of the impediments words you notice. Write down
the potential impediment related to each word.
Noticing impediments? 4
Other Places To Look

Exercise
Walk around your team’s area, look at the task boards, definition of done, or other
items you see displayed. Write down at least 3 potential impediments related to your
team’s policies and assumptions.
Two Questions
4th Question
How confident are you that we will make our sprint commitment?

Faster Question
How can we go faster?

Exercise
Pick one of the questions above and ask your team this question. Write down any
impediments you noticed based on what they said.
Problem Solving Tree

Exercise
Pick one of the more difficult impediments that you have written down in this
workbook. Create a problem solving tree for this impediment. Try come up with at
least 5 leaf nodes (things you can do immediately) to address the impediment.
Listen to your Instincts
… if something irritates you, fix it.
The majority of us always have something to moan about. We don’t even notice it really; it seems
to have become a part of our culture to complain. Do you disagree? Listen carefully the next time
you have coffee with someone or bump into them in the passage. Does our culture encourage
moaning or fixing?
In agile we strive for continuous improvement. That means not just accepting the status quo,
but challenging it and changing things that are impediments. This is counter to our complaining
culture. We need to change our mindset from moaning, to fixing. So if you are going to get this
right at work, how about trying an experiment in your personal life first.
Think about something that is annoying you. How long have you been moaning about it? Can
you imagine a life without it? Would it be better? In my day-to-day life I can quickly come up
with : traffic, bank queues, broken coffee machine, price of petrol …
Can’t come up with anything? If something has been an annoyance for a while we sometimes
don’t notice it anymore - it becomes just how life is. Try noting every annoyance or time waste
you have for a week, try to see patterns.
Figure out what really irritates you about it. Use the 5 Whys to get to the root cause, because
that’s where real improvement lies.
Not really sure if this thing needs fixing? Another trick is to avoid that thing for a week; does it
improve your happiness? If so, then it needs fixing.
All these annoyances are impediments to your functioning and to your happiness.
Notice how this irritation impacts you. In your work life think of what happens to your happy
state of mind when the following occurs: broken build, critical bug, overtime, broken coffee
machine (yes, I love my coffee!).
Think about whether you can fix this or not. If yes, what are you waiting for? If no, see if there
is something you can do to improve on it. Try the problem solving tree technique (look for
upcoming blog post!). Does it waste time? How much? Use this to justify the cost of fixing it.
Here are 2 examples of what I’ve done:
Bank Queues - Get internet banking and avoid queues. Sometimes you have no choice but to go
into the bank though. I bought a kindle and catch up on reading whilst in the queue.
Traffic - Wake up earlier, drive to gym near work and go to gym before work. I also bought some
books on audio that I wanted to read and listened to them whilst driving - this actually made
me look forward to the drive home in traffic!
What are you going to improve today? This week?
Sharpening your pencil
or shaving yaks?
I’m writing this post in Word, because my internet connection is down. After spending the last
hour trying to restart routers and connect to different internet providers, I realised I could achieve
my task of writing a blog post in Word without access to the internet. How ironic that today’s
post was going to be on yak shaving. It’s an awesome reminder that despite our best efforts to
stay focused, and be as effective and efficient as possible we often end up shaving yaks without
even realizing it.

If you aren’t familiar with “Yak Shaving”, check out this definition from wikipedia³:
yak shaving

• Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate diffi-
culties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
• The actually useless activity you do that appears important when you are consciously or
unconsciously procrastinating about a larger problem.

Last month while creating the SUGSA newsletter we became aware that the task was not as
straight forward as it could have been. We decided to keep going and just make a few notes.
Here’s a diagram of what happened.
³http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
Sharpening your pencil 10

Wow, that seems complicated for a fairly simple task!

Look at all the stuff on the right. None of it is core to the task. Some of it is necessary, but doing
Sharpening your pencil 11

it in the middle of the task rather than getting it before hand, required context switching.
Let’s look at how we could have done better in this simple example.

• With better planning we could have identified the prerequisites (images and eventbrite)
earlier. We could then have done these tasks first so that when we started the newsletter
we had everything we needed on hand.
• The app store diversion is a great example of an impediment. With some thinking we could
have identified the need for Pixelmator early and our ScrumMaster (if we had one) could
have solved that problem for us

Agile teams are always looking to get better, faster, more effective, more focused, and eliminate
impediments. The worst thing about yak shaving is that you don’t even realize you are doing it
half the time.
Start with noticing when you are yak shaving.
For one day (or even 1 hour), keep a simple log of what you are doing, then look at what is
core to the task and what required context switching. For each of those, look at how you might
prevent those things from cropping up again. Is there a general impediment to solve, are there
prerequisites to identify early?
Removing any of these diversions will reduce context switching and improve your focus on
getting the task at hand done.
Sharpen your pencil by getting better at staying focused, rather than shaving yaks.
About Growing Agile

At Growing Agile we help companies create great teams that build exceptional software. We are
agile coaches passionate about helping you get the results you are looking for.
Here are examples of how we’ve helped our clients:
We have helped teams combine Kanban and Scrum effectively to manage both production
support and new feature development in a sustainable and predictable way.
Our agile kickstart has helped software companies adopt Scrum and transform their teams.
They are now more focused, enthusiastic, and delivering quality software regularly.
We have coached ScrumMasters to better understand their role. Their teams are now more
effective, through better facilitation, visibility of impediments, and team ownership.
If you enjoyed our online course, you will love our interactive training and coaching. We deliver
private courses throughout South Africa for companies looking to train whole teams. We coach
teams getting started with Scrum, as well as those who’ve been doing it for years looking to get
to the next level.
Find out more about us at www.growingagile.co.za⁴.
⁴http://www.growingagile.co.za
Growing Agile Books
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Training Scrum

Part of the ScrumMaster role is to ensure that everyone on their team is educated about Scrum
and to evangelise Scrum to their organisation. Over the past few years we have come across
many ScrumMasters who have great intentions of running training but then get bogged down
in the planning and preparation and don’t ever get round to actually doing it.
This book is a collection of all of our materials. It will help you plan and deliver interactive,
fun Scrum training for anything from a short workshop on a particular topic to a full two-day
course. If you buy the book you will also get access to our slides, participant workbook, exercise
handouts and training plans.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Training Scrum is available on Leanpub⁵

Collaboration Games

Over the years we have played various games with individuals and teams to illustrate the value of
collaboration. The games are fun and non-threatening and allow for great learning experiences.
Many people have AHA moments when playing games.
Collaboration Games is available for free on Leanpub⁶

⁵https://leanpub.com/TrainingScrum
⁶https://leanpub.com/CollaborationGamesToolbox