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.
Benefits for attendees:
recognize impediments and understand how they can hinder the team
deploy agile and lean practices to deal with them
learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments
Come to play the impediment game!
