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“Scrum will highlight every deficiency and impediment that the enterprise has so the enterprise can fix them and change into [the best product development] organization [in its market].” Ken Schwaber
As teams and businesses adopt Scrum and Agile to their enterprise, they will encounter an entire host of bumps, roadblocks, obstacles and impediments to becoming an industry leader in their market. Unless the organization is already a market leader (which begs the question “why are you interested in Scrum?”), almost everything they did prior to the adoption of Scrum acts as a deterrent to becoming a market leader because, quoting Ken Schwaber again, “everything that was hard in waterfall…now has to be done every iteration and [that] is incredibly hard.”
All of the wasteful practices that are derived from, and support, the industrial mindset inhibit the fast flow of value to the customer. Each Sprint, participants are confronted by just how wasteful the mindset, and the practices, are on the Team and the business. This makes people feel uncomfortable. There are many reasons for this discomfort, but in order to become a market leader the participants will have to change many of the habits that brought them market success. If the enterprise does not attend to resolving these gaps, they eventually drag down the Scrum adoption and put the goal of being a market leader at risk.
In the old days, we used to call this list of barriers, hurdles, obstacles, snares, deterrents, blockers and impediments an Impediments Backlog. There were just two requirements for the Impediments Backlog: the impediments are written down and publicly available for anyone to review. Once we have a public list, then the impediments can be addressed, prioritized by business leaders and people can be held accountable if the items have been fixed (or not). Since we are using the term backlog to describe this list of obstacles, these reasons echo why the Product Backlog must also be publicly visible.
So what are some common failure modes around impediments?