I was in one of our Moose Herd sessions the other day and one of the Moose (or is it Meese) brought up a scenario around impediments. The topic was—how to encourage (inspire, make) the team take ownership of resolving their impediments.
The question elicited a wonderful Herd discussion that felt like it helped the questioner. But as it went on, I began to remember that I’d historically formed a view of 4-Types of Impediments that I hadn’t thought about in a long time or articulated. Thus, this post.
4-Types of Agile Impediments
The first thing is that there might be more than four that some of you can come up with. These are just some that have helped me decide how to describe and act on them uniquely. I like drilling down into different types because it adds contextual flavor to handling the wide variety of challenges we aggregate into the word impediment.
1 - Team Impediments
I think the Scrum Guide refers to these as impediments the Scrum Master should be helping their teams resolve. They are within the span of control of the team and can usually be “struck down” quickly and easily. Or relatively easily.
