When considering blockers and impediments it might be useful to start from considering a perfect, hypothetical, Agile, organisational system that doesn’t have any.
Imagine, if you will, a values-driven system of work where customer needs and strategic vision are clear, communicated, and understood. These translate magically into a single prioritised list of problems to solve and opportunities to leverage. Due to the perfect architecture, aligned supplier ecosystem, dedicated customers, free-flowing finance, and team structure the highest priority work is always in-flow, free from constraints and dependencies. Testing and releasing is automated and fresh bug-free code flows to delighted customers like melting butter slipping off a fresh hot pancake.
De-licious!
Then, when we wake up, we can start to bring in all the “little things” that we might notice creeping into our slightly inconvenient reality, things that might interrupt that perfect buttery flow.
These might be Impediments or Blockers. An impediment is anything that reduces or slows the flow of value to customers while blockers stop it for a period and of course these can occur at any level of the pancake stack or at any stage of our idea-to-pancake delivery process.
Often we notice these when a team is trying to deliver value to their customer. Taking this back to Agile teams, here are some ways in which we might become blocked or impeded:
- Lack of business / customer understanding to effectively complete the PBI
- Lack of technical knowledge / ability to deliver the PBI
- Lack of access to a certain platform required to deliver a PBI
- Delivering something that no-one wants
- Misalignment on strategic direction
- Development pipeline blocked by external, avoidable factors
- Different ways of working to related teams
- Confusion over roles or collaboration methods within the team / Other team dynamics issues
- Contractual relationships that are not aligned to agile ways of working
- “Urgent” work taking over
- Lots of meetings slowing or blocking progress
- Process impediments or blockers which could be related to bureaucracy or technical debt
However, simply because an impediment or blocker manifests at the level of the team, or any other level, it does not mean that they originate there or are best addressed there.
When addressing blockers we can look at this in a number of ways. First there is the tactical fix where we address the issue directly and move on, this often results in a similar issue recurring at a later date. Alternatively, we might look at underlying causes to stem the flow of a certain type of blocking issue. Finally, we might look systemically at what dynamics were behind the underlying causes, this often involves working at the level of culture or core beliefs of an individual or organisation.
To make this a little more concrete, here are some examples…
Tactical
If we encounter a lack of specific knowledge within a delivery team, the tactical element that we might address is getting that knowledge into the team. This could be educating someone on the team, bringing someone with the knowledge into the team, or negotiating a different way of working with people outside the team, and you would of course be able to solve the problem in a variety of ways depending on your contexts.
Underlying Causes
If we want to look at the underlying cause of the same issue, we might consider how we are creating teams and whether they should contain a broader mix of knowledge or skills, we might consider starting projects differently with clearer contracts for how we want to collaborate with others, or maybe we will tweak our process and incorporate something like a “Definition of Ready” or a gate to pass before we start work on something.
Systemic
Sometimes, even when we think we have looked at the underlying causes, we can still stay stuck in a pattern that we can’t seem to disentangle. This might be an unresolved systemic issue. Acquisitions, mergers, and changing ways of working often create such dynamics.
Taking a systemic perspective, we might explore where this pattern of behaviour originated, and whether this feels like an older pattern. Often patterns in systems are rooted in difficult historic experiences of the organisation. For example, maybe at some point previously teams would release quickly with fewer checks and balances, and this resulted in a costly mistake. Patterns might then perpetuate for years where delivery of value is paused or blocked unconsciously, until we work at the level of a systemic resolution. It is as if we are carrying forward a solution to a painful situation that has long since ceased to exist.
All of these avenues are in fact valid and can be progressed in parallel. The tactical fix is often the quickest to implement and also the most likely to be an urgent, short-term fix. Working through the layers, if someone has greater systemic leverage and is in a more influential and usually senior position then the greater the likelihood that they will be able to work on these levels of the underlying causes or culture of the system. When we detangle the senior layer then the team layers often resolve themselves.
At times when communication pathways are not conducive to systemic resolutions, we might find teams using techniques like Agile frameworks to essentially patch-fix organisational dynamics. It should be noted that while these non-systemic fixes feel good, and more accessible in the short-term, they are usually only temporary and more expensive long-term than really working at the level of the system. We often notice that they are temporary when a sponsoring leader moves on and old patterns re-emerge; their expense often becomes evident with the additional roles and processes that they require to keep them in place.
As well as the different levels at which these issues can be addressed, we can also broadly categorise our blockers and impediments. Looking at the examples listed previously you might notice that they can broadly fit into the following categories, although you might prefer different or additional categories:
- Organisational – Ways of working, strategic mis-alignment, siloed thinking, values-confusion
- Technical – Software, hardware, environmental
- Educational – Skills, business or technical domain knowledge, lack of customer-centricity
- Process – Bureaucracy, overly manual processes, spreadsheets!
With these categories or the ones that appeal to you, and the different ways of addressing them you might like to create a grid to help you investigate areas that you might not usually consider. This is something that could be done during a Refinement or Review session. This way, we can shine a light on our blind spots, force ourselves to listen to the voices that we might not usually hear from our deaf-spots, give a voice to the unspoken truths from our dumb-spots and maybe take small steps back towards the land where our pancakes, our bacon and the maple syrup all harmoniously arrive at the same time.