 Thank you very much for coming today. This is impediment hunting. And just to tell you a little bit about myself, I'm a scrum master, sometimes agile coach. And I have a lot of different interests. I have a lot of different things that fascinate me. I'm into this impediments thing, of course. I'm also fascinated by complexity and how teams work together. I have a fondness for beer, science fiction, agile, software, leadership, so on and so forth. And if you're not tech-oriented, we can also talk in pictures. Really, it's the same thing. Teams, beer, humor, sci-fi, it's all the same. So with that, I'd like to go ahead and move on. The first question and what I'm here today to tell you is a bit of a story. And it's about my own struggle with impediments. Impediments have been something that actually have been, for me, a very elusive little creature. And so, all too often, with the teams that I've worked with, we all go to our daily stand-up. And in the daily stand-up, we go around, we answer the three questions. What do we do yesterday? What are we going to do today? And no impediments. And around we go. What do we do yesterday? What do we do today? No impediments. What do we do yesterday? What do we do today? No impediments. Can you go around the circle? No impediments. And frankly, nobody gives it a whole lot of thought. And I think, oftentimes, it's really an afterthought. It's something that we don't treat too seriously. And when I watch other teams with especially good scrum masters from time to time, I watch them. And they're catching impediments. They're seeing impediments that I'm not seeing. So I started to obsess a little bit on this impediment thing. I had a professor in college who used to say that we're often attracted to the things that were worse at. In his case, it was memory. So with that in mind, I started on a little bit of a journey to search and find impediments. What are impediments? Maybe that's the first thing I need to figure out is what is an impediment? Is it a special kind of mint? Is this an impediment? Perhaps this. Another impediment. What I was learning along the way is I was googling was that the internet is a boundless source of impediments. Yes. There are impediments everywhere out there. So it wasn't a bad place to get started. And I've tried to be helpful here and point out the impediments for the impediment blind amongst us. So with that in mind, I think we all have some intuitive understanding of what an impediment is. This thing that blocks our progress, the thing that's slowing us down, this thing that's getting in our way. And what I'd like to do is have you all join me on this journey. And so right now what I'd like us all to do is take a few minutes on a handy sheet of paper here on the back of your program. Write down just a quick list. We're going to call this our baseline of the impediments that you've encountered today. Was there enough coffee in the lobby? Were there no donuts left at the donut table? I want to hear about all your impediments. So let's just take just a minute here. I'll set aside 60 seconds. And let's just jot down a quick list of our own personal impediments. I see some people scribbling furiously. So could have been a bad morning. Who had, I don't know, three impediments? So we have sort of a starting number of impediments to work with. And what I'd like to do is I'm going to, what I'm going to try and do here is take you through a list of different ways of recognizing impediments, finding impediments, and listening impediments. And hopefully throughout the course of this presentation you will find techniques that are useful to you to help expand that list. So hopefully at the end of this presentation you're going to have a list that's much longer than the one you started the presentation with. So let's continue. One of the first things that I started to do when I started this obsession with impediments was think, well, as I listed them out and I just started making a list every day and these were just Tom's impediments, you know, or the team's impediments. I started to see a few patterns. Patterns were emerging in the impediments. These things that were coming up that were blocking the team seemed to fit into some categories. And there were categories like incomplete work over and over again. I was coming across stuff that wasn't quite done yet, okay, things that weren't finished. Missing information. I always run a little bit of a risk with this slide, but I'm sorry, that says missing information like nobody's business. And that's a common theme for me and oftentimes the teams I'm working with. Missing parts, important missing parts, missing pieces, missing components, missing documentation, repeated work, rework, waiting. This one's an awful lot. Everywhere from my commute in the morning on the freeway to waiting for other teams to deliver pieces for my team, that sort of thing all the time. Missing dependencies, a lack of time. Just flat out not enough time to do what I committed to do. Interruptions. This one gets me a lot. Running around dealing with two teams, three teams, four teams. I'm all of a sudden interrupt driven and I don't get anything done. Defects. Anybody want that sticker? Yeah, I thought so, yeah. Eurocracy. Eurocracy. Miss communication. Yeah. Decisions that don't get made. Those can be impediments. Decisions that do get made. Yeah, so the question here is, as I was doing this, as I was playing this game of starting to categorize these impediments that I was seeing over and over again, I realized that I had a set of patterns, really. These patterns I could use and I could run down my category list. I could run down my category list and say to myself, well, I don't see any impediments today, let me check. Did I have to repeat anything? Oh yeah, yeah, okay. Was there anything missing? Were there any defects? All of those things. So it was Tom's handy checklist of things that I should be, of categories I should be reviewing to help me remind myself of what impediments are out there. If I didn't have that checklist, it was very likely I was gonna forget to look at those things. So why don't we take just a minute and see if we can't add a few more impediments using some of these categories to our baseline list. So can we do that exercise one more time and take any one of these? You could even have your own. They're probably unique to every person and every team and it would be interesting to collect these over time. But let's go ahead and add a few more impediments and see if using these categories, we can't add a few more to the list that we have. So let's start right now. I see a few more folks adding stuff. Some folks are looking at those categories, I think thinking, I don't know if that applies to me. Alrighty. How many folks got a few more out of that? Okay, wow, okay. Anyone up to 10 yet? Okay, cool. It's a gold mine. Kids are a gold mine. Yeah, yeah. Just a note to the wary. Categorizing family members as impediments can be a hazard to your health. Just, you know, yeah. The minute I told my wife she was an impediment, woo. Yeah, so, yeah, yeah. So, watch out for that one. Yeah. So, I started thinking of this impediment thing for me as kind of a disease, an affliction, okay? Because I really was just not picking up on them. And frankly, I know I'm not alone. I know there are a lot of scrum masters out there, a lot of teams out there that have a hard time even recognizing them. Sometimes they just seem to fly right by. You don't hear them. You're impediment death. So I came up with a term for it. I call it impedimentia, okay? And this is this inability to recognize impediments. We're just kind of crawling through life, just marching right over those impediments without really remarking on the fact that they're there. And I thought, what is this? What's going on? Why am I having such a hard time with these things? And here's an example I thought of. One is I do a little riflery. And when I'm shooting at a target, and I hand the target to you and I say, there we go. How am I doing? What's the answer? Right. Well, it's kind of grouped together. You're looking all right, but what are you shooting at, Tom? So that seemed to me, at least metaphorically speaking, to be pretty important here. If you're gonna identify what you're shooting for, you gotta have that context. The context matters, okay? And so if I don't have a target, if I don't have a plan, if I don't have a goal, then it's really hard to tell where the impediments are. Another thing that might be coming into play here is perspective. Sometimes our perspective may make it difficult for us to see these things. And this is a classic visual illusion. Some people see an old crone. Some people see a young, beautiful lady. How many folks see the old crone? And the young, beautiful lady? Uh-huh. How many people can switch? Nice, nice. And so it occurred to me that maybe it's my perspective, that maybe my role that I'm playing on the team, maybe how I'm viewing the work that the team is doing is affecting how I see impediments and which impediments I see and take seriously. Sometimes as a project manager, I find myself not recognizing, I think the coding impediments, taking those quite as seriously as I might say a process impediment or sort of a meta impediment, okay? And so I wonder if it's a perception issue, is that all it is? Now maybe another thing that comes into play, and I know this happens, is that I'm kind of like that, the metaphorical frog in the pot of hot water, you start turning up the heat and the frog just doesn't hop out because it's just getting warmer, and then pretty soon you got cooked frog, right? Maybe I'm fitting in. Maybe what I'm doing is not objecting as things kind of get gradually, gradually, gradually worse. Maybe it's just sneaking up on me and so I'm getting acclimated to these impediments. And as I get acclimated to dealing with these impediments, I stop taking them seriously. They're just part of my daily work and on I go with my job, okay? And I suspect, I suspect that that's the case for an awful lot of us. We get used to it. It's just the way things are. Or it could be complacency. Maybe I'm just lazy, okay? Maybe I'm just not willing to do the hard work. Sometimes I'm not, to be honest. Sometimes I'm going around and I've got enough to deal with today without asking for a whole bunch of impediments to pile onto my plate. I mean, honestly, it's asking for extra work every time I open my mouth and ask for impediments. And I have to realize that sometimes I'm just being plain ignorant. So what are some things we can do to fight those influences? To fight those perceptions? Well, I have a bit of a story. I was on a trip recently. And on this trip, I was driving down the Columbia Gorge, beautiful Columbia Gorge. And I'm going, as I'm going on this trip, I'm doing that usual thing that I think a lot of us do when we go on trips, which is I'm running through the silent inventory in my head of like, did I bring my socks? Did I get the underwear? Did I get the pants? You know, yada, yada, yada. Going down that list, looking for the thing I forgot. Knowing full well, I forgot something really important. And as that critic in my head was talking to me, going through, going, you know, you screwed up your someplace, buddy. Something here's not right. All of a sudden, maybe it was because I was driving. Maybe it's because I was in the Zen state, but I realized he was there. I was like, holy cats. I've got this guy in my head who's constantly pointing out problems. Who's constantly pointing out errors. Where did this guy come from? Okay. And at first I was like, oh, this isn't any good. But then I thought about it some more. I'm like, he could be useful. He could be real handy this critic. I mean, sometimes he drives me to neurosis. Okay, let's get that straight. Let's get that out right up front. But sometimes he can be real handy this critic. The guy who's pointing out all the things that I'm doing wrong, because he's an expert at identifying impediments. He is an expert at finding things that are bothering me. I call him my homunculus. Okay, sort of a classical notion. Homunculi are used for various incendiary things in classical literature. Everything from the little man in your head who controls what you're doing to sperm to all sorts of fun things. And so that's who I have. I have my little homunculus. And he's very, very good. He's that critic, that voice in the back of your head who's saying, no, no, no, that's not right. Okay, and I can take advantage of that guy. And so can you. And what he is basically being is a perfectionist, okay? Basically it's that perfectionist that we want to cultivate a little bit. I think all too often we get into a place of accommodation, a place of, this is how it always works. This is just how it is, and we're accepting. And as we start into that accepting, we're losing the value of that perfectionist. We're ignoring that perfectionist. That perfectionist is the guy who's gonna help us identify those impediments. Okay, and so we need to keep that in mind. And it's also very important for driving innovation. Now, as I've been doing some reading, I found others who basically were using this notion of perfection as part of their improvement effort. So Matthew May in The Elegant Solution puts it as not asking the question, what can we improve? What can we make better? That sort of question. It's much more of what's blocking perfection, okay? It's much more focused on what's in the way of being absolutely perfect. And I started to doodle this out. I started writing out, well, what's wrong with me? Why am I, you know, how am I perceiving this thing? And I thought, well, sometimes I look at things with an empty head. Sometimes I look at things and I'm not really making much of a comparison. It's an apple. I see the apple. What I need to have is sort of that idea of what perfection looks like. I need to be holding that in mind. I need to have some goal of what the perfect project would look like, of what the perfect day would look like, of what the perfect cup of coffee would taste like. Okay, if I have that goal, then it's much, much easier for me to see it when there's something floating in my coffee, when the day isn't going quite right, when the project has a problem. Okay, so it's, I need to have a concrete idea of what I'm shooting for. And of course, this isn't a new idea. Ever since Plato, we've been talking about forms and perfection and that sort of thing. And so this is an idea that's been around for a long time. Now, there was a release recently that I went through one of these nightmarish production releases that went on for days and days. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And actually it was a very important learning process for me. And when we were doing this, when we were going through this process, I was definitely feeling like there were things that were in my sphere of influence that I could control, okay? There were things that the team and I were responsible for that, you know, we had to get right in order for everything to go just right on the deployment. But then there were things that were upstream from us and there were things that were downstream from us. And the things that were upstream from us, we had no control over. And the things that were downstream from us, we had no control over. And really didn't pay a whole lot of attention to. And so as a result, during that process, everything inside of our sphere of influence went peachy, but outside on a variety of different areas, we had all sorts of failures. I didn't see those impediments coming. I had no idea. And what I realized afterwards was that maybe if I'm to help out the whole group, if I'm to help out the whole, the deployment team as a whole, all the way from product marketing, all the way through to operations, all the way out to the customer, I need to be thinking of the bigger picture that sometimes my scope is so narrow that I'm not seeing all the possible impediments. Sometimes our scope is so focused on the team, on the micro, that we can't see the bigger picture. And seeing the bigger picture opens up a tremendous opportunity for a lot of new impediments. You might not have considered, okay? Impediments like what if we don't have good information coming from the product managers? Impediments like what if operations hasn't accounted for having certain IP addresses in the production domain? Okay, there are a whole bunch of opportunities for things to go wrong. And if I can expand my scope, now I'm not saying I wanna be a control free, but if I expand my scope, I can find myself a lot more opportunities for things that are gonna be impediments. So that's just another way of trying to find new ways to discover impediments that are out there. There are other places, there's something called, that I like to think of as impediment mining. And impediment mining is really just going to these repositories of impediments. Number one repository of impediments for me, Outlook. I can go through my Outlook email list, my calendar, and I can find 50 impediments, easy. They just, that's where they collect, all right? Other places I can find impediments, talking and working with other teams. When I see something go wrong on another team, when I see something happen on another team, that's a heads up, that's a hello that's gonna happen to me too. In my plans, okay, I don't do enough of this, but when I'm doing detailed planning for something specific like a release, or a release plan for the team, or something like that, that is not only my definition of what the perfect release should look like, my goal, the perfection that I'm shooting for, it is also the place where I'm going to find all the possible impediments that are coming up here. Retrospectives are excellent reviews, roadmaps, stories and features, technical debt. This is something that I'm all too often unconscious of. To-do lists and even just using my five senses, sometimes just changing my perspective. So instead of just looking at the team and what they're doing, listening to the team and what they're doing, I won't go to any of the smell senses, but you get the idea. So one way to deal with this, to find impediments, is simply to speed up, try going faster. You'll trip sooner or later, just accelerate. Have the team try and deliver in half the time, and you'll find impediments in a hurry. Yeah, maybe you're not going fast enough, maybe you're crawling along too slow, maybe the team has gotten into a, what I might think of as a satisfied state, or yeah, everything's coming in just great, and we're not really pushing ourselves, and we don't really have any impediments, and they don't have any impediments. And that's good, we like sustainability, what are they pushing to improve themselves? Maybe not so much. Another idea is breaking the rules. I'm very much a conformist, and I find myself listening to rules that are laid down and saying, yep, yeah, okay, I can do that, uh-huh. But in a subtle way, those are, can also be impediments. Rules that I'm taking for granted are things that may be slowing me down or preventing me from getting from point A to point B. And if I stop and think about breaking the rules, getting outside of the box, then I might find many opportunities for speeding up. So suddenly the rules can, in a very funny way, sort of guide us towards impediments. And I thought about this while sitting in traffic, looking at the gas station and thinking, I can cut that corner, I can cut that corner. Didn't do it, but I was thinking, boy, the traffic's an impediment, and there's an opportunity right there to get around that, but I'd be breaking the rules and probably be such a good thing. So use that one with care. So can we take one of these things, like expanding the scope, like breaking the rules, indulging our perfectionist, maybe going over our goals? I'll tell you a story. I had one day where I'm on vacation and I'm doing a great job of recording my impediments every day. I've got my list, my wife is going nuts. And I'm obsessing on impediments and I get up in the morning and I have my coffee, no impediments. And I have my cereal, no impediments. And I go out in the backyard and play with the kids, no impediments, and I have lunch, no impediments. And I'm finding nothing, bupkis. I mean, I didn't have a thing. I thought, what's wrong with me? Yeah. And so you can tell this, you get a little neurotic doing this too much, but the question that I was asking myself was why am I not seeing any? Because there must be some out there. Well, in this case, I had no goals. I had no objective for the day. There was nothing. There was no plan. There was no way to go wrong. Anything I did was right on. I think sometimes when I'm working with teams, I get into a state where I'm getting very tactical and reacting to the issues of the day as they come along. And I don't really have a plan, okay? I don't really have, I'm being agile, right? I'm reacting to everything that comes my way and I'm not seeing the impediments. They're just things I have to adapt to. So maybe I need to do a little bit more planning so that things can go wrong. After all, if we don't do any planning at all, things are what they are, right? So how do we manage these things? It's one thing to say, identify them. But then another question that came up for me was how are we going to take these impediments and do something constructive with them? I've seen this done a lot of different ways. I like to think of it at a couple of different levels. As I was playing around with impediments, I was playing around with them as my list of personal impediments, okay? Those are the things I was dealing with every day. And then there were team impediments, some of which overlap with my personal impediments. And then above that, there were things at the team level that we really couldn't resolve that had to be resolved at the organizational level. There was sort of this escalation hierarchy. I had personal impediments, if I couldn't deal with those, I brought them to the team. And if the team couldn't deal with those, they went to the organization. And hopefully some happy executive would come along and help me out. And tracking these things, I've seen done with Post-it notes, Thickey notes, the tracking who it's assigned to, when it was discovered, what the status on it. And it's very simple, it's very, you know, it's really, it doesn't have to be a whole lot. Simply tracking them just keeps our attention focused on them. Or you can go as far as an Excel spreadsheet with elaborate, you know, putting down the categories for everything and they both had use. The thing that I found about the spreadsheet was that I was keeping an ongoing history of the obstacles that the team and I were overcoming. And that turns out to be something that's kind of useful. All too often, I treat impediments as just, you know, a sheet of paper on the wall. And once I've dealt with an impediment, it's history, it's gone, I never want to think about it again, I blow it off. But if I started keeping them, excuse me, in an Excel spreadsheet and keeping this history around, suddenly I had something to go back and look at and learn a little from. And that was becoming kind of interesting. And so what I was seeing was that, you know, living in the here and now, often times, I and the team were tracking the daily impediments. Okay, so we get a few impediments every day, we knock them off, we're doing the good, agile thing. As I started to keep the spreadsheet, I was keeping this history of impediments. This was the history of all the things that we had overcome on the team. Some good things, some bad things, things to be very proud of, all accomplishments. And as I looked at that, I realized that there was, there was this end of the axis. And what are these things? Impediments, they're impediments that happen in the future and we have a name for those. Impediments that are yet to come are risks. Now for me, this was kind of a big deal to realize that the impediments yet to come were basically my risks for my project. Because one of the things that I remarked upon with friends and others who are very sage in the agile domain have said, where's risk management? Where's risk management in agile? You read the Scrum book, it doesn't say a whole lot. You read a lot of books, it doesn't say a whole lot about risk management in the agile domain. Well, here's where your risks are lying. Your risks, one area. I mean, they're being addressed in a lot of areas, I'm sure, but one area is impediments. Okay, impediments and looking for impediments yet to come is where you're gonna find your risks. And if I have this history of impediments that I've dealt with in the past, I have a set of categories of kinds of impediments that this team frequently encounters. I have a history of impediments that repeat themselves over and over and are highly likely to show up here again. Okay, so because there are some impediments that are very transitory that are things that even a team might blow off. Sometimes they're little things. You're like, yeah, we could jump on this today, but it'll be gone by the end of the day and it really doesn't matter that much. So you blow it off and it moves on. And then you see it a week later and then you see it a month later and then you see it a week later. And pretty soon if you go back and look at your history, this is something that you've, you're probably not taking all that serious but it's coming at you over and over again. And that's a good thing to recognize. The other thing that I think we need to do with our impediments is we have a process where we're basically collecting and addressing impediments throughout the week. Stand up day one, stand up day two, stand up day three, stand up day four, stand up day five. And we have our planning meeting and at the end of the week, we should have collected a pretty impressive list of impediments, okay? And at that point, I think sometimes what we fail to do in our reviews and our demos and in our retrospectives is take that collected list of impediments which tells a very interesting story and look at it in the review, in the retrospective. Number one, I want my product owner to know the mountains that I climbed, the flaming hoops that I jumped through in order to deliver the product for them. I think that's interesting to know and I think it's an important part of the story that all too often we just brush under the carpet, okay? It's part of explaining how some stories got done and maybe others didn't, okay? And it's important context. Sometimes they can even help us with those things. The other thing I think we do, when we do our retrospective and we come out of our retrospective with our recommendations, with our action items, hopefully some of them might be recommendations that address some of those impediments or address planning for those impediments in the future at which point it all opens back to our planning meeting for our next sprint. In that planning meeting for the next sprint, we should be taking a look at the impediments that we've been encountering, the action items and saying, all right, how do we avoid that this time around, okay? So we want to take that history with us. It's useful history. The other thing we need to do, of course, is there are some impediments that need to be escalated, okay, when you have multiple teams working together. You may want to escalate those things to the scrum of scrums. If the team can't handle it, if it's the sort of thing that the team can't address themselves, it needs to be escalated up to the scrum of scrums and dealt with there. And so a key talking point in any scrum of scrums or meta-scrum, depending on what flavor you use, is talking about the impediments, the organizational impediments. One thing that I realized as I was playing this game was that as I started writing impediments down and tracking them over time, I was getting better and better at identifying them. And that implied to me that perhaps impediments tracking, impediment hunting is something that we can practice. This is something we can get better at, like a lot of things. And so I think one of the things we have to do if we're not as a team very good at finding impediments is practice those finding impediments. And how can we do that? One way is keeping a journal, okay? That's one area I can mine for impediments, okay? Keeping a journal every day of just, you know, it could be just an agenda, a list of things that I did today along with some comments can be very useful for going back, reviewing that and saying, what was happening? What was bothering me? What was an issue? And that helps raise the awareness of what sorts of things are going on. Another way is simply observation. Watching the team, sitting back, sometimes just looking at the way the team is operating can tell you an awful lot about what impediments they're dealing with or struggling with. That leads me to, am I doing okay with time? So that leads me to eliciting impediments. And the question is, how do we pull impediments out of the group, okay? You know, you go around the circle and everyone in the team says no impediments, no impediments, no impediments. And they've done this for the third day straight and you just know it's not true. How do you prod the team? How do you get those things? I'm not only out of the team, but of yourself as well. One technique is when the team comes around and goes no impediments, no impediments, no impediments, no impediments, you go, all right, great. We're ready to go, we're ready to ship. Let's go. And you get the predictable reaction of oh my God, but we're not ready on this, we're not ready on this, we're not ready on this, we gotta overcome this. And it's like, ah, beautiful. That's what I was looking for. I was looking for all the things that are holding us up from shipping. That also kind of changes the focus for the team. And you know, it's a fun way to bring up the question. Another way to do this is to work on your task tracking, okay? Sometimes you're not tracking the stories very closely. And so, and you're not reporting on the stories very closely. So if you tighten up that process, then you're more likely to catch those task items that have been in progress for three days straight. You know, the things that are going on too long. And those are impediments. You know, those are obviously places where impediments are hiding. And so if you're not tracking your stories down to the task level, if you're not tracking your stories and asking questions about them at each standup, then you're missing an opportunity to uncover impediments. There's also this mindset that comes from the lean folks, which is the no problem is a problem mindset. And I think it's one that we need to have when we're trying to, you know, get the team to take an interest in impediments. Not having impediments to me might be worth, you know, if you go around and there are no impediments at all, as a scrum master, I might turn around and write down on the list of impediments, team can't find impediments. Maybe that's not fair, but part of me wants to call it out to make it visible, to say we're not tracking impediments. Why is that? There may be legitimate reason. It may be, hey, it's just a good day, Tom. And that's all right. But I wanna ask, I want push a little. It's my job to push a little and make sure that they're really looking for those things. Another thing that comes from lean is looking for bottlenecks. Maybe do a value stream map of your entire process and look at where the most time is spent, where the cues or backlogs are developing, okay? Those are where you're going to find your impediments. Another thing to do is take that list of categories that I was talking about earlier and you can actually track this stuff. You could track it in your retrospectives or something with a radar chart, just to see if it's something that you're making ground on. Is it something that by whatever changes you're making, you're reducing the incidents of these kinds of impediments. Recently, I was pointed towards the thin book of appreciative inquiry and I really enjoyed it. And one of the things that I realized was there was an opportunity to turn the impediments question into something a lot more positive. In fact, when I submitted this presentation for one conference, one of the feedback, some of the feedback that I got was, Tom, this is awfully negative. It blew me away. I hadn't even considered it. That someone could look at this and it's all the bad things that happened to the team. I hadn't really thought of it that way. But there is a positive spin on it and one that I've been exploring lately and one that I kind of like, which is asking a fourth question. What one thing helped accelerate my progress yesterday? Uh-huh. Somebody else made me. Beautiful, beautiful. I like that. So it's that focus, what asking myself, what actually helped make me, who helped me? What made me faster? Started keeping that list. The list of people who helped me. Of people who, of things that were done that made my life easier. Servers that suddenly came back online, whatever, it doesn't really matter. And you know what? I had this problem with my impediments list and I wonder if other people have it where I tended to drop it over time. I kept dropping it. I'd keep it for two or three weeks and be really good at it and then drop it. And I'd keep it for two or three weeks and then I'd drop the discipline. And that just may be me, but I found that when I was keeping the list of accelerators, I'm still keeping that list. That list I'm much happier with. I can go and face that list real easy. Okay, I love looking at that list. And so that, maybe there's something subtle going on there. I don't wanna read too much into it but I found that keeping that list of the positive things and focusing on that list of positive things changed the way I was approaching this stuff. And finally there's, this is the Agile Roots Conference and as I was putting this together and as I've given this presentation for other folks, one of the things that people have said is there's some history behind this whole self-improvement thing. And you can go to the self-improvement section of the bookstore and really that's all about, at some level, removing those personal impediments. And there's somebody who started this trend on off a long time ago, who we probably should recognize. Ben Franklin came up with the 13 virtues and he would track those things over time and he would try and improve on them and he would keep a nice sheet. And so he had these virtues, these were his categories of things he was gonna track, kind of similar to the category of the stuff that I was tracking, although it wasn't virtues. And he tracked these things. These were the things that Ben Franklin tracked and as he was doing that, he kept this self-improvement chart, okay, to track how he was doing on addressing those items. And it seems to me that even today that's exactly what we're doing with our impediments if we're addressing those really closely. So in summary, to detect them, we have to, I think, get a little bit more restless and not settle for the way things are right now. We have to be a perfectionist. We have to, we can use things like expanding our accountability, okay. I'm not saying become a control freak overnight, but the idea is to at least take an interest in a wider scope of activities. We can use planning to identify where things are gonna go wrong. We can use the process, escalating things through the scrum of scrums and things like that. And we can practice this technique. We can practice finding impediments. Here's my contact information. If you have impediment techniques, impediment hunting techniques that you find, I'd love to hear about them and please contact me. So we've got plenty of time, I think, for questions here. I'm finishing a little bit early. So, yes? So I just like what twisted me impediments is, is there things we can't remove, like I live in the Bay Area for a while. Like I'm gonna drive to the San Francisco airport five p.m. on Friday. I know it's, I can think far, but you know just the whole thing. I'm going to get to point A, point B, or gonna shower in a big city or things like that. I know it's gonna take time or whether it stops compliance or things like that. It's gonna be, I mean, if you look at it, you're like, this isn't efficient and I hate this and I just want to just open it up, I can't. So there's that flavor of impediment, I'd say. And then there's the other thing where sometimes you get into people where there's this kind of belly. Is it impediment? How do you deal with those or how do you approach those? I'll share a similar situation. I have a commute each morning that's just aggravating. 15 miles in an hour, an hour and a half, right. And it's there and definitely when I first think about it, there's sort of this rollover, sort of God, there's nothing I can do about it. That's just the way it is. But that's not actually true. What I'm doing is shutting down a whole bunch of different possibilities, a whole bunch of different possible solutions to that problem that I just don't want to look at. I can change the time of day, right. I can take the bus, I can commute with colleagues. And the reason I don't do those things is, you know, well the various incendiary reasons, you know. And I think, but they're there, they're there. And so when I look at those, when I look at the, and I was tracking exactly that sort of impediment because it can be really serious. I mean, I can lose two hours a day of my personal productivity, of my personal life, to this impediment, namely the freeway. And I have to acknowledge the solutions are there. It's just, when am I going to take them seriously and do something about it? And I think that happens all over the place. And I think one of the things we can do is perhaps use some of the problem-solving techniques like Diana was talking about in her retrospectives presentation, you know, the fishbone diagrams, things like that, to work through all the alternatives. I don't think we spend enough time working on the, I think a weak area, at least for me, is problem-solving techniques, you know. Finding impediments is raising the visibility of the impediments, is getting them out there, great. Now the big challenge is, what are we going to do about it? So, yeah, I think we have the tools there to address those issues. And then whether or not we do something about it, I do think there is a legitimate class of impediments where I look at them and go, I'm aware of it, but I'm not going to deal with it today. And, but I'm keeping track of it. And I keep keeping track of it, okay. I, you know, I don't, it's not worth it for me to tackle this today, but I need to keep this in my, in my, in my perspective, in my vision, because it's cost to me. And that's important. Yeah. I think another, I have a couple of comments. One is I discovered another category that I was looking at my list of impediments today. I discovered a category I would add to your list called faulty assumption. Yes, yes. I like it. But the other thing I was thinking about is you were just talking about how you choose what impediments to work on and what not. I find that some of the risk tools, because you made that connection, can be helpful with that. Like doing an analysis of how often does this impediment happen? Right. And how much positive or negative, or probably negative impact doesn't have on the team or on the work. Right, severity impacts. Yeah, and so, and so, you know, the things that happen a lot and have a big impact, you know, those are the ones you have to go after first. Exactly. Then after that, you get to make choices of things that don't happen very often and they have a really low impact. You know, maybe you can let those go. Right, right. Yeah. I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about the balance between the team resolving their impediments and the kinds of impediments that they would be resolving versus what else, like the scrum master. I like to see it where the team is addressing, really the scrum master is acting as a focal point, as a coordinator, but it's not necessary. They're responsible for making sure that the impediments are raised, that they're tracked, and that they're getting resolved. Okay, but they're not necessarily responsible for doing the work to kill the impediment. Okay, that they need help with, often times, and that's where the team comes in. One technique I've seen used is where you say after the stand up, you say, okay, everybody who's interested in helping resolve impediments stay behind. We're gonna talk about impediments now and what we do about this. And I think that's a nifty way to handle it, which is to say, if you're interested in resolving issues that are blocking the team, please stay. The flip side of that is more of a, the project management sort of, they're the central person, they're responsible for all of this. I'm not as fond of that. Some teams like it that way. Some teams really don't want to. They want to make it the scrum master's job to deal with this. We're coding, we don't want to be, we don't want to have this interfere. So I think it varies a little bit with the character of the team. I know what my preference is, and but sometimes when I'm working with a team and they're starting from a place where they're more comfortable with a sort of central control, I will fill in that role and move them with the idea of moving them towards trying to move them anyway, towards a more collaborative work through on that stuff. You were saying that you need to expand your horizon for what impede your team and beyond it at times. Yeah. When you start to do that, you start to look at other teams and stuff and see it might be coming. You start to hamper on the fact that it goes in the face of, do you trust them at this point? And where it's easy to ask once or twice, everywhere are you after a while, that starts to become a trust issue and always be a political aim at some point? Yeah. I can get around something like that. Well, part of the answer is I don't know. Part of the answer is I wouldn't want it to go there and I make a conscious effort not to. In other words, I know some project managers, Scrum ashes I've worked with, who were on the sort of control freak end of the spectrum and they were all over anything that looked like it was a possible issue. And I'm not sure I want to go there and I'm not advising people to go there. That's not necessarily what I'm saying. What I'm trying to do is increase awareness and toward that specifically to answer your question, what I was doing up until very recently was actually just attending as a chicken in this other team stand-ups. And so I was just there every day. I wouldn't say a word. This wasn't my editorial on their issues. I just was just there to overhear what was coming up and maybe nothing, maybe nothing relevant. But the simple fact that I was in all the stand-ups raised, I probably knew more than anyone else in the company because I was attending five different stand-ups every day than anyone else. I mean, I really, it raised my consciousness of what all the issues were amongst the teams. And I found that very, very useful. And so I found myself occasionally being in one, hearing something that came up and thinking, oh crap, I'm gonna have to deal with that on my team too. And that's the golden moment. That's what I'm looking for is that I forgot about that, or heads up, they're having issues with the DBAs. When we go in to deal with the DBAs, we're likely to meet some resistance here, so I'd better be prepared, that sort of thing. There is this concept of waiting for the last responsible minute to make change to the software developer, right? Suppose you have two competing projects, right? And your impedance is the bureaucracy which is taking time to decide on it. And they're waiting till the last responsible minute to make that decision. But you're sitting there going, I'm running out of time, because I still have to deliver in a second period of time. Is there a way to facilitate moving forward, do you start working and then do rework, or do you just wait and have to bear the grudge of it? Two thoughts there. One, I have a pretty poor track record of identifying the last responsible moment. Personally speaking, that's an art I haven't quite learned. But there have been many times when I was, we were in that sort of situation where it's like we need something, we need it now. And in that case, I resort to escalating to executives, getting the visibility, however I can, raised so that the decision gets made. And sometimes they do a better job than others, but that's what I typically resort to. There may be a lot of better ways, but that's where I go, is raising the visibility of the issue is any way I can. I think on that is if it's the executives who are unable to make the decisions, the way we deal with that is essentially, the team wants to be productive. And so we work with the product owners to try to identify things that they can do in the meantime. Most of the time they're less valuable, the kinds of work, and so they're not quite as fulfilling, typically. But at least it keeps the team moving forward and delivering something. And that's generally when we start digging into other areas of the business, for example, and having to have as many backlog items, for example, brought into their back mug recently. So try to give a little bit of PR time to finance, for example. I think that's a great example. And it reminds me of a couple more. We keep a backlog of technical debt. And so that would be an opportunity to tackle that backlog. But I think this stuff is pretty important to the business and I do think it's important that the business get the slap upside the head. And so if I took the Ken Schwaber approach, I'd probably send the team on vacation. You know, that'll get their attention. And because I run the risk, if I run the team down towards technical debt or whatever these other things are, of not addressing the most important pressing concern for the company, the company needs to make this decision. And so the radical in me says, boy, you gotta hit them hard. And the complacent in me is like, well, we'll just do something. Trade, I don't know if the writing is serious. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, depends on where you're seeing it. So I can't envision myself literally sending the team home, but I can envision myself making quite a fuss. Any other questions? Well, folks, I hope I've given you some useful tools for impediment mining, maybe managing a few impediments, maybe discovering a few. Thank you very much.