Recently I’ve been reading Simon Wardley’s book on strategy mapping. I’m finding it to be some of the best writing on strategy that I’ve ever come across, so I really recommend it if you have the inclination to learn more about strategy. Simon is a very vocal critic of the typical tools that we consultants use to ‘do strategy’ with. In particular, he is especially critical of the use of 2×2 diagrams and SWOT analysis. His central observation is that strategy as we do it today

I wrote a book a few years ago about dealing with impediments on agile teams. It’s right there on the upper right of the page (I’ll give you a minute to make your purchase). Well, the industry has continued on since those heady young days, and two things are still true: people still underestimate the impact of impediments, and impediments are bigger than ever. Where agile was largely a team level affair not much more than a few years ago, now it is much bigger. Scaling is all

I was describing impediments to a friend last night over a couple of beers. Hey, that’s what happens when you give a guy like me a beer. So this poor friend of mine, he’s a really sharp guy with a lot of experience with operations management and as he patiently listened to me, he said, “You mean impediments are constraints?” To which my immediate answer was, “Yes!” Impediments can and often do create bottlenecks in value streams. Anything that causes delay is an impediment, o

“This is where the Agile tribes meet.” Agile2016 is swiftly approaching. I’ll be there in Atlanta doing a couple of talks this year. If you are going to be there you should definitely come check them out: Self experimentation: Radical Continuous Learning Introduction to Agile Leadership: Recognizing and Removing Impediments The Self-experimentation workshop is something that I originally developed a few years ago for XP2013. It is very hands-on, each attendee contributing the

I’ve talked a lot about the rigors of finding and resolving impediments for a team. There is one thing that I have left out: the people part. I learned this lesson at a conference that I was co-hosting. I had been in charge of setting up the food for the event. Getting the caterer, arranging for meals, that sort of thing. As you might imagine, it’s a pretty tough job to satisfy the dietary requirements for a very large group of people. I learned of whole categories of food al

I stumbled across Pawel Brodzinski’s blog on Software Project management. In “Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work” he talks about the importance of having the right culture that will support using and taking full advantage of the tools (Agile, Lean or otherwise) that people try to introduce to organizations. He notes that when the culture doesn’t permit experimentation without permission, introducing any kind of continuous improvement effort is almost always doomed to fa

When trying to find impediments there is a trap that awaits those of us who are outside of or observing the team. Often, when you are observing a team as an outsider, you may think you see patterns of behavior and obvious disfunction. Naturally enough, not being part of the system often gives us a fresh perspective from which to see problems within a team. Often I have found myself able to rattle off a list of issues that I see a team dealing with after observing them for onl

I stumbled across Pawel Brodzinski’s blog on Software Project management. In “Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work” he talks about the importance of having the right culture that will support using and taking full advantage of the tools (Agile, Lean or otherwise) that people try to introduce to organizations. He notes that when the culture doesn’t permit experimentation without permission, introducing any kind of continuous improvement effort is almost always doomed to fa

So there I was in a meeting the other day (saving the world…yawn). Everything was going smoothly (too smoothly) so I did a quick spot check for impediments. You know, “Hey folks, before we wrap things up, are there any blockers we should be aware of?” There was the usual pregnant pause and then: “The teams aren’t talking to each other. I think we should have a wiki page to share what we are doing.” “We need a common defect tracking system. I have to look in too many places to

Impediments have long been a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I’ve just published the first draft of a book dedicated to managing impediments on Leanpub. It’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for years and finally decided to execute on. The book is a collection of many of my ideas on dealing with impediments from this blog, as well as from presentations and tutuorials that I have done at many conferences. There is still a long way to go, but if you are interested

So, for the past week or so, I’ve been developing the Impediments Game. You can see some of my efforts: interation 1, iteration 2, Interlude, and Iteration 3. Now I have no experience or expertise designing games, so as you might imagine, there has been a great deal of trial and error involved in this process. Whenever you add a new element or change an existing rule or component of the game play you are doing it with some sort of hypothesis in mind. For example, If I add “Ac

So today was a day to make a few changes and take stock of where things are at. The first change I wanted to make was to double the length of the game from 20 spaces to 40: Changing the board like this actually raised a few interesting questions about the game for me. First, what does each space on the board represent? It could be: A square, just like on the sidewalk, just a position to advance to… It could represent a unit of time, like a day, or a sprint It could represent

I know what you’re probably thinking by now: MORE on this silly game? Well, yes (I’m so embarrassed). You see, it just gets more interesting as I continue to play with it. Today I decided that I needed to improve the impediments cards in the game. In previous iterations, the cards had the word impediment printed on one side and the impact or cost of the impediment was printed on the other side. I thought it would make the impediments much more interesting if I used some real

Recently I’ve been dealing with disengaged product owners. You know the type: they don’t show up for the stand-ups, when they come to the standup meeting they don’t bring any stories and instead simply review whatever the team has brought to them – and then leave early because they have more important things to do. When they show up for the demo, they obviously don’t recognize the stories and simply give tacit approval to the work that the team has done. And the scrum master

There was a short video made back in the 80’s that made a huge impression on me called, “Bambi meets Godzilla” Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s epic. There’s Bambi in the meadow looking all dewy eyed and innocent and munching on daisies. Then you are treated to that iconic Godzilla roar and Bambi looks up, alarmed. You see one giant lizard foot descend out of nowhere and Godzilla stomps on Bambi. The end. The first time I saw that film as a teenager I think I laughed so hard I crie

I discovered the other day that I have apparently gone over to the dark side of Agile. It’s unfortunate, but understandable given the circumstances. You see I’m a manager now. The minute that happened there were some telltale signs that I really should have noticed earlier. I caught myself telling people that I mentor things like, “I am your father…” I’ve noticed that line gets me a few puzzled expressions in the office. It seems to work better with the kids. Then one day the

Lately I’ve been living in a strange world. It’s a world where everything is all turned around and inside out. Bad things are good. Good things are bad. In this world things seem to play out the reverse of the way we might normally expect in the real world. For example, in this world impediments that threaten a project’s success are a good thing! That’s right, in this strange realm impediments are the very best thing that could happen to a project! Let’s say you have a normal

I was watching a presentation on risk today and I saw a symmetry between risks and impediments that I had never realized before. With both, the hard part is awareness. Once you’ve discovered a risk or impediment, half the battle is over. Seeing risks before they become impediments is hard. The discovery step is the part where I tend to fall down. How many times has someone pointed out a risk or impediment and you find yourself palm slapping your face in embarrassment because

I was talking to a group the other day about impediments. We were debating the temporal relationship between risks and impediments. We arrived at the following conclusion: Risks are potential threats to our projects that lie in the future. Once they manifest themselves in the present, we call them impediments. And once impediments are resolved and we move on, they become lessons. I’m intentionally not referring to them as “lessons learned” because I’m not sure we always learn

I’ve been spending some time researching impediments and risk management – two topics that I believe are intimately related. I wanted to take a brief moment to share some of the great resources that I have found along the way: Agile Risk Board | Agile UX Leading Agile: Agile Risk Management – Logistical Risk LeadingAnswers: Leadership and Agile Project Management Blog: Creating Risk Profile Graphs Agile Issue Management for Projects and Programmes | ! | Agile101 – Agile Proje