Impediments Small and Large

This week something unusual happened: two different people who are not on my team approached to ask for help with impediments. Removing impediments is, of course, one of the chief responsibilities of a Scrum Master. We're supposed to be way-smoothers, facilitating the team's work.

One issue was very straight-forward, and was actually given to me because it seemed to involve a piece of documentation (my other job); my boss wasn't sure what the complaint was about or what needed to be done to resolve it. I talked to the Scrum Master who had raised the impediment, together we talked to one of the members of the team affected, and confirmed that the issue had already been automated away and could be closed. Easy-peasy.

The other item is ongoing, and I want to document it here, because it's the kind of thorny recurring problem that can't be easily resolved. It has to do with collaboration between one of the local teams and the offshore group. HQ is farming out more and more work on this particular product to the offshore teams, but when they have a question, they sometimes get stuck, and no one on their paired local team knows this product well. How to facilitate this process so that they can get answers quickly is the issue.

Since the offshore initiative started, the local teams have expressed a fair amount of frustration with the fact that they are expected to help the offshore folks while simultaneously getting all of their own work done, especially since the demand is unpredictable. Management has repeatedly said, "Just time-box it," and we've tried adding stories to every sprint to represent the time commitment, but grumbling continues.

My first task, as I saw it, was to nip in the bud any, "we shouldn't have to spend our time doing this" arguments. Like it or not, the teams are there, they have their assignments, and they need support. Since I have been reading about Liberating Structures this week, I took the opportunity to try a 1-2-4-All conversation (skipping 4 because we only had five people in the room) and emphasized that the purpose was to generate ideas for how we can help.

I did get one person who attempted to answer the question "how can we help them effectively" with "I disagree" (???), but it was overall a good conversation, and now I have a list of strategies I can discuss with my counterpart on the offshore team to see what we can experiment with most easily.

To be continued....

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