If you want to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively. This game teaches you to recognize and analyse impediment and to take appropriate action by deploying agile and lean good practices. Many organizations are going through agile transformations. They are implementing Scrum and maybe large scale agile framework like SAFe or DAD, hoping to better serve the IT needs of the business and to develop products that satisfy their customers. Unfortunately those transformation do not always live up to the agile promise to deliver faster, make better products that customers really like or reducing the IT costs. One of the reasons that transformation fail is that team get blocked while working agile due to impediments, and are unable to solve them themselves or to involve their stakeholders or managers and have them solved. In this game you will be a team which has been working together for a couple of iterations. The game can be played by 1-4 teams simultaneously. Each team will has Scrum master and a Product Owner. The game consists of a deck of impediment cards, a list of agile and lean good practices, and an impediment board. During the game the teams will be coached in understanding impediments and selecting and deploying good practices to take action.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Agile and Lean Impediment Game
Agile Tour Brussel,
November 2, 2015
Ben Linders

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Ben Linders Consulting
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
Retrospectives Facilitator
Agile Coach/Mentor/Trainer
CMMI & People-CMM Assessor
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
Ben Linders
Co-Author Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
English Dutch French Japanese Spanish Italian Chinese
Russian Polish German
Author: What Drives Quality Continuous Improvement
eBook: Download from Amazon, InfoQ or Leanpub
Print: Buy on Amazon or Lulu

3. 3
Ben Linders Consulting
Why Agile Fails: Impediments
Many organizations are going through agile
transformations. They are implementing Scrum and
maybe large scale agile framework like SAFe or DAD,
hoping to better serve the IT needs of the business and
to develop products that satisfy their customers.
Unfortunately those transformation do not always live up to
the agile promise to deliver faster, make better products
that customers really like or reducing the IT costs.
One of the reasons that transformation fail is that teams
get blocked while working agile due to impediments,
and are unable to solve it themselves or to involve
their stakeholders or managers and have it solved.

4. 4
Ben Linders Consulting
Impediment Game: Goal
• Recognize impediments
• Understand how they can hinder the team
• Deploy agile and lean practices to deal with them
• Become more effective in dealing with impediments

5. 5
Ben Linders Consulting
Playing the game
• Assign Scrum Master and Product Owner
Introduce yourself (1 minute)
• Take impediment card
– Read the card out loud
– Discuss the impediment
– Pick practices to deal with impediment
– Decide who takes which action
– Card + action on impediment board
• Play for +/- 60 Min / 15 cards

6. 6
Ben Linders Consulting
Apply practices effectively
Examples of practices:
• INVEST, Backlog Grooming
• Estimation, #NoEstimates
• Reviews, Pair Programming
• YAGNI, Refactoring
• Collective Ownership
• Ship-it Days
• Retrospectives
• Root Cause Analysis
• Safe-to-fail experiments
Technical Practices
Team Working &
Efficiency
Customer &
Requirements
Organizational Change

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Ben Linders Consulting
Evaluate Actions
• Are the actions clear? Feasible?
• Actions which are related? Combine?
• Distribution of actions? Bottleneck?
• Do actions really address root causes of impediments?

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Ben Linders Consulting
Share you learnings
• How did the game go?
• What did you learn?
• What worked for you?
• What didn’t work?
• Suggestions for handling
impediments?

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Ben Linders Consulting
Tips for dealing with Impediments
Make it visible
Raise issues early
Feelings matter
Why over How
Know the root causes
Safe-to-fail experiments

10. 10
Ben Linders Consulting
Continuous Improvement
Become aware of importance of
continuous improvement,
Explore how it’s engrained in agile
software development
Suggestions that you can use in your
daily work to improve continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
Leanpub.com/continuousimprovement
“Continuous Improvement is the act of continuously doing
whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable”

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Ben Linders Consulting
Getting More out of Agile & Lean
Practices for teams and stakeholders to develop the right
products, deliver faster, increase quality, and create
happy high performing teams.
Full Day Workshop:
Deploying practices effectively
Improve Collaboration
Tips & Trick for Agile & Lean
Improve Continuously
Increase your organization's agility!
BenLinders.com/agilelean

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Ben Linders Consulting
Questions?Questions?
Ben Linders
Independent Consultant Agile, Lean,
Quality & Continuous Improvement
info@BenLinders.cominfo@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinderswww.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvieswww.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvies
www.benlinders.comwww.benlinders.com

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Ben Linders Consulting
Background Information

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Ben Linders Consulting
Retrospectives Book
Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives
By Luis Gonçalves & Ben Linders
Download from InfoQ or Leanpub
Buy on Amazon or Lulu
amazon.com/dp/B00SWJO1DI
leanpub.com/gettingvalueoutofagileretrospectives
Mailinglist: eepurl.com/Mem7H
The suggested price is $9,99 (excl. VAT); this is what we think is the real
value of this book. We leave it up to our readers to decide what they
would like to pay for the book.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Agile Retrospectives
amazon.com/dp/B00SWJO1DI benlinders.com/exercises/

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Ben Linders Consulting
Articles on Effective Agile
• Agile needs coaching
• How futurespectives help teams to reach their goals
• Spice up your agile retrospectives
• Empower teams to increase quality
• Self-assessing how Agile you are
• Sustainable Improvement through Agile Retrospectives
• Working in a Sustainable Pace
• Becoming Agile and Lean
• Succes Factors for Using Scrum and Getting Benefits
• Process Improvement: The Agile Way
• Golden Rules for Agile Process Improvement
• How to deal with Resistance when Implementing Agile
• Managing Projects with Agile Teams
• Establishing and Maintaining Stable Teams
• Getting Business Value out of Agile Retrospectives
• Are your Professionals Empowered?