When Impediment Management Won’t Work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 fail. He makes a good point. I’ve seen this pattern myself and it applies just as much to managing impediments as it does for any other kind of improvement.

Some signs you may have a problem introducing a change:

• Taking action requires getting permission (this is straight from Pawel)
• Stating the desired change is too risky
• Action can’t be taken because projects are too important
• Only certain people can take action

I’m sure this could be a much longer list. The take home message for anyone who is interested in initiating this kind of change: Make sure that you have the buy-in from your organization. Talk about these sorts of examples and discuss how you might deal with them. Use the feedback from that dialog to inform what changes you try to make.