Provide an impediment removal service

Description

One of the essential duties of leadership is to resolve issues that are outside of the boundary of teams' autonomy and empowerment. This has the dual aim of optimising teams' flow of value delivery and recognising and resolving systemic issues caused by the organisational environment.

Rationale

Agile teams discover problems impacting their work as a natural part of doing the work. Some of these problems can be removed or resolved by the teams themselves (with support of Scrum Masters and coaches as appropriate). The team can also influence some other problems by collaborating directly with other teams and stakeholders. However, there will be some impediments that sit outside of the teams' authority to resolve, for these challenges, teams will need support from leadership.

Leadership's relationship with teams, Scrum Masters and coaches should be viewed as a vital part of the "Organisational nervous system", collecting valuable data and insight into where and how the organisation needs to improve. Leaders will require both a tactical approach to mitigate or work around the negative impacts of impediments and a strategic approach to understand the root causes and catalyse the appropriate organisational changes as part of the continuous evolutionary change process.

Related Principles

• Catalyst for change
• Evolutionary over revolutionary change
• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Leadership supports rather than drives the work
• Foster a high trust environment
• Cultivate learning between teams
• Create a Learning Organisation
• Are lean practitioners
• Limit Team Mental Workload
• Maximise engagement