For some time now our Scrum teams have experienced recurring impediments caused by external factors to the team. The teams have discussed the impediments in their retrospectives and also brought it up on Scrum of Scrums. It seems that the impediments may require involvement by management as it requires some rather significant changes in that way we do things and the way our technical environments have been configured. In a small setting these kind of issues would probably have been easy to deal with because the team would have more control, but in this setting there are multiple teams, stakeholders and parties. Id like to hear your experience in making waste and costs visible. Do you simply estimate the hours wasted on the recurring impediments (such as, we waste 10 hours every sprint waiting on the build server) or do you have a more systematic way of gathering and showing the waste?I would like to collect waste based on Six Sigma (and Lean Software Development) and estimate the waste cost in terms of story points. E.g. at every retrospective highlight the waste in seven categories with the number of story points wasted in each category. The seven categories would be: Partially Done work, Extra Features, Relearning, Handoffs, Task Switching, Delays, and Defects.In the end of the Retrospective, there would then be a clear indication of the cost of external impediments that management would easily be able to act on. What do you think?
Determining the cost of impediments (waste)
agile;scrum;lean