Impediments are those blockers that prevent the Scrum Team from achieving the Sprint Goal.
You, as the Scrum Master, are responsible for the removal of impediments. But how?
Defining how to tackle the impediments is usually difficult. In this blog post, I demonstrate how to utilize AI to assist you in the process of removing impediments.
Every blocker is not an impediment. When the team encounters a blocker that doesn't have enough authority or resources to resolve it by itself, it becomes an impediment.
When you want to use AI, you need to effectively communicate your request with the AI system. A good communication guideline has the following steps:
1- Describe your Scrum organization:
The structure of your organization, the number of Scrum Teams, and how they work together are important.
2- Define your context:
What is your product? What is the current impediment that you want to resolve?
The result of this process is the following prompt:
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[Explain your teams' composition status, like the number of Scrum Teams you have].
[Explain your product and how it is going to create value].
[Explain who you are].
[Explain the impediment in detail].
Create a step-by-step plan of how to remove this impediment by answering the following questions:
1- Who should I invite to create a focus group to collaborate and remove this impediment?
2- How could I best facilitate the focus group collaboration?
3- What collaboration tools can we use in the process of resolving this impediment?
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Copy this prompt, paste it into an AI system like ChatGPT, fill in the brackets with the specific data of your product, and use the result as the guidelines for the impediment removal.
This is a sample prompt for removing an impediment in the context of a machine-learning product:
We have 5 Scrum Teams working on a single product which is a machine-learning project. I am the Scrum Master of 2 teams out of 5.
All 5 Scrum Teams use a shared testing infrastructure to test their outputs. However, there is an impediment regarding our shared testing environment.
The impediment is that when one team uses that shared testing environment, they change the data and when another team wants to use the test environment, the data is not accurate and clean anymore. So, they usually do the test but shockingly don’t get the expected results. Each time they should investigate what the problem is and usually, they discover the same problem, the shared testing environment.
Create a step-by-step plan of how to remove this impediment by answering the following questions:
1- Who should I invite to create a focus group to collaborate and remove this impediment?
2- How could I best facilitate the focus group collaboration?
3- What collaboration tools can we use in the process of resolving this impediment?
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Copy this prompt, paste it into an AI system like ChatGPT, and enjoy the result.
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