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— Photo from Woodland Trust
WHAT IS A BLOCKER?An abnormal condition that prevents
a committed work item from progress
THE INVITATION @mattphilip #ale15
Subject: Improve planning and reduce risk
Dear Asynchronites,
Would you like to improve planning and reduce risk in your team? I'm offering to coach up to two teams in the practice of blocker clustering…
© 2012, Asynchrony Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Talk with teammates about the experiment.
2. Define “block” for your team.
3. Start gathering blocker data, including reason and duration — simply and easily.
GETTING STARTED @mattphilip #ale15
CLUSTERS EMERGEAfter dividing into Internal and External, the team further clusters the blockers
into reasons for blocks.
Internal blockers caused 20 days of delay
External blockers caused 147 days of delay
The biggest blocker cluster accounted for 86 days of delay
WHAT WE DISCOVERED (TEAM 1) @mattphilip #ale15
141 stories in the release
66 stories were blocked at some point — nearly half!
WHAT WE DISCOVERED (TEAM 2) @mattphilip #ale15
THINGS TO AVOID
Most blockers were of “unknown” reason
@mattphilip #ale15
Differing definitions of “blocker”
Misunderstanding your commitment point
Bad (or no) data
THINGS TO TRY @mattphilip #ale15
Manage empirically as a safe-to-fail experiment
Start simple, with invitation
Tell others about it