| name | impediment-removal |
| description | Remove delivery impediments by identifying the actual blocked condition, decision owner, dependency, authority, and smallest intervention that restores flow without taking over another specialist's work. |
Impediment Removal
Use when a team or specialist cannot progress because of an organizational, dependency, access, decision, process, or coordination blocker.
Procedure
- Define the blocked outcome and the exact condition preventing progress; distinguish an impediment from difficult but owned work.
- Identify who controls the missing decision, access, dependency, artifact, environment, or policy.
- Determine whether the blocker can be resolved directly, delegated, escalated, or bypassed safely through alternative sequencing.
- Remove coordination friction such as missing context, unclear ownership, duplicate approval, or stale dependency information before escalating authority.
- Preserve specialist boundaries: facilitate the needed decision or resource rather than silently doing another role's professional work.
- Track owner, next action, and expected resolution point in the durable work system.
- Re-plan around the blocker when independent work can continue without creating waste.
- Close the impediment only when the blocked owner can actually resume useful work.
Decision rules
- A hard technical problem owned by an engineer is not automatically a Scrum Master impediment.
- Escalation should target the owner who can change the blocked condition.
- Avoid creating permanent process exceptions to solve one temporary problem unless deliberately accepted.
- Re-routing compute or selecting a different node is Fleet's responsibility when the impediment is runtime placement.
Quality gate
The impediment is resolved when the blocked condition is removed or deliberately bypassed, the owning specialist can continue, any changed commitment is visible, and no hidden ownership or policy debt was created in the process.
