What Are Impediments in Agile?

In Agile, impediments are anything that slows down or blocks a team's productivity—and ultimately affects product delivery. Agile or not, impediments are a daily reality.

At PracticeToLead, we interviewed several engineering leaders who echoed the same concern: current Scrum/Agile tools don't offer a solid way to track and escalate impediments.

Really? So What?

Yes. If you search for solutions, the best advice you'll find is “create a separate Jira project to track them.”. Even though tools like Rally Software has a feature specifically for this. BUT Jira owns ⅔ of the market.

Most organizations either:

  • Leave it to Scrum/Agile teams to handle impediments themselves (generally the right default), and/or

  • Rely on managers to escalate the serious ones ad hoc.

But this creates real problems:

  • Delayed visibility: Stakeholders don’t hear about risks until it’s too late. The team has likely been struggling for a while by then.

  • No institutional memory: Without proper tracking, there's no way to learn from past blockers or spot recurring issues.

  • Cross-team impact: In larger orgs, one team’s impediment could be affecting—or be affected by—another. Without visibility, there’s no chance for coordination or shared learning.

Now What?

Rashid Shaikh and I are working on Sensai (our Agentic AI concept and started to put together requirements to explore potential solutions. 

We fast realized a dedicated Jira project does make sense—but only if:

  • It's simple and purpose-built for impediments.

  • Your team has an easy way to manage the tickets (we recommend AI :) ).

Impediments translate to tasks to be resolved, and here is our recommendations for the project setup


Jira project details


Status and flow

Below is workflow of my impediments project.  The statuses listed below are best practice for agile projects.  No rocket science here, just going back to the basics.

My project assumes that Impediments belong to the team and that is why “Escalated” is a status




Priorities

First I thought of having Blocker as just a flag/checkbox, but then I thought of simplifying priority field and adding Blocker as an option.  You don’t have to have it as a default option, I am using this to force the team to pick a priority


Fields

I added the fields that are appropriate to my team, these are what impediments will affect.  These are optional and I would recommend adding others based on your situation. 


Guiding principle: the simpler, the better. Add what makes sense for your team, but avoid turning this into another admin-heavy process.

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