Why Blockers Can’t Be Overlooked (+How to Manage Them Effectively!)

Today, let’s take a step back to basics and talk about blockers: what they are, why it’s crucial to keep your finger on the pulse of blocked work, and what opportunities come with handling them head-on.

Let’s be real… blockers often don’t get the attention they deserve, but by the end of this article, I hope to spark some ideas on how to move from feeling stuck when facing blockers to feeling empowered to manage them effectively.

Discovering the True Impact of Blockers

So, why are blockers such a big deal? Blockers are any impediments or obstacles that prevent a work item from moving forward in your process.

Unclear requirements, lack of expertise, third-party dependencies, or waiting for customer feedback are just a few reasons that cause blockers. Despite your team having the capacity to handle the work, these issues bring progress to a halt.

Think about it: there’s a high chance that blocked work is one of the top reasons you’re experiencing delays.

Yet, the biggest issue we face is our own mindset.

We often act like there’s nothing we can do about blockers. We let them sit there, out of our control, sometimes even giving them a dedicated column as if blocking work is just a standard step in our delivery process.

This mindset is all wrong.

We shouldn’t see blocked work as something beyond our control.

Instead, we need to bring awareness and hold our teams to the same standard.

You want your teams to develop a sense of intolerance for work that’s just sitting there.

This feeling should become second nature for everyone. Imagine a team where everyone is actively working to resolve the problems that slow them down. That’s the kind of proactive culture we’re aiming for.

How to Cultivate a Proactive Team Culture

So, how do we foster this culture of intolerance for idle work?

It starts with visibility.

Encourage your team to bring up blockers during daily standups every single day and brainstorm ways to overcome them. Make it clear to them that blockers are not just roadblocks, they are opportunities for improvement.

This can be as simple as asking the right questions during meetings:

• What’s currently blocked?
• What’s our plan to resolve the blocker?
• Who can help with that?

By consistently addressing these questions, you create a habit of attacking blockers head-on. Your team will start seeing blockers not as something they don’t have control over but as challenges they have to address.

And that’s all you need to shift the perspective from ignorance and intolerance.

How to Handle Blockers on Different Platforms

Now, let’s talk about how to handle blockers across different platforms. Here are some tips on managing blocked work so you can visualize it and gain actionable insights:

• In Jira: Use Jira flags to mark issues as blocked. Remember, a blocked work item is still in progress, a commitment, a piece of value your customers are waiting for.

Both blocked and unblocked tasks should count towards your WIP limit and have a Class of Service assigned to them. Discuss blockers during daily standup meetings and escalate issues if needed to encourage swift resolution.

• In Azure DevOps:
  • Create a Custom Field: Start by creating a custom boolean field to mark work items as blocked.
  • Mark Work Items: Use this custom field in your Azure board to mark blocked items.
  • Follow Up: Once the item is unblocked, remove the flag.

So, why bother with all this? Here’s the deal: it helps you visualize blocked work, making it easier to track and analyze. On your Nave dashboards, edit your dashboard and select the custom blocked field. This will highlight blocked items with a big red dot on your charts. Nave will track your blocked time, allowing you to see how blocked work impacts your performance.

On the Cycle Time Scatterplot by Nave, the red dots represent tasks that have been flagged as blocked at any point during their lifecycle.

Analyzing blocked work during retrospectives is a game-changer. Use tools like Nave’s Cycle Time Scatterplot to detect blocked work items. Switch to a bar chart to see how much time is spent on specific block reasons. Focus on blocked time and dig into the reasons behind these blockages.

Improve Your Delivery Speed by Prioritizing Initiatives

From then on, to make the most of your improvement efforts, you want to prioritize resolving the blockers that take the most of your time first.

This process is called blocker clustering analysis. Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing it:

• Identify Your Blockers: At the moment a work item gets blocked, flag it and specify the reason for the blockage. This could be due to internal dependencies, external dependencies, defects, expedite requests, etc. Use a dedicated custom field from type “select list” to specify your blocked reasons.
• Capture Blockers’ Time: Track the total time each work item spends in a blocked state. This helps in understanding how much waiting time is accumulated due to specific blockers. Use the Cycle Time Breakdown Chart for that purpose.

Agile teams across the globe use the Cycle Time Breakdown chart by Nave to identify the blockers that slow them down the most.

• Determine Root Causes: Analyze the data to identify which blockers are causing the most significant delays. This involves breaking down the blocked time by reason and evaluating the impact of each type of blocker.
• Visualize and Analyze: Now that you understand the distribution of blocked time, choose the most impactful one your performance and create an initiative to resolve it first.

Here’s your action item: If you haven’t connected Nave to your product management tool, now is that time. Start your trial here, it’s free for 14 days, no strings attached →

And remember, don’t let blocked work become a standard part of your process. Shift your mindset, create a proactive culture, and tackle blockers head-on. By doing so, you’ll not only speed up your time to market but most importantly, you’ll unlock new opportunities for improvement.

If you know someone struggling with blockers, share this article. I believe that plenty of teams need to hear that message, so let’s spread the word!

Alright, my friend. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll see you again next week, same time and place for more managerial insights. Have a wonderful day!