Impediment Removal — Communication and Vocabulary

An impediment is anything outside the team's power to resolve that blocks their progress — e.g., waiting for a vendor decision, access to a system, or a dependency on another team. The Scrum Master's job is to remove or escalate these.

Escalation means taking an unresolved impediment to someone with the authority to act — e.g., a product manager, department head, or senior engineer. The Scrum Master frames it clearly: 'This is blocking the team from delivering X by Y.'

An impediment backlog (or blocker list) is the Scrum Master's working list of all active obstacles — including who is responsible for resolution, the current status, and the escalation path if not resolved by a specific date.

Effective impediment escalation language is specific: names the team, the blocker, when it started, the business impact, and the exact action requested — making it easy for leadership to act quickly and understand urgency.

Technical impediments include: broken CI, missing dev environment, untested APIs. Organisational impediments include: waiting for approval, unclear ownership, cross-team dependencies, policy restrictions. Both are the Scrum Master's responsibility to address.