One play from the tronghieu/agent-skills scrum-master set (MIT), imported on its own (owner-approved acquisition, gap report row 18). The set's init script and its other plays are NOT imported. Fleet note: this fleet's sprints close on scope completion, not on a calendar; read any fixed-cadence wording accordingly — it has been stripped where the source carried it.

Impediments — the Shield play

Impediments don't get resolved by being written down. They get resolved by being visible, owned, and aged — and escalated before they fossilize. The register exists so that nothing blocks quietly.

impediments.md — the register

# Impediments — <team>

| IM# | Opened | What & who it blocks | Owner | State | Last action | Links |
|-----|--------|----------------------|-------|-------|-------------|-------|
| IM-2 | 2026-08-26 | Staging env down — blocks A-105, QA idle | Tùng | aging | nudge draft ready 08-29 → state.md | SC-2 |

Rules:

• An impediment enters the register the moment a pulse or a conversation surfaces it — not at the next ceremony.
• Every IM# has an owner. "Unowned" is written as owner: NONE in the table and reported as its own problem — an unowned impediment is the oldest kind.
• An owner who also owns the story the impediment blocks is a conflict, not a plan — nobody fixes the infra and ships the feature at once. Flag the join; propose an owner outside the blocked work.
• Closing records what worked, one line. Closed lines stay in the table; they feed the retro data pack and the health-scan.

The aging ladder

Age drives action. Check ages at every pulse and every re-entry; list open impediments oldest-first.

Age	State	The move
0–2 days	fresh	Owner works it. Note it, stay out of the way.
3–6 days	aging	Nudge: draft a short message to the owner — what's stuck, what would unstick it, offer help.
≥ 7 days	stale	Escalate: draft a message to whoever can actually fix it, propose a plan B, tell the user plainly this now costs the sprint goal.
Outgrows the team	project-level	Hand off to the risk register (below).

Thresholds are defaults — a hard team agreement in context.md overrides them. What never changes: age is checked, and rising age forces a bigger move. An impediment nudged four times is not being managed; it is being watched.

The ladder binds every play that touches the register, not just tend-impediments. A retro prep that meets a 12-day impediment drafts its escalation in that same session and marks the state stale — root-cause work is added on top of the ladder move, never substituted for it.

Handoffs — the honest-hands rule

This skill has no legs. Every nudge and escalation is a draft: the message text, a named recipient proposed from context.md or the PM roster — ask only when the files offer nobody — and a follow-up note in state.md ("check IM-4 next session").

Two states, and the words never drift past them:

• draft ready <date> — the message text exists in a file. The reply alone dies with the window: save the draft beside its follow-up in state.md and point the register cell at it. No saved text, no claim — "escalation drafted" with nothing to show is a violation, not a shortcut. The next session will read the register and believe it.
• sent <date> — only when the user confirms it went out, or asked us to send it through a connected tool.

There is no past-tense "escalated (by me)" — the reply says "draft ready, not sent" and the user says when it becomes sent. A draft is written to its recipient, in the recipient's frame; the test is whether the user could forward it unedited. Analysis addressed to the user ("what I'd worry about...") is not a draft. Tightening a reply removes duplication, never the artifact — the quoted messages are the part the user can use. Never mark an impediment "handled" because a draft exists.

Escalation drafts name the cost, not the villain:

"IM-4: staging has been down 9 days. Sprint goal ★ stories can't be verified; QA has been idle 3 of the last 5 days. We need either infra time this week or a decision to test in prod behind a flag. Which do you want?"

Project-level handoff — IM# ↔ R#

Some impediments outgrow the team: they need budget, another department, or authority nobody in the room has. If _project/ carries a project-manager workspace, that is where they belong.

1. Draft the risk entry in R# form (risk, probability × impact, owner, trigger) for the user to paste into registers/risks.md — never write that file yourself.
2. Link both ways: the IM# line gets → R12, and the drafted R# text cites the IM#.
3. The impediment stays open here until the block actually clears — a risk being tracked is not a block being gone.

No project-manager workspace → same drafting move, addressed to whoever holds the authority (a sponsor, a manager), tracked only here.

The sweep

Impediment work is a habit, not an event. Every pulse touches the register (rule 4 of the pulse play). Once a sprint — at the pulse nearest mid-sprint — do the full sweep: re-age everything, chase owner: NONE, check whether sent escalations actually moved anything, and surface the median age. Median age above sprint length is a health-scan trigger (see anti-patterns.md, impediment rot).

Source: tronghieu/agent-skills · @ 1a4b81dc6964 · skills/scrum-master/references/impediments.md · Imported 2026-10-07, acquire-adapted. License MIT.