It’s day one of the most exciting project of your career. You and your team are going to build the next great social media website! The potential rewards you will reap are exceeded only by how daunting the deadlines are. The whole team is energized and gets right down to business. You’re all slinging code day and night, heads-down and in the flow. During one of your rare free moments during the day you pause and take a look around you. Right then it hits you: this is one of the best teams you’ve ever worked with! You all rock!

• And then somebody mentions that IT won’t give the team a place to build their code for another six weeks.
• And the security team wants to review all of your code, but they can’t get around to it for another 2 months.
• And your lead developer? Your main man? The man with a plan? His dog just died.

Suddenly, you are totally screwed.

That’s what impediments feel like. It doesn’t feel very good does it? All of a sudden, the project that looked like a guaranteed “win” just became a lot more likely to fail.

The impediments that teams deal with are perhaps one of the most under appreciated subjects in the project management world. When not uncovered and resolved, impediments can do harm to an otherwise well run project in ways that are often subtle and easy to miss.

That's what this book is all about: how you find, track, and destroy impediments.