Anything that prevents the team from meeting their potential (e.g. chairs are uncomfortable). If organizational, it is the Scrum Master’s responsibility to eliminate it. If it is internal to the team, then they themselves should do away with it.
Some types of impediments:
- Blockers (for a user story)
- People issues
- We (anyone on the Team) is not skilled or knowledgeable enough
- Technical issues
- Lack of knowledge
- Less than perfect skill (in one area)
- Operational issues
- Managerial Issues
- Organizational issues
- Process issues
- Outside disruptions (outside means from outside the Team)
- External things (weather, riots, war, etc)
- Problems that the Pigs have at home (eg, lack of babysitter)
- Lack of positive things (eg, the Team needs its own Coke machine or ping pong table)
- Business or customer issues
- Culture and waterfall attitudes
- Impediments to faster Scrum/Agile adoption
- Etc Etc