Who is the manager responsible for the output of the sprint? Is it you, someone on the other side or a common manager of all the team members?

Have you asked them why they wait this long? This sounds like something you should bring up during a retrospective as something that can be improved. "When they do it" is honestly much to late to be tackling this issue, you need to work on getting them to stop doing it in the future.

@Helena, that's a great question, to which there's no simple answer I'm afraid. The scrum master stresses a lot that they just have a facilitating role and is no accountable or responsible for what the team does. We have an informal head of the vendor's team and myself who directs the project on our side (also informally).

You'll probably get better answers in the Project Management Stack.

@Kilisi, I imagine that's the reason. But what is the solution? The sprints are 2-week long. If we shorten them to just one week we will be spending 4-5h every week on sprint reviews, sprint planning and retro. That's a lot of time to spend in meetings. I'm not responsible for facilitating, but we do facilitate a lot: we make sure during the sprint planning that the user story can be done, ask for any blockers, help needed, etc.

You mention retros. Have you (or anyone else) brought this up at a retro? If so, what was the result? If not, why haven't you?

What is the "unorthodox Scrum"? Can you reveal some of it?

@user3295 Shorter sprints should mean shorter meetings, and you don't necessarily need to have every meeting for every sprint.

I guess part of the issue is Team Asia's "loss of face" in admitting that it isn't going to deliver - i.e. they hope for a miracle to happen and solve the problem, until they don't have any alternative but to accept reality.

Is it possible that this is a strategy of your contractor? Not working enough and then looking for an explanation and blaiming you for the blocker?

Asia has a lot of significantly different cultures. Which one are we talking here.

There might be some cultural issues here in the communication with Team Asia. This answer here provides some insight into the point that @alephzero raised: workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/164312/…

I don't even really understand how there are so many answers here, and so diverse. If a team isn't raising blockers until well after they've discovered them, they're simply not doing their job. Start documenting every time a particular person stops working without notifying the broader team, and for any individual who demonstrates a pattern of this behavior, get them on a PIP and get them out. I feel like debates about Scrum are a red herring here and this is a very simple question about performance management.

@AlexM I'm not sure if there is an actual delay in reporting blockers, or if the delay is in them starting tasks. Like maybe they complete 2 tasks, they start the 3rd, and realise they are blocked. But by then it's half-way through the sprint. (I'm assuming this is the case).

I know this pattern as a contractor, when working with other contractors from overseas for a common customer. Last project, it quickly evolved to some kind of blame-game, where there were weekly emails to the project lead stating "we are blocked because of those guys", despite it being at least mutual problems, if not even their own fault. I don't quite know if it's cultural or just some business-related behaviour, don't want to jump to conclusions here.

@orithena Agreed. However, "Asia" doesn't really narrow down the issue. Asia includes lots of countries and cultures. For example, my experience with Indians are that they seem to be yesmen who agree to everything, even if they don't understand the details. Additionally, Scrum is meant to reduce friction, but in this case it seems to be source of the friction...

@Aron You're completely right -- I did want to point to one (of many) examples of a cultural mindset that many westerners are completely unaware of. Should've marked that more clearly.