Working with urgent, unplanned work
Advanced
difficulty
Stage 2
Agile IQ® Level
Technical Debt
Product Health
Overview
Urgent, un-planned work might seem like “business as usual” (BAU), but requests at the last minute by other areas of the organisation, or even external clients and stakeholders, can be easily managed.
What is un-planned work?
Un-planned work is any type of work request, issue, bug, or even project that the team has no awareness of until the request comes. When it comes, it comes with the following demands:
- It’s urgent.
- It must be done now and can’t wait.
The impact of un-planned work
Un-planned work has the following impacts that are often unseen:
- Interruptions create waste. Research in the field of neuroscience shows that any interruption , even a phone call, can waste up to 23 minutes of people’s time.
- Planned work becomes a second class citizen. Typically, teams drop what they have planned in order to attend to the urgent work.
- Planning effort is wasted. The time spent refining work, planning work and then starting delivery is now wasted because attention is now focussed on the urgent work.
Unplanned work says something about your product's health
An outage is a result of poor product health
System outages in software and severity one defects and issues are all a sign of a product’s health. If people are constantly calling the help desk about problems they’re having, it is likely that the user experience needs attention. These are all forms of “technical debt”.
If left untreated, technical debt grows. Soon, all a team does is fight technical debt over delivering value to stakeholders.
Try This
1. Make technical debt transparent
Make Technical debt transparent. If a design decision is made that will eventually require re-work ensure that as soon as rework is needed that it is recorded in the Product Backlog.
2. Spend time paying back technical debt
Allocating dedicated time to “pay back” technical debt is critical for Product Owners to strengthen the health of their products and reducing the likelihood of unplanned work.
3. Ops & dev teams need better collaboration
When your ops and dev teams are separate, a Product Owner may not have visibility of the tickets being managed by ops teams as a result of technical debt. If your teams are separate, regular communication that makes issues management transparent to the Product Owner is key to then recording “payback” of technical debt in the Product Backlog.
4. Take learnings to the Retrospective
Whether its poor code or a simple mistake, there’s always room for improvement. The Retrospective makes an excellent opportunity to assess how to improve coding practices, reduce mistakes, look for smarter ways of coding, and how to improve the quality of code.
5. Constantly refactor
Old code should be continuously assessed for opportunities to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. Great Product Owners put time aside to make this happen to futureproof their products.
Reduce Technical Debt
Allocating dedicated time to "pay back" technical debt is critical for Product Owners to strengthen the health of their products and reducing the likelihood of unplanned work.
Unplanned work says something about your stakeholder relationships
Urgent stakeholder work happens less when you build strong relationships
For those people working with Scrum and delivering services, every time urgent work emerges without notice it is because of a failure to establish a strong collaborative relationship with the customer so that the two of you are aware of each other’s needs and work deadlines.
Some teams work by the mantra “your deadline is not our deadline”.
Try This
Turn urgent, un-planned work into planned work
Many stakeholders will say work is urgent only because in the past if they have not stressed its urgency the work never gets done.
- Determine the actual date the work products will be used by customers.
- Schedule the work to be done in a Sprint that aligns to the use date, not the date the stakeholders.
