Unplanned Work

Code will be used in ways we cannot anticipate, in ways it was never designed for, and for longer than it was ever intended.
—Joshua Corman

Picture this: A senior business executive sees business value in an integration between her company’s product and another software application. He hires a third party to integrate a new service and promises zero impact to her Product Development teams.

The external, offshore team designs an integration but overlooks the fast growth of the user base, resulting in an overburdened database. The database server revolts, setting off alerts to the duty pager. Operations staff have to stop work on a high priority task to troubleshoot the angry database. Two cups of coffee and two hours later, the issue is resolved, and people can get back to work on that high-priority task they were deep into before the interruption occurred…right after their meeting that starts in ten minutes. This was not the intent of the senior business executive.

People were interrupted and pulled away from important work. The interruption (the unplanned work) caught people off guard. It was an unintended consequence of a move by a well-meaning executive which negatively impacted high-priority work, work that will now be delayed because of the interruption. The time spent away from working on the original priority is irreversibly wiped out. This is the problem with unplanned work—it sets back planned work. It increases uncertainty in the system and makes the system less predictable as a result.

Sometimes unplanned work comes in the form of a necessary strategic change in direction: “Let’s stop marketing to everyone and just focus on large enterprises.” But often, unplanned work comes in the form of unnecessary rework or expedited work requests. These are the fires that stem from some failure. Demand from failure is called, predictably, failure demand, and it is a frequent target for Thief Unplanned Work. It can be the case, though, that a dependency from a team just down the hall from you is a greater risk to not responding to your needs. This usually results in a communication up your line of command to the common denominator leader and then back down the food chain to the person responsible, resulting in an interruption/delay to that person’s lunch (hopefully, it’s still in the fridge).

Let me be clear, I am not suggesting all work should be preplanned. It is irrespon-sible (maybe even delusional), to believe that it’s possible to know everything up front while planning a complex project. Quite the contrary—we don’t know much about what we don’t yet know. Sometimes changes in direction are necessary, because new information emerges as we work to solve problems. A major value of the Agile movement is to encourage responding to change over following a plan. Life is uncertain. Change is inevitable. It’s a law—the second law of thermodynamics to be precise.

Unplanned and expedited work steals time away from work that’s creating value. The 2016 State of DevOps Report survey data show that high performers are able to spend 28% more time on planned work.1 Unplanned work is considered a measure of quality because the more unplanned work, the less time for creating value. “All hands on deck” incidents tend to reduce performance and increase variability.

As mentioned above, unplanned work steals time away from planned work. However, there are times when it is understandable and necessary for unplanned work to muscle its way to the front of the priority queue. If the request happens to be, “Please look into why no one can log in to the website,” then you really have no choice but to drop what you’re doing to fix the issue. Unpredictable fluctuations in demand can reduce the ability to deliver things as expected.

You know Thief Unplanned Work is stealing time from you when urgent issues pull people away from focused efforts on creating value. This could manifest in anything from an unexpected fire drill to a malfunction with a heavily used program that then adds uncertainty and variability into our everyday work. Because of this interruption, something else is going to take longer than expected. If the work is frequently late, chances are Thief Unplanned Work (i.e., failure demand or strategic change in direction) is stealing not only your time but also your predictability.

The reality is that we work in webs of interdependencies. The complexity of human interactions consistently produces things that no one wants. Thief Unplanned Work is a mainstay in a complex world where change and uncertainty flourish.

Unplanned work not only causes its own problems but brings with it all the problems of too much WIP: context switching, interruptions, delayed work, and increased cost. When unplanned work (such as fixing broken functionality on a website) creeps into the everyday work scene, it increases the amount of work already sitting on your plate. The more urgent unplanned work that interrupts your day, the bigger the pileup of partially completed planned work. The relationship between unplanned work and too much WIP is a twisted, codependent liaison resulting in heaps of unexpected work that is impossible to catch up on. Unless you keep stepping up, planned responsibilities fall behind. Overfunctioning becomes an automatic response, eventually becoming dysfunctional and imbalanced. That’s why it is so important to learn to identify and tackle, as early and often as possible, the issues that Thief Unplanned Work creates.

Unplanned work increases risk, uncertainty, reduces predictability, and smacks down morale. But that doesn’t mean we have to simply lay there and let Thief Unplanned Work walk all over us. There are ways we can fight back.

Making work visible is a core component in combating thieves like Thief Unplanned Work and is also a core component of kanban, the system that we will come back to again and again throughout this book. Kanban cards show all kinds of information that traditionally have been hard to see. Kanban cards live on kanban boards, and kanban boards answer questions like, “What is being worked on?” and “What state is the work in?” and “Who’s doing what?” All essential information is visible on the board, so you don’t have to chase down workers to ask them what is happening and you don’t have to wait for a politically sanitized weekly status report to get a glimpse of transparency.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Unplanned work adds unpredictability to the system.
It’s all about predictability and expectations. Unplanned work eats expectations for breakfast.
High-performing companies spend less time working on unplanned work than lower performing companies.
Sometimes we have no choice but to drop current projects to focus on urgent unplanned work.
Unplanned work steals time away from planned work.
Unplanned work is hard to see, but it can be made visible. Kanban helps to combat and better anticipate unplanned work by making work visible.
Plan for unplanned work by reserving capacity for when it arrives.