Unplanned Work

Introduction#

Like good agilists, you’ve refined your work into small digestible tasks with estimates. You’ve groomed the backlog so the team knows exactly what is in it. Your Product Owner helps you determine your priority. At the sprint planning meeting, everyone agrees on the sprint goal and the tasks required to accomplish it. You all feel confident that you can hit that goal in the given sprint. You have done everything as correctly as you know how. However, come the end of the sprint, you still miss your sprint goal! “How could this have happened?” becomes the theme of your team’s retro. The conversation revolves around unforeseen problems, systems being down, production bugs, and adhoc requests from the business. All of these issues took time and resources away from the goal of the sprint. It was work that the team had no idea about during the sprint planning meeting. This is unplanned work.

Symptoms Of Unplanned Work#

Unplanned work is a very destructive problem. It grows overtime, is unseen by stakeholders, and will pull an unexpected amount of effort away from the team’s goals. If your team has a clear view of the goals and an understanding of the work that needs to be done, yet you are still unable to hit those goals - then you likely have an unplanned work problem. You must learn to identify what sprint-sucking distractions bog down your team. A few examples of unplanned work are as follows:

  • manual interventions
  • bugs
  • data gathering
  • failing tests
  • failure to deploy

Anything that has your team focused on work that does not contribute to your sprint’s goal or tasks is by definition unplanned work.

Remediation#

Step 1: Make The Problem Visible#

The first step to solving this problem is to make it painfully visible. Every single unplanned work item needs to be called out explicitly. Some ways to do this could be to use your Kanban board to either tag work that has been effected by the unplanned work, or add the unplanned work onto the board as separate items. The goal here is to be able to study the intrusions and identify the source(s). The entire team must understand the causes so decisive action can be taken.

Step 2: Address The Source#

Create and assign tasks to resolve the identified root-problems from step 1. It is paramount that each of these items are resolved so the distractions do not perpetually continue. Attempt to fix at least one source of unplanned work every sprint. In the book The Phoenix Project, there is a powerful quote that expresses this principle:

Improving daily work is more important than doing daily work

Step 3: Measure Progress#

Reducing unplanned work on your team is just as important to the business as it is to your team. Just like any other long-term goal, you will need to track and measure the progress of defeating unplanned work. Make it something that you talk about during every single sprint ritual. Refine, prioritize, plan, execute, and review this work. What you will begin to see is that sprint goals are achieved more often. More then that, though - team morale will increase and you will gain some breathing room to think proactively about future work instead of reactively dealing with unexpected problems in a sprint.