Fight Unplanned Work, the Silent Killer of Projects
<p>Visualizing the health of your codebase offers an actionable starting point and potential trigger for paying down technical debt. However, any organizations looking to improve their delivery efficiency have to take a broader perspective. In addition to the technical improvements, you also need to re-shape the engineering and collaborative strategies to ensure no new bottlenecks are introduced.</p>
<p>All of these changes are investments which take time, meaning we need to bring visibility to the outcome to ensure improvements have a real effect. Measuring trends in unplanned work offers a simple solution by complementing the code-level metrics with a higher-level perspective.</p>
<p><em>Unplanned work </em>is anything that you didn’t anticipate or plan for such as bug fixes, service interruptions, or flawed software designs causing excess rework. By its very nature, unplanned work leads to stress and unpredictability, transforming a company into a reactive rather than pro-active entity. In fact, in <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-phoenix-project-a-novel-about-it-devops-and-helping-your-business-win-anniversary-george-spafford/6459456" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win</em></a>— a wonderful and highly recommended read — Gene Kim describes unplanned work as being “the silent killer of IT companies.” Let’s see how to use the concept for communicating expectations and future improvements.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/fight-unplanned-work-the-silent-killer-of-projects-fb437cc2b302"><strong>Website</strong></a></p>