The Ratios of Your Work

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~1000 word | ~6 min read
There’s some truth in the statement:

“Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you what you care about”.

The idea is that our decisions about how we use our time, reflect our values. And the same is true for the distribution of our work. Books like The Goal, or The Phoenix Project suggest there are 4 categories for our work. In IT, these are:

Business Projects - Building new capabilities for the business
Internal Project - Building new capacity for IT
Operation Changes - Standard Maintenance, or OMS
and Unplanned Work - Something’s on fire! We need to fix it!

But how much of each of these you do, can tell a lot about the health of your company’s technology strategy. Certain patterns of distribution among these categories indicates systemic malaise. No one would argue consistently doing a majority of Unplanned Work is a good thing. But they might argue that doing an overwhelming majority of Business Projects is. I could repeat myself about how Leftover Maintenance Become Unplanned Work, but there are other patterns too.

0% Internal Projects

Consider what it would mean for a department to never work on internal projects. Any Technologist knows this means tech-debt isn’t paid down. It means that new technologies aren’t explored! Translated for the business, that means that when the next big thing comes we won’t be in a position to benefit from it, at all. Technology, and business for that matter, have long been ‘Grow or Die’. Internal Projects are how your company’s ability to wield technology grows. If you are not investing in Internal Projects, your system is decaying. Expect maintenance to expand to the point of consuming capacity for Business Projects.

The good news is, it doesn’t take much to fend this off. But you must be diligent, and consistent. Internal Projects are not an endless litany of proof-of-concepts. Rather, they should be strategic, intentional investments. This time needs to be consistently applied. And it must be rigorously defended against the tyranny of the urgent. Little and Often Make Much. Here, even preserving 10% of your time consistently, can make a world of difference.

‘High’ % of Operational Changes

For the propose of this discussion, a high percentage of Operational Changes would be 40% or more. If 40% or more of your work is just keeping the lights on, that’s high! If you’re seeing this much OMS, you’ve got too many plates spinning. The cure is to start taking down plates. Or to start building automated plate spinners (i.e. Internal Projects).

This is typically the default pattern for Project-oriented, IT-as-Cost-Center organizations. In such organizations the goal is to build some new tool, and then move it into ‘maintenance mode’. The execution and follow-thru by both sides is lacking, even if the initial idea was good. The business will naturally move it’s attention to the next new thing.

But we, IT, seldom do a good job explaining the trade-offs to the business. “What benefits or costs change when they delay maintenance, or other hardening work?” As a result, we’re left trying to spin more and more plates until eventually one or more fall. Remember, all current Business Projects will eventually move into maintenance mode! But if we have an on-ramp to ‘Maintenance Mode’, we must also have an off-ramp! There’s no such thing as “free lunch”. A fixed IT-as-Cost-Center budget, cannot to fit all things.

So create space for yourself and for your business. Retire tools where the value-trade-off isn’t present any more. Create space for yourself, by growing out of the problem. Through Internal Projects, you create new capacities and opportunities, like automated plate spinners.

A Note about Unplanned Work

Even in a stable system, you should still expect occasional unplanned work. You cannot remove it. Though you can reduce certain classes of unplanned work. After all it’s impossible to predict when the next Crowdstrike will happen. The key is in ‘Special Causes’ and ‘Common Causes’ of Unplanned Work. Read Deming’s The New Economics for more on this.

Now What?

With all this talk about work distribution, what do you do now?
While the answer is simple, but not easy:
Start with Visibility First.
If you cannot see what kind of work your doing, you cannot analyze it.
Nor can you change it’s distribution.
Observe Before You Tweak!
Read How to Fix a Broken Work-System for more on this and why.
Then, Create Flow.
If work isn’t flowing through your system, you won’t see the patterns.
Plus flow allows you to deliver some value while you’re re-balancing your system.
Finally, Tweak the Distribution!
Tweak the mix or work released to the teams.
Stop Starting, and Start Finishing!