from Hacker News

Planning for Unplanned Work in Linear

by cristinacordova on 11/16/23, 7:58 PM with 33 comments

• by yjftsjthsd-h on 11/16/23, 10:11 PM

  > Unplanned work happens unexpectedly, but it’s not unexpected. You know that there will be bug reports, you just don’t know when, where, and in what shape they will come up. The only thing that is certain is that they will appear.

  I am tempted, half tongue-in-cheek, to suggest simply scheduling it:

      09:00-09:30 get coffee and morning standup
      09:30-11:30 work on project A
      11:30-12:30 lunch
      12:30-14:00 deal with the emergency of the day
      14:00-17:00 work on project B
  

  And for all that that's exaggerated for humorous effect, I actually have played with scheduling blocks of time for catching up on Slack messages, which is pretty similar really.

• by cratermoon on 11/17/23, 12:58 AM

  I kind of like the article take on how to handle emergent issues, but I don't like that it still sort of silos software development into two parts -- planned and unplanned.

  I hate the term "unplanned" to describe this kind of work. By using a very narrow definition of "plan", for work "organized and scheduled in advance" but only within projects and roadmaps, it sort of works. A more informal usage of unplanned, though, suggests a kind of blindness to the reality of software development and maintenance.

  The reality is that the effort in software development isn't easily divided into these streams. The article fails to address an important consequence of putting effort into fighting fires: the project plans and roadmaps of the affected teams will be disrupted. This is where the term "unplanned" really fails, because if the organization never takes into account the effort taken to address issues and emergencies, the plans are worse than having no plan at all.

  On a different note, one place I consulted with had its planning and tracking tool (Jira-like Azure DevOps) directly feed into its accounting system, such that different types of work were bucketed into different amortization flows. Planned work was a capital expenditure (CapEx), while anything funneled into Unplanned became an operating expenditure (OpEx). Any accountant that knows the implications of CapEx vs. OpEx can see where this is going. This company had a lot of bugs and issues that were left unaddressed.

• by dmos62 on 11/17/23, 1:29 AM

  Put whatever unexpected work comes up into a general inbox somewhere, without preprocessing it (i.e. without figuring the next steps). Then periodically process what's in the inbox (figuring out the next steps and scheduling them), once a day, once a week, whatever. Also, buffer for unexpected stuff in your deadlines, in my work it's generally 40%.

• by esafak on 11/17/23, 4:46 AM

  They had to call it an "Ask" :(

• by asicsarecool on 11/17/23, 1:08 AM

  Has anyone here used Linear? Looks interesting

• by marginatum on 11/19/23, 12:48 AM

  Hi. Ty for the article and responses. Is there a similar open source, transparent, and modifiable tool using things like git or emacs org mode? Please don't flame the noob.

• by jjk166 on 11/17/23, 2:56 AM

  Absolutely nothing in this actually covered how to plan for unplanned work. While yes becoming aware of issues quicker and preventing things from falling through the cracks is great and all, it's still strictly post hoc. "Dealing with unplanned work" would be a better title.