Loop - Ad Hoc Work
Setting up and maintaining your team's process loops is your secondary focus as a manager, after expecting and fostering leadership. All loops share an execution steps, which we discussed before.
What is ad hoc work?
As a matter of course, small ad hoc tasks, bugs, investigations, etc., will arise that need immediate attention. This is not exceptional, and shouldn't require deviating from our normal execution process.
How to handle ad hoc work?
Based on our previous discussion about execution, the way to handle ad hoc work is to:
- Create a task, with enough context and details
- Put that task in the 'emergent' lane, unassigned and in ready state
- Communicate with the team that this work came up, ask for an owner
- Wait for it to be done
Who can create and add ad hoc tasks to the board?
Ideally, any team member can create ad hoc tasks: engineers, manager, product manager. However, this can lead to increasing randomization and context switches. In this case, it's sometimes necessary to gently intervene as manager to act as gatekeeper.
How to manage a constant influx of ad hoc work?
If ad hoc work is constant and unexpected, it's a signal of instability that usually has two root causes: 1) work is not being defined properly; or 2) software quality is deficient. The way of addressing both is outside our scope here, but typically involves a revision in underlying processes, for instance putting more thought at the requirement or project planning stage, or taking a step back from project work to stabilize the software.
However, ad hoc work could also be expected, for instance if the team is quickly iterating based on customer feedback, doing a bug bash, performing routine production maintenance, or any number of other situations. In that case, there is really no change to the process apart from ensuring enough engineers are free to handle it. Some engineers in the team may enjoy this kind of work, in which case they could become defacto owners, or a support rotation may be more appropriate if the work needs to be distributed equally, done outside business hours, or to ensure knowledge transfers, for example. More on support rotation in the Production Maintenance section.