Hi guys!
I have a team made up of devs, sre and architects. We have a product manager instead of a product owner but essentially they are the same thing I just think she has a little bit more responsibilities. The issue is my team does sprint work and support tickets like production support work that can come at any time, and a lot of times they come during the middle of the sprint. We call them unplanned work. These production tickets are also high priority items.
My question to you guys is how do you handle unplanned work throughout the sprint when there is so much unplanned work? Also I would like to note that this team do not have sprint goals and really struggle to provide them because so much of the work is unplanned and needs to be tracked.
The best thing to do is to plan for the unplanned work…
That can take a few forms; one route is to leave a “buffer” for that unplanned work; in practice a buffer is *usually* a good idea anyway in a Scrum context. if you aim for the mean (average) velocity then half the time you will do more, and half the time you will do less.
Having a buffer might also give you enough breathing space to be able to actually set a Sprint Goal, and start working towards the Product Goal step by step, doing Scrum “for real”
In a Scrum sense you’d not usually ingest work that might imperil the Sprint Goal, and so a buffer allows you to pick up service tickets and still make progress.
If you don’t want to do that, then maybe look at the Kanban Method; there you just pull work from the backlog. In the Kanban Method you have “classes of service”, one of which is Expidite; that’s pretty much where urgent work goes.
However, there’s some deeper stuff to maybe unpack…
– do you triage the production support tickets? Classifying them as “now”, “next Sprint” and “backlog” might be useful. Remember the Product Owner’s role is often about saying no to things, not saying yes to everything.
– what generates the production support tickets? Can you do anything to eliminate or automate them?