Leftover Maintenance Becomes Unplanned Work

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~280 Words | ~1.5min Read

Leftover Maintenance becomes Unplanned Work.
Most teams plan some amount of time for Operations, Maintenance, and Support, or OMS, work. But when that fire breaks out, which work does it interrupt first? Most teams I know default to interrupting scheduled OMS before interrupting their planned work.

On the surface this makes sense. Planned work is the net-new value stuff! So of course we want to protect it. But you must be careful of this default.

Falling behind on planned work usually interrupts OMS too. That maintenance gets kicked further and further out. When was the last time your team stopped to true up to the ‘planned’ maintenance they missed? It’s a hard business case to make. What about the last time you were called to double-down on ‘planned work’ that had to make it? Much more common.
Maintenance, left undone, eventually demands that you do it. Dr. Goldratt, father of the Theory of Constraints, states in his lectures:

“Either you will schedule maintenance, or the machine will schedule it for you!”

Defaulting to interrupting planned maintenance first, means the machine is going to schedule it for you. It might be next year. It might be next week. Or it might be during your next deployment.

Instead of letting the machine decide, create some rules. Empower the team to decide. They have the best sense of the cost of deferred maintenance. Or better yet, create some decision rules on how to strategically weigh interruptions. Then delegate those to the team, and regularly check-up on it.

Leftover maintenance becomes unplanned work.
Will you decide when to do maintenance?
Or will you let the machine decide?

This is an excellent arena to practice effective delegation with your team.