The c-suite has a lot to do. But few responsibilities are more consequential than deciding what their team's do. Time is their company’s most precious resource, and must be allocated strategically across competing priorities.
So you can imagine the shock of the CEO of a public company we work with who learned that only 28% of his team’s time was being spent on work they had actually planned to do. The majority of their time, an astonishing 72%, according to Parable’s analysis – was being diverted to something else, something we call Unplanned Work.
Planned Work:
Planned work is simply work that the company has planned to do, and typically falls into two main categories:
- Planned Work on Goals: Any time spent on goals that were set at the beginning of the planning cycle.
- Planned Work on Maintenance: Known tasks the business needs to complete to keep the lights on (also known as KTLO.)
Unplanned Work:
Unplanned work, on the other hand, has no explicit intention. But it’s always happening — sucking up resources without strategy or accountability. And it takes on many forms. But in our research, we've discovered a few areas where companies in every industry and at every size seem to be most vulnerable:
- Technical Debt
- Unplanned Maintenance
- Unplanned Feature/Product Requests
- Customer Fires
- Other Distractions
Unplanned Work is Killing Your Business
Last week, we wrote that time is a blindspot for many companies because it’s invisible.
Nowhere is this more salient than with Unplanned Work.
Since it is, quite literally, unplanned, it never shows up in Strategic Planning or Project Management tools, and is rarely evident in monthly business reviews. Despite the often massive disruption it causes to teams (and their ability to deliver), C-level executives only learn about it when the cost is too significant not to inform leadership. They remain blind to the majority of Unplanned Work, and are left unable to respond let alone anticipate in a timely manner.
It goes without saying that any hope at reducing misalignment at your company flies out the window without an educated understanding of how Unplanned Work is eating your business’s time, you need to know how much it actually consumes.
What Can You Do Today
While we’d love Parable’s solution to play a role in decoding your company’s Unplanned Work, you don’t need AI to start a conversation about where it lives within your company.
Here are a few questions you could ask your team this week to begin identifying where unplanned blindspots are forming:
- What unexpected project has had the biggest impact on your team’s ability to reach its goals?
- How do you currently account for – and report on – the impact of Unplanned Work on Planned Work?
- What’s one time-suck that you would love to get off your plate?
Start the Conversation
Once the concept of Unplanned Work is accepted across your leadership, conversations around how time is being pulled away from your top priorities become far less nebulous.
Unplanned Work is most detrimental when it’s ignored, so let’s give it its 15 minutes of fame and then start chipping away.
