another way. They simply left the room and asked the stakeholders to come to an agreement of what work should be prioritised, in line with the ITIL guiding
principle of ‘focus on value’. It should not be for the team to decide what is most important from a business perspective.
MANAGING DIFFERENT TYPES OF WORK
The customer meetings made it possible to choose and prioritize the work items coming from the business.
However, there were other types of work items in the team’s total workload and some of them, such as resolving technical debt, were not on the customers’ radar. After some discussion it was agreed that the work items could be divided into four categories:
- support
- enhancements (new features and changes)
- technical debt
- projects
This made the other types of work items visible to the customers but, as the customer saw their enhancement and support requests as more urgent, technical debt and project work still had difficulties reaching the WIP column. The team realized that something had to be done to make those work items that
were less urgent, but equally important, flow. The solution was to introduce limits on the different types of work.
Even though this created some initial protests from the customers, it proved successful in the long run as the customers started to see the positive impact of removing technical debt and increasing the overall quality of the IT service.