every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures.

Let me be clear. I need you to say no! We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just do, goddamnit!

Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work.

the four types of work: business projects, IT Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work. Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

Remember, unplanned work kills your ability to do planned work, so you must always do whatever it takes to eradicate it.

“You even used the term I like most for it: unplanned work. Firefighting is vividly descriptive, but ‘unplanned work’ is even better. It might even be better to call it ‘anti-work,’ since it further highlights its destructive and avoidable nature.

“At the plant, I gave you one category, which was business projects, like Phoenix,” I say. “Later, I realized that I didn’t mention internal IT projects. A week after that, I realized that changes are another category of work. But it was only after the Phoenix fiasco that I saw the last one, because of how it prevented all other work from getting completed, and that’s the last category, isn’t it? Firefighting. Unplanned work.”

“Ha! ‘Small credit card breach.’ I like that. Like ‘small nuclear reactor meltdown.’