Urgent requests keep blowing up our sprint
Set the rule before the emergency, not during it. Define the categories, the rule for each, and what actually qualifies.
A great deal of time gets wasted debating what to do about items of work that all seem important. David Anderson's Kanban Method has a name for the answer: a class of service, which is a policy set in advance for a category of work so the team never argues it item by item.
Once the policy exists, an urgent request stops being a negotiation. Everyone already knows what happens. That is worth more than it sounds, because the debate itself is expensive and it happens at the worst possible moment.
The step teams skip is defining what qualifies. Skip it and everything becomes an expedite, which puts you back where you started with extra ceremony.
What you get
- A table for defining your classes of service and the rule for each
- The two real expedite rules, drop everything versus front of the queue, and the cost of each
- A prompt for writing the qualification test while nothing is on fire
- A field for the capacity you reserve each cycle for unplanned work
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Adapted from the Delivery chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.