Labeling
The labeling for work scope is important to determine the effectivity of the DevOps team
Based on the reading The Phoenix Project, there are four different types of work that every DevOps unit must identify as they work through the value stream. Identifying this types of work is very important to measure and analyze the effectiveness of the DevOps team in a quarterly manner. This is why correctly labeling tickets and keeping track of them is very important to allocate the limited resources of an organization.
Four (4) Types of IT Work
The first three types of work fall under the category of Planned Work.
Business projects (Business) generate revenue or strategic value for the company, e.g. new software/features that add value to customers.
Internal projects (Internal) helps the internal customers (internal team, internal employees) in the organization to become more efficient and productive, e.g. maintaining/upgrading existing systems, or adding new security patches.
Updates (Updates) are required to stabilize and improve the original output from the 2 categories above, e.g. fixing bugs, updating versions, or refining the features.
The last type of work falls under the category of Unplanned Work, making it the work least desired in any value stream.
Critical Work (Critical) or unplanned work is the most dangerous type of work, because it disrupts, slows or blocks all 3 types of planned work above. Any resource spent on unplanned work (e.g. environment outage or database failure) means that the resource is not being used for other priorities. Firefighting also leaves you with no time/energy for planned work (nor to plan your work). This leads to more problems and more unplanned work in a vicious downward spiral.
DevOps units should avoid running into Unplanned Work as much as they can. In order to do this, they must first keep track of the type of work realized per sprint, therefore, every issue/ticket must always be categorized with one of these labels and in the end of the sprint, every label must be counted to be able to determine the effectivity of the team.
Labels
Business
Any ticket for the customer/client that "generate revenue or strategic value for the company".
Internal Any ticket for the internal customers (devs, admins or employees) to become more "efficient and productive".
Updates
Any ticket with the aim to stabilize the two previous categories that involved "Bugs, fixing, updating versions, or refining".
Critical
Any issues for unplanned work that involved "Critical bugs, Outages, fixing bad architectures or any type of Failure".
By the end of each week, we must count the amount of labels to keep track of how the time has been allocated in the team.
In theory, every organization want to allocate the majority of their time and resources in Planned Work and not in Unplanned Work.
Sample of Labels when Ticketing
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