Once upon a time, there was a company with a smaller internal IT development team (somewhere between 3 and 10 people, I can’t remember). They were working on a few critical and not-so-critical software systems of the company, doing various developments, bug fixes, and some maintenance tasks. The company did great in their market, they were developing and growing well, but they had to move fast if they’d wanted to stay ahead. There were new customers, new products, and new ideas. This meant a lot of work and pressure for our poor IT department because the future depended on it. There was always much more to do than possible with this handful of IT people. The business came up with newer and newer ideas and development requests. On top of that, everything seemed to be extremely important and very urgent.
So what did our poor IT department do? They felt the pressure and knew that the future of the company was in their hands, so they tried to work harder and harder and hoped it was going to work out somehow. But the work seemed to always be more than a week ago. It seemed as if they were moving backward, not ahead. ‘If only there were a week of undisturbed work, we could finally catch ourselves,’ they said. They didn’t have time to administer tasks or build a system with processes. They didn’t have the capacity to measure, estimate or plan anything because they were always in an emergency mode, only trying to put out the fire. They had to keep swimming or they would just sink like a stone.
Later they tried to create task-lists in different spreadsheet files, but those soon got outdated and out of hand because the new requests were just flowing in uncontrollably. Always something new, something else, something more important and more urgent.
Zol's Work 