The 4 types of Work in IT
Christopher Huntley
Helping clients design and implement cloud solutions for AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM clouds
The four types of work and how we handle them in consulting is something I think about often. This is a concept from the Phoenix Project. If you haven’t read that book, I think it’s an important read for anyone entering Kanban or Agile work environments. Taking from those lessons we have the 4 types of work that will cause someone to look for consulting help. The first three are very often encountered in IT while the 4th is more related to strategy
If you are on a sales prospecting call you need to find out which of these are pain points and then you know what you can do to help mitigate that pain. Knowing where to go requires knowing what your firm is truly great at. A funnel has a very wide opening and narrower exit. This means you can potentially put more in than you can get out. It all depends on how you fill the funnel. With that in mind let’s jump to the 4 types.
Firefighting: often related to difficulties with operations. Firefighting is also known as unplanned and unscheduled work. There is no limit to unplanned and unscheduled work. Any of that will derail a sprint. You can use missed spring goals and burndown charts to diagnose this as the problem area. Can be a symptom of a less than optimal Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CICD) process also. This is almost always mitigated via reduced workload to current internal staff via augmentation of another area or if the problem can be identified specifically, or potentially professional services projects. This is generally the most difficult space to insert a new firm as the business processes are unknown and you have a lot on the line with operations. If you are in a company with firefighting issues, until you stop flooding the funnel with this type of work everything else will suffer.
Examples:
Work in progress: This is planned work that you just can’t get to or finish. A well planned, well understood project that requires resources. This can be handled by staff augmentation or a full project depending on where it is in progress and what things it is touching. This is not a full project that hasn’t yet started.
Examples:
IT Projects: These are preplanned projects that have some idea of an outcome, timeline and budget. Most likely encountered in some sort of RFP process. This is almost always professional services. You can probably do this with some staff augmentation if its expertise related but generally it’s better to control the process and deliverables.
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Examples:
Business Projects:
Being in tech sales I don’t often get involved in this sales conversation.
For me more often than not this comes up at live client events where we're chatting. This is often more aligned with strategy consulting than technology consulting. Not to belabor the point but consulting isn’t done in a vacuum and often multiple aspects of the firm will play a role. IT tends to be closely aligned with any business outcome and this is likely part of a larger interaction.
Examples:
In summary the four types of work have different challenges in the world of IT consulting sales. I like to approach them differently based on what exactly which type we’re targeting. The types of work are part of a series of philosophies I call the 4 4's.