One Way to Get More Work Done

You very likely work with a ticketing system. How often have you grumbled and then contacted the ticket’s author, asking them for all the missing details? Quite often? That’s because communication is hard. It takes considerable effort from the writer to provide the necessary information. They’re not doing your job and have no experience doing so. How would they know exactly what you need?

This poor communication leads to rework. And rework is a bad thing. It forces a context switch for you and the ticket author. You have to find something else to work on; your ticket author has to drop their work and clarify the information they provided. You might even have to talk to each other, in person. Yuck!

I assume this is not new to you. I don’t have to explain to a programmer, that a ticket with a half-assed feature description is annoying to deal with. You have better things to do than chasing down your Product Owners to ask them questions.

But have you thought about the work that you send to other people?

• If you reply to your PO in a ticket, did you make sure your answer is free from overly technical details? They might find it difficult to understand your message otherwise.
• When you send someone a request, how often do they come back to you for clarification on what exactly you ask them to do?
• If you send a script to the operations team to have them run it in production, how sure are you that it works? Will they come back to you to ask if it’s normal that it’s not logging anything? Are there there any datasets in production that will make your script crash?

In all those cases, you might be like the person writing the incomplete ticket. Your work/request/message needs to be sent back to you for further clarification, interrupting the work of two people.

Make note of why your work is sent back to you and improve it in the future. The less often you have to perform rework, the more time you have to do other things.