Four Types of Work: Business, Internal, Changes, Unplanned

Definition

Every bit of IT Operations work falls into exactly four categories: business projects (new revenue-generating features or capabilities), internal IT projects (infrastructure, tools, security improvements), changes (planned modifications to systems in production), and unplanned work (firefighting—outages, incidents, unexpected failures). The first three are planned; the fourth is recovery work that prevents completion of the other three. Understanding and measuring these categories separately is the foundation for managing IT operations as a system.

In the Book

Bill Palmer goes through a journey to identify these four categories. Erik Reid challenges him: "Remember, there are four types of work. You've named business project work as one. When you have the other three, give me a call." After Phoenix explodes in production and Bill sees the change board go to zero percent completion, he realizes unplanned work is "the fourth category of work." He calls Erik back and states: "At the plant, I gave you one category, which was business projects, like Phoenix. Later, I realized that I didn't mention internal IT projects. A week after that, I realized that changes are another category of work. But it was only after the Phoenix fiasco that I saw the last one, because of how it prevented all other work from getting completed, and that's the last category, isn't it? Firefighting. Unplanned work."

Erik validates this, adding: "Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing [the other three]. Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury." He emphasizes that "unlike the other categories of work, unplanned work is recovery work, which almost always takes you away from your goals."

Why It Matters

This taxonomy replaces vague claims about "not having enough resources" with precise visibility into what is consuming capacity and why. It makes unplanned work—the most destructive category—visible and countable. Most IT operations teams intuitively know they are drowning in firefighting but cannot convince executives to fund prevention because they have no language to describe the problem. Naming unplanned work as its own category transforms the conversation from "we need more staff" to "we need to reduce our unplanned work from 70% to 20% of capacity by addressing the sources that generate it." It also reveals that changes and incidents are two separate problems requiring separate solutions.