Keeping a Work Log
Recently I have begun keeping a work log for those times when I pick up ad-hoc requests to get tasks done that are not part of my current planned work load. I’m operating as a cloud architect and DBA on an Agile development team . However, we often have needs for maintenance tasks or requests to have changes performed on our production environment.
I already allocate a 6 hour day to project work due to trends in ad-hoc requests. Even still, I found it difficult to fulfill my committed work consistently in any given sprint. In an effort to better understand the ad-hoc work hindering my project work, I started tracking requests that took 1 hour or more because I would forget what I had done.
This ad-hoc work was added to our project sprint more as a placeholder to give us a view on how much work I was picking up. I was surprised at how much time I contributed to other tasks. However, since many of the jobs were smaller, they didn’t make it into the sprint tasks. So, I started using a notebook and logging anything taking more than 5 minutes. Once again it was very interesting how much work I did outside of the projected sprint tasks.
This is a common experience for most DBAs. Most of our work is not planned out, but performed on an as needed basis. Rarely does a DBA have a pure project based work schedule. Tomorrow I’ll share some ideas of how I am taking advantage of the information revealed in my work log. In the meantime, why not write in with some of your observations or processes you use to manage your ad-hoc work? Please send your insights in to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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