I have a similar take on stuff pushed onto the dev team. I think it’s often not the unplannedness of this work that’s at the root of the problem but its low val

I have a similar take on stuff pushed onto the dev team. I think it’s often not the unplannedness of this work that’s at the root of the problem but its low value. Pushing back against actually important unplanned work would be harmful — and usually nobody does that, which shows that it’s not actually about planning. The point is, at least in my experience, many orgs have lots of other teams running around with ideas for things the dev team might do for them. Many of those are just not very important in the grand scheme of things. A lot less important, for example, than keeping the codebase healthy. But it’s usually not politically convenient to say that explicitly. It’s much easier to “shut them up” by citing schedule pressure. Of course, this tactic backfires hard whenever there’s even a hint of downtime.