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The High Cost of Unplanned Work

Is it merely the cost of doing business, or a staggering waste of resources?

No marketing team is safe, no matter what industry you’re in. We can’t control when work will get thrown our way, but we can reduce the disruptions it causes. It’s time to focus on what we can control: improving marketing’s internal workflows.

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Unplanned Work Creates Collaboration Drag

 84% of marketing leaders and employees report experiencing “high collaboration drag.” This demand for excessive levels of interactions often happens when seemingly perfect plans get derailed by new input. Better plans won’t prevent these disruptions; marketers need better tools within their own ways of working to deal with the inevitability of the unplanned.   

Dealing with the Drag of the Unplanned

Modern marketing is dynamic and unpredictable. Even the best-laid plans can be disrupted by unforeseen events, causing significant collaboration challenges and workflow interruptions. While it’s impossible to eliminate unplanned work entirely, there are effective strategies that marketing teams can implement to manage and mitigate its impact. Here are three actionable steps to help your team better handle the drag of the unplanned.

Annual plans are outdated almost instantly, and they’re the most prone to being derailed. With quarterly planning cycles focused on minimally viable, metric-focused deliverables, disruptions become far less disruptive. 

Stakeholders are rarely aligned in their needs or goals, but marketing is expected to cater to them all. Through more rigorous stakeholder management, there are fewer priorities to juggle and less opportunities for conflicting demands.  

Marketing’s work doesn’t get the visibility or attention it deserves. By systematically surfacing goals, activities, and success metrics, we can protect our teams from well-meaning external inputs. 

What Is Unplanned Work?

Because unplanned work is by definition work that falls outside your existing plan, it's actually more defined by your plans themselves. In theory, if you started creating a new plan every hour, you could eliminate unplanned work entirely! But we all know that’s not feasible.

Unplanned work is a reality in modern marketing, because the world in which we operate is changing fast. New data, stakeholder input, tools, or ideas are always going to arise and throw you off your carefully laid plans. But convincing the world to refrain from changing so you can execute your plans precisely as you envisioned isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. 

So if this kind of unplanned work is inevitable, the thing you can control is how you respond to it.

Start Managing Your Unplanned Work

The answer to this question may seem obvious, but the way you distinguish between the two is actually quite important. For most teams, planning is relatively ad hoc and work frequently comes up that wasn’t in the original plan. As a result, this unplanned work requires marketers to context switch, juggle lots of Work In Progress (WIP), and generally get sidetracked and distracted often. 

Agile marketing teams handle this differently. For example, they may work in two-week sprints, deciding what they will work on at the start of that sprint. During those two weeks, new work may come up, but it should go into a backlog to be considered for your next sprint. Stakeholders and team members alike understand that unplanned work does not go straight into the team’s workflow, it has to get prioritized and addressed at the same cadence as all other work.

The answer to this question may seem obvious, but the way you distinguish between the two is actually quite important. For most teams, planning is relatively ad hoc and work frequently comes up that wasn’t in the original plan. As a result, this unplanned work requires marketers to context switch, juggle lots of Work In Progress (WIP), and generally get sidetracked and distracted often. 

Agile marketing teams handle this differently. For example, they may work in two-week sprints, deciding what they will work on at the start of that sprint. During those two weeks, new work may come up, but it should go into a backlog to be considered for your next sprint. Stakeholders and team members alike understand that unplanned work does not go straight into the team’s workflow, it has to get prioritized and addressed at the same cadence as all other work.

We all know unplanned work is annoying, but is that annoyance worth really paying attention to? Answering that question requires learning the actual cost of unplanned work. That starts with understanding the cost of context switching. Regularly switching between planned tasks and unplanned ones that have unexpectedly popped up dramatically decreases our productivity. It also makes planning itself more difficult as the amount of work teams can deliver becomes less stable.

Another way to understand the true cost of unplanned work is by looking at the cost of delay. Unplanned work reliably leads to tasks taking longer. So understanding how that unplanned work is really affecting your teams requires calculating the costs of that delay. Essentially you need to put a price on the time it requires to accomplish a task.

Taking in unplanned work without consideration, understanding its value, or prioritization, could also mean that high-value work does not get done or is delayed significantly as capacity is taken up by unplanned work. It can also lead to burnout which causes a drop in productivity as employees are ill, slowing down, or lead to attrition.

52% of marketers surveyed in the 7th annual State of Agile Marketing Report said they had difficulty managing last-minute requests. For marketers that difficulty translates into frustration. For their employers, it translates into costly turnover.

So when you’re considering the disadvantages of unplanned work, be sure to look at all three of these elements together. Added up, the costs to your marketing teams are likely far higher than you realized.

Calculate Your Cost of Delay

Introducing: Agile Planning

If your teams are getting bogged down by unplanned work, Agile planning provides a solution. For one, it abandons the process of creating overly detailed plans ahead of time. After all, those plans rarely remain relevant or useful for long. But it also doesn’t abandon planning entirely. Instead, Agile planning is all about balancing stability and adaptation to get the best of both worlds.

Because modern marketing teams can’t afford to plan too much or too little. Finding success requires being strategic about where, when, and how you plan. If you think your approach to planning could use some improvement, you’ve come to the right place.

Explore Our Marketing Management Guide

One of the most common misconceptions about Agile is that it does not involve any planning. Many just assume that Agile teams just “live in the moment” so they can instantly respond to changing circumstances. Problem is: not only is that not Agile, that’s a recipe for disaster.

In fact, planning is absolutely essential for marketing agility. The difference comes in the approach to planning. Think of it like going on a week-long road trip. Planning every turn you will take and every place you’ll stop for food or gas would be crazy. There are just too many variables you can’t control and there’s no way following such a rigid and detailed plan will help.

But at the same time, embarking on such a road trip with no idea where you’re going or where you’ll stay is just as crazy. The Agile approach embraces a balance between the two built around flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency.

Explore Common Agile Myths

So if Agile plans aren’t extremely detailed, what do they actually look like in practice? First let’s consider what they aim to achieve. Instead of focusing on building precise timelines, lists of deliverables, etc. Agile planning focuses on defining goals with the understanding that the way you achieve those goals can evolve as you go.

Or, put simply, Agile planning defines the “what” while leaving the “how” up to the individual marketers and teams to define as they work. This creates space for experimentation, and adjustments when circumstances change. So instead of falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy and investing in a campaign that fails to show results early on, marketers can pivot and try something else.

All this raises a common question: when do you make these changes? Doing so the moment something arises can create chaos, instability, and frustration in the team. But waiting too long means missing the right moment to make a change. The Agile approach is all about building a cadence for such changes. Often this might be bi-weekly or at the beginning of a sprint. 

The last major thing to note is that Agile planning isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Finding the right cadence of long-term planning, short-term adjustments to those plans, etc. is a process that should always be tailored to your marketing realities.

Explore Common Agile Myths

While there’s no single way to plan in an Agile way, it’s worth exploring a common example to understand how most teams approach this challenge. The process will usually begin with something like quarterly big room planning. Here, various stakeholders share demand and desired value-based outcomes. Based on that, leaders prioritize initiatives and break them down. Finally, teams will break that work down further into user stories and tasks for the quarter.

With the bigger strategic KPIs set out in that big room planning session, individual marketing teams can begin figuring out the best way to achieve them. Often that means building a prioritized backlog of tasks. At the beginning of each sprint, they review their backlog and plan, making adjustments where needed, breaking down work further, and adding more definition.

At the end of each sprint, the team looks at what they accomplished, what went well, what went poorly, etc. If changes are needed, they can be experimented on during the next sprint. 

These sprints repeat until the next big room planning session occurs. In other words, you begin by building alignment and setting a strategic direction. Then, marketing teams execute on that vision in short bursts of work that iterate and improve each time. This gives teams ample opportunity to address problems, improve processes, or make adjustments if strategic priorities shift.

Start Planning More Effectively

A major advantage of Agile planning that doesn’t get much attention is its impact on team collaboration. Traditional planning usually generates lots of small elements that team members need to keep track of. The result is a lot of questions like “what’s the deadline?” “who is this for?” or “is this a high priority?”

It’s necessary to ask those questions because marketers know that what’s in the plan they’re following often has little relationship with reality. So it becomes necessary to waste time double checking information. Agile planning, by contrast, begins by creating alignment around priorities and goals, helping ensure everyone understands what they’re trying to achieve.

But beyond simple alignment, working off a prioritized backlog ensures everyone always knows what the next priority is. Next is the way Agile marketing teams use visualization boards and cards to contain information. These boards show the status of all work items with cards. Those cards in turn contain all the relevant information about the work item. This kind of planning also helps teams understand dependencies between team members, teams, etc.

As a result, instead of asking questions and waiting for answers, team members have the information they need at their fingertips. This in turn helps fuel better collaboration because everyone has a shared understanding of what’s happening and what they are trying to achieve. 

Lastly, when Agile teams build continuous improvement cultures, coming together to try new things becomes second nature. It’s something marketers do regularly, so they get better at it with time. Taken together, all of these elements significantly improve how marketers are able to collaborate within teams, between teams, and even across functions.

Unlock Better Collaboration with Agile Planning

Steps You can Take for Better Marketing Planning

If Agile planning sounds like it can help you tackle your unplanned work problem, how can you get started? 

One of the most effective ways to tackle unplanned work and improve your marketing efficiency is by simply doing less. That probably sounds strange and counterintuitive, but stick with us. You can reliably improve your efficiency by doing less work at a time. This rids us of costly context switching and ensures work items spend less time being worked on. The result is valuable work getting delivered to stakeholders more quickly.

You can make this a reality by implementing Work In Progress (WIP) limits. By, for example, limiting your team to having three items in review at a time, you force your marketers to address bottlenecks and push work through instead of leaving it to wait. By working on fewer things, you’re able to actually get more done.

But how do WIP limits connect to unplanned work? They help control the flow of tasks that come into your team’s workflow. But to be maximally effective, you want to combine WIP limits with other strategies like better estimation and stakeholder management. Together, these strategies can both reduce the amount of unplanned work you encounter and your ability to handle that work when it becomes unavoidable.

Start Doing Less

Ultimately, the best way to manage unplanned work and improve marketing planning is to address the source of the issue: stakeholders. Most unplanned work comes from them when things like last-minute requests for copy, unexpected changes in strategy or direction, etc. get thrown your way. Effectively managing stakeholders can go a long way towards preventing them from making such requests in the first place.

The first thing Agile marketing managers need to learn is how to say no. When stakeholders come to you with unplanned work, it’s vital your team leaders feel empowered to say no if that work would cause the team to exceed their WIP limit or simply doesn’t fit with their current priorities. This may take some getting used to, but having a more balanced and mutually understanding relationship with stakeholders is crucial to keep your workload sustainable.

Openly communicating how marketing plans and prioritizes work can be helpful to stakeholders. If they know that plans are developed on a quarterly basis and that they can submit their demand on this cadence, they also have the opportunity to plan better. Helping them understand how marketing plans on a Sprint basis, how work is prioritized, and how teams make decisions about what work to pull in, reiterates the need for planning and prioritization on their side. 

Without this open, transparent communication, stakeholders can become very frustrated and think that their work is not important to marketing. But with this kind of communication, stakeholders understand that they can’t simply throw unplanned work at marketing teams and expect them to drop everything. Marketing teams are then better able to handle the work they do have. Done right, it’s a win for both sides of the equation.

Embrace Better Stakeholder Management

One of the foundations of Agile marketing management is visualizing work. Tracking your tasks on something like a Kanban Board vastly improves the ability of individual marketers to see and understand what’s happening. The status of tasks can be seen at a glance, prioritization is expressed in the order of those tasks, and details like definitions of done, due dates, assignees, etc. are listed on each task’s card.

Besides making the entire marketing team more productive, this more effective form of information sharing effectively minimizes one easily forgotten type of unplanned work: the kind you simply missed. When vital information is freely shared instead of siloed away, it’s less likely marketers will get unpleasant surprises when they learn about a task they weren’t aware of.

Visualization also enables the kinds of WIP limits that help teams push back on other unplanned work coming from stakeholders. In many cases, those stakeholders themselves have access to the visualization tool, enabling them to see what a team’s workload looks like, what’s being prioritized, etc. without having to ask.

As a whole, visualization both reduces the amount of unplanned work coming in and makes it easier for teams to handle such work when it can’t be avoided. It creates more empowered and productive individual marketers and informed stakeholders at the same time.

Start Visualizing Your Progress

One of the biggest challenges of effective planning, Agile or otherwise, is capacity estimation. Humans are generally terrible at this. Even with decades of experience, most people consistently fail to accurately estimate how much work they will be able to accomplish in a set period of time. 

This process comes down to two things. First is estimation, accurately determining how long tasks will likely take to complete. Here again, most people struggle to do this accurately. That’s why we recommend using approaches like planning poker. By structuring your estimation and capacity planning it becomes easier to track and improve your accuracy with time.

When estimation and capacity planning get taken seriously and tracked in this way, it becomes far easier to improve both. Such improvements then help teams handle their workloads, accurately predict when work will be completed, and generally keep their stakeholders happy.

Start Capacity Planning

If you’re reading about the Agile approach to marketing planning and wondering how it applies to larger tasks, you’re asking the right questions. Visualization boards, WIP limits, and capacity planning are all designed to manage tasks that can be completed in a few weeks. For tasks that take longer, you’ll need to break them down.

Fortunately, Agile has a set of processes to do just that. It begins with breaking down the actions needed to complete the larger task. These should be phrased as actions to take and accompanied with a clear definition of done. 

Importantly, you don’t want to provide all the details necessary for every single task on day 1 of a 6 month project. By the time you get to month 3, most of that information will be out of date anyways. Instead, prioritize the tasks within that project and provide granular details for only the upcoming tasks. Then, as other tasks get close, you can do the same for them.

If possible, you can also ensure the individual tasks within that project are similarly sized. This isn’t always possible, but it does make it easier to track progress. In any case, breaking down large tasks in this way can help you apply Agile ways of working to large projects that take months to complete. At the same time, that information helps reduce unplanned work coming from less well planned out projects.

Learn How to Break Down Tasks

Using a visualization board is great, but if you’re not using it to work on the right tasks at the right time you’re just not getting the value you deserve. That’s because you’re not prioritizing those tasks to ensure you’re delivering the most value at the fastest sustainable rate.

Prioritization like that begins with stakeholder analysis. You need to understand who your work is for and what they value in order to deliver such value. At the same time, you should consider how you want to integrate them into your work processes. Will you be getting input and feedback from them regularly or occasionally? Will they attend your planning meetings?

Armed with a solid understanding of your stakeholders, you can begin building a prioritized backlog. This is where you put every single task your team wants to do in the coming months. You then order those tasks by priority. There are a few approaches you can use for this including Stack Ranking, MoSCow, or planning poker. Whatever you use, just have a consistent method for determining what will be the priority on your team.

When you have a prioritized backlog, it becomes far easier to manage sudden unplanned work that comes your way. You simply apply the same prioritization process you would for any other work item and put it in the backlog. It’s a fair system that empowers marketing teams to push back on requests that don’t align with their priorities.

Improve Your Prioritization

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If you work in marketing and are tired of doing only what’s urgent – and neglecting what’s really important – this system is for you. 

It’s designed and taught by professional marketers who know what it’s like to spend weeks building out a campaign plan, only to have it blown up as soon as sales has a new idea. 

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