Support teams with the need to both plan (scrum) and handle support tickets (Kanban)

[Thayne Munson]

I have a number of agile teams that have the need to both plan their work via scrum sprints (projects) and manage unplanned work (support tickets).  In some cases the team is trying to use both a scrum board for planned issues and a kanban board for support.  It's clear this is not a great solution since the product owner and scrum master have split visibility to the work as well as the different best practices that come with each agile board type.  

I am trying to guide these teams on the best way to manage their overall work effort.  I would be interested in any ideas that others have come up with to effectively manage this scenario.  In most cases, the percent of planned vs unplanned work is approximately 50/50.

Thanks,

Thayne Munson

[Trudy Claspill]

It is not ideal, but I would recommend using just a scrum board. Planned work should be added to the sprint to fill half the normal velocity for the team. The remaining would be filled by unplanned work added to the sprint as deemed appropriate.

Alternately you allocate some portion of the team to just the planned work, and manage that work in a scrum board. The remainder of the team is on "support duty" and focuses on working the support cases.

In my experience having all members of a team trying to work on both planned work and interrupt-driven support work does not work out well. The planned work continuously gets deprioritized by the support work. In companies where the team must do both types of work in parallel, my experience has been that it is more effective to split the team between planned work and support work, with team members rotating in/out of the support sub-team. We opted for people to be assigned to the planned work for a month, and then rotate to the support sub-team for 2 weeks or a month, depending on the team member skills and the work that was being planned.