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How to Stop Overcommitting at Work
A Summary of Unplanned Work in The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project is a fictional story covering how an IT team leads its company, slogging through technological and organizational transformation. It’s an exciting way to learn more about software operations. It’s a business fable, not dissimilar from The Goal, The Wealthy Barber, or The Grumpy Accountant. I want to summarize one of the key concepts in it, that of unplanned work.
While I haven’t recommended it in my Best of Books newsletter yet, it’s still a good read, especially if you’re actually interested in technology, business, or learning about how work gets done. Outside of my work as an author, I also work in communications — say, marketing, or engineering communications — so I’m not offering a programming perspective here.
In the first pages of the book, the CEO promotes the protagonist, Bill Palmer, to a VP, after letting him know his old bosses — the IT operations leader and the CIO — have been let go. It wasn’t surprising, as CIOs had always come and gone from the company every couple of years.
Bill had survived, treading water in middle management, until this promotion. Now he has to get to work. He is introduced to an advisor character named Erik, who tells him his goal is to “ensure the fast, predictable…
