Firefighting is expending time and effort to deal with an unplanned activity, usually problematic in nature, that requires immediate action, diverting your or the team’s attention from planned activities.
The unexpected interruption immediately breaks your train of thought, derailing your work. If you’re disciplined and are afforded the time, you may be able to properly terminate your current activity at a logical stopping point, documenting where you had paused it. If not, then upon returning to the task, there’s the possibility of needing to restart the work or reacclimate yourself to where you left off before you were interrupted.
This task-switching will usually result in consuming more time than originally planned if the task had not been interrupted in the first place. When your attention is diverted to respond to an emergency, it’s not just the possibility of missing a previously committed deadline that’s the issue. You may still meet your planned objective by delegating your responsibilities to someone else, adding additional resources (crashing the schedule), or with the burden of overtime—all of which could put additional pressure on you and the team. As a result, you may increase the likelihood of carelessness and inaccuracies, all of which could make you a potential accomplice fanning the flames for future firefights.
Continually having to address urgent, unexpected problems interrupts your original sprint activities, causes stress on team members, and builds up more work that will have to be dealt with. But with due diligence, you can lessen the need to constantly put out fires.
Here are some steps that can mitigate the necessity of constant firefighting and break the vicious cycle of work and rework.
There will always be unanticipated circumstances that arise and make firefighting inevitable. You don’t want to build the firehouse after the fire starts, so make plans now for how to deal with emergencies. That way, when an urgent issue necessitates curtailing your planned activity, you can have it cause as little disruption on the team and the schedule as possible.