Do You Work to Requests?

How much of your work is done based on a request? Does the task you’re working on have a an RT ticket, a Bugilla id or story ID associated with it? If it doesn’t should you be doing the work at all?

Even some of the more routine tasks can fit in this model, rather than remembering to check for the expiry dates of SSL certs or domain names have scripts that check and put any actions in to RT for you. You get an audit trail and a task list for (almost) free. You were going to write the checking scripts anyway. Right? Good.

I know this is overly optimistic but by thinking about it, and keeping track of how many changes you make that don’t have an external driver your percentage should get better. And improvement is about all we can ask for.