Dan O'Boyle and Brian Artschwager, Stack Overflow
Does your team suffer long, unstructured meetings?
Is your team mired in unplanned work?
Do you struggle to provide a timeline or status on deliverables?
Are you interested in practical street magic?
We’re not magicians, but we can help with the first 3 problems!
Ops teams tend to have a higher volume of unplanned work than any other similarly sized team.
This talk will attempt to explain the details of a practical method of managing unplanned work, though the engaging story of how our team used this method to systematically process our previously unending backlog.
Have you EVER been this excited about process and procedure!?
Unfortunately, it's all downhill from here.
But we promise to keep things as lively as possible, without fireworks, or magic (Stop asking).
Brian Artschwager, Stack Overflow
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/artschwager_brian_148x170.jpg?itok=cog36nr9)
Brian is an Internal Support Engineer @ Stack Overflow working on software, servers, and networking to make life easier for our employees so they can make Stack Overflow an even better experience for our users.
Dan O'Boyle, Stack Overflow
![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/styles/speaker_photo/public/oboyle_dan_200x230.jpg?itok=t821SL9T)
Dan works as an Internal Support Engineer @ at Stack Overflow. He started his career as a high school teacher and transitioned into a System Administrator. He enjoys creative collaboration to solve solvable things, and using automation for everything else.
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![](https://www.usenix.org/sites/all/modules/usenix/usenix_files/images/usenix-locked.png)
author = {Brian Artschwager and Dan O{\textquoteright}Boyle},
title = {Expect the Unexpected! A Method for Handling Unplanned Work},
year = {2019},
address = {Portland, OR},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}