When you are starting to increase the collaboration between development and operations, you will quickly notice that they have to cope with different types of work. In development, a large part of the work is planned: user stories and bugs that are picked up from a backlog. On the other hand, for operations, a large part of their work is unplanned. They respond to warnings and alerts from systems and requests or tickets from users or developers.

Integrating these two, especially if developers and operators are located on the same team, can be challenging. To see how you can deal with this, let's explore the following approach:

1. First, switch to a flow-based way of working for developers.
2. Next, allow for operations to also list their work in the same work management system as developers using synchronizations. You can also choose to implement fastlaning, an approach to expedite urgent work.
3. Finally, you might choose to decommission existing ticketing tools for operations if possible.

Fastlaning is an approach to organizing work that allows for both planned and unplanned work by visualizing two separate lanes of work. To do this, the Scrum board is extended with a Kanban-like board on the top. This is the fast lane. On the Kanban board, urgent but unplanned work is added. Any work added to this lane is picked up by the team with the highest priority. Only when there is no work remaining in the fast lane is work from the Scrum board with planned work picked up. Whenever new work is added to the fast lane, this takes priority again. Often, there is the agreement though that work in progress is finished before switching to work in the fast lane.