[umanwizard]

I worked at a big company that had a big data warehouse that you could submit jobs to: these jobs could be given one of five priorities from "lowest" to "highest". Naturally, everyone set their jobs to "highest", so jobs that generated some weekly email report that nobody really read were competing at the same level as jobs that were actually business critical (e.g., necessary for ad auctions to work correctly or whatever).

So they introduced a new priority level: "Critical". The pattern repeated itself in short order.

It was a tragedy of the commons thing, and eventually it was literally impossible for a job to ever finish if it was marked anything other than "Critical".

So they introduced "Omega Critical". Now you needed to be on a permissions list maintained by the database team to raise something to "Omega Critical". I got on the list (because I was scheduling actually high-priority stuff). Then everyone in my org would come to me and ask me to set random bullshit to Omega Critical, because they knew I had permissions and "one more job won't hurt"...

I don't work there anymore, but I believe they have since developed even more weird categories like "Q4 Omega Critical" and who knows what else.

[zhte415]

I've seen 2 pretty good solutions to this.

1. VP bangs head with equivalent VP in other department, complaining there are too many requests. Can work, depends on individual.

2. Actually have a service level agreement. Requests are limited to X per hour/day/week/whatever the process needs, and billed accordingly. Have a bit of buffer in this, a little creative billing. Requests within SLA are dealt with in agreed turnaround time. Have a dashboard that clearly shows this to customers. Alert customers if they're consistently submitting what's outside of SLA, and they will receive a degradation of service unless they provide further funding.

Everyone knows if you pour too much water unto a cup it will overflow.

[mdpopescu]

Having a budget for each department and a cost for running the queries is a great idea... I'll try to implement it the next time I'm in this situation. (I have also had a ton of VPs - plus the CEO and the owner - come to me with "very urgent now now now!" requests... it would have been great to tell them "the top priority for me is this query worth $1000, can you beat that?)

[zhte415]

Sure. That's how external service providers work - being internal is in the buffer, you can 'do a favour' when needed. If it is the owner making an ASAP!OMG! request perhaps take the chance for a chat and to demonstrate you have a system and that you're not only managing, but taking a stance of leadership (and point out that as it is internally charged, they're not losing any cash).

[aserafini]

Data warehouse queries at Amazon worked like this (5 levels of priority). Everyone set the priority for all of their queries to the highest possible level, every time.