[tetha]

>they will try to have several #1 priority items - sometimes by having several priority lists or categories that are all "equally important".

I'm currently struggling with exactly that. We're the ops-team, so the infrastructure itself as well as the upstream applications are capable of producing its own backlog of maintenance work very well (hello SACK). And then you have all kinds of technical tasks to optimize and maintain the infrastructure. On the other hand, Sales, dev and other teams are also throwing project work at us we have to deliver, sometimes on a communicated deadline, sometimes without.

It's a rough balancing act. By now I've split that into two queues, our internal and our external queue. Multiple stake holders can fight about priorities in their external queue, the internal queue is team-internal and backed by our head of IT as a stake holder. From there, we're trying to consume both queues in a fair fashion. It kind of works, but perfect it ain't.