Terms Governing Priority Inflation

TERMS AND CONDITIONS GOVERNING THE PRIORITY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM Version: Current Status: Under stress

Article 1: Original Intent

The priority system was established to indicate relative importance, allowing the team to sequence work based on consequence and urgency. Priority levels were defined as high, medium, and low. These levels were intended to reflect a distribution: some high, more medium, most low.

Article 2: Current State

Current distribution:

• High priority: eleven items.
• Urgent (introduced informally as superset of high): three items.
• Business-critical (introduced informally as superset of urgent): two items.
• Medium priority: two items.
• Low priority: two items.

Total items above medium priority: sixteen.

The distribution no longer reflects relative importance. It reflects the tendency to describe one's own items as requiring immediate attention, which is a rational behavior at the individual level and a dysfunctional one at the system level.

Article 3: The Consequence

When everything is high priority, nothing is. The list must be sorted by something. In the absence of meaningful priority differentiation, the list defaults to: recency (newest items first), relationship to the person deciding (their own items first), or arbitrary sequence.

This is equivalent to having no priority system.

Article 4: The Remediation

The remediation requires that each person who has submitted a high priority item resubmit it with a specific reason why it is high priority rather than medium. The reason must distinguish it from the other high priority items, not merely state that it is important.

This remediation will be added to the backlog. It will be submitted as high priority.

Article 5: Limitation

These terms cannot resolve the underlying issue, which is that priority is set by the people whose items are being prioritized. The terms are noted for the record.

The list is sorted by high priority. The list will be reviewed next week.