I just got a sudden bitter taste in my mouth when reading "P0" and remembering the people who used to say it out loud; is that normal?

Another great thing about inverting the priority numbers is that nothing can easily go beneath a floor of 0, though ultimately all of this is about fixing the symptom and not the cause.

This is what I like about kanban, there is a queue, priority is not a status.

This is inevitably what happens when the people reporting the issues get to decide their priority (I've seen this even in a two-person dynamic). You have to have discipline, and you usually have to have an impartial outsider (to the issue at hand) who doesn't care about other people's panic to actually set priority levels.

Remove all priority levels.

Put a checkbox. "This is an emergency". People are suddently less likely to click it.

And anyway, if it really were, they'd have called so it still doesn't matter but it makes them happy :D

Hire P4 interns or contractors :)

If possible.

Order them, don't bucket them. That is, the highest priority is head of the queue, and the lowest is at the bottom.

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.

No, sooner or later an exec swoops in with "this is our largest customer!!!!". It's still a P1, it just gets bumped to the front of the line - because revenue. Nothing wrong with that, and no need for a different numbering system. Their P1 is no different than a smaller customers P1. They just get to be first in line because they pay to play.

I have a different issue. Everything kindof always gets promoted to a must have. So now I've made 2 priorities, need-to-have and nice-to-have. For any given collection of work that needs to be done there can be no more than 60% need-to-have estimated work hours. When the deadline is accepted by my team, it means that all need-to-have are done at that deadline, and nice-to-have probably are, but no gurantees.

Every single fucking time the PO thinks the deadline is too late, she tries to remove nice-to-have issues - sorry, but that doesn't change the deadline.

I once had a priority list with a few items had a "low" priority, the rest being "high", "very high" and "extremely high". It gave me a depressing feeling because we had to delay stuff that was supposedly "high" priority for someone.

I'll never forget the company I consulted at where the priorities were harder and harder to say with a straight face.

To get to the front of the queue, you had to mark your request "hot and urgent for the whole team"

The problem with priorities is that multiple issues can have the same priority. If you give every issue it's own priority number then you no longer have this problem.

I former co-worker of mine told me about their priority tracking software where you could enter a number from 0-5 for each bug, where 0 was the highest priority and only certain senior managers could set a priority of 0.

However people soon discovered that priorities where stored as a float in the database and they could enter any number 0<n<=5 in the field. So bugs quickly started to get priorities like 0.5, 0.25, 0.1, 0.05 and so on...

The reason for the numbering system possibly comes from the ITIL system where priority is determined as a product of two factors - impact (scope) and urgency. These definitions in most IT orgs I've seen regardless of how poorly executed or immature the org is seems to be pretty consistent and oftentimes include gating factors like other comments in this subtree have been discussing. If some of the most immature and byzantine IT processes can get this nonsense settled, engineers can avoid the bike shedding and goalpost moving, too if they actually put some effort into a sensible system and enforced it.