Write the prioritisation criteria before the first conflict
Criteria agreed in calm look like bureaucracy. Criteria agreed in a crisis look like politics.
Every shared queue eventually produces the same meeting: two areas, one capacity, both convinced their demand comes first.
What decides that meeting is not the arguments in it. It is whether criteria existed before it started.
Criteria are cheap in advance and expensive live
Defined in a quiet week, prioritisation criteria read like bureaucracy — criticality, volume, regulatory deadline, blast radius, cost of waiting. Nobody is excited to write them.
Defined during the conflict, the exact same list reads like it was tailored to make someone lose. It probably was, even if nobody meant it to be.
The criteria are not the decision
A good set of criteria does not decide for you. It makes the decision legible: this went first because it carries a regulatory date and that one does not. The losing area still loses, and still knows why, which is the only version of losing a team can absorb twice.
What they protect
Mostly they protect the person holding the queue. Without criteria, every call that person makes is personal, and after a month they are not managing capacity any more — they are managing their own standing with five teams at once.
