The standard priority matrix — impact against urgency, producing a P1 through P4 — looks rigorous and gets overridden constantly in practice, because it doesn't account for the thing that actually determines how a ticket gets treated: who raised it and how loudly. A P3 ticket from a senior executive routinely jumps the queue ahead of a P2 from someone junior, and pretending the matrix is what's driving prioritization is dishonest to everyone using it.
The workable fix is not eliminating that reality but making it explicit rather than informal. A defined escalation path for genuinely business-critical requests, separate from the standard queue, means urgent things get handled fast without every requester learning that shouting gets faster service. Without an explicit path, the informal one trains your whole user base to escalate everything immediately, which is how priority stops meaning anything at all.
Impact should be assessed by number of people affected and what they can't do, not by department seniority. A payment system outage affecting one junior clerk who can't process refunds is genuinely higher impact than a font rendering issue on the CEO's laptop, and a matrix that gets this backwards trains the team to fix the wrong things first while the business quietly loses money.
Review the matrix against what actually happened, quarterly. Pull a sample of tickets, check what priority they were assigned against what priority they should have had by the stated criteria, and look for the pattern in the gap. Usually it reveals either a criterion nobody follows consistently or a category of request the matrix never anticipated — both are worth fixing before the next quarter's tickets hit the same gap.
