Usually, we will prioritize any work coming to the team (not incidents) with First In First Out.
Incidents will take higher priority than other types of work in general.
If there is any escalation then the Team Manager will take the call on priorities and reassign work within the team.
The Team will redirect priority calls to the Team Manager.
When handling priority calls, it’s important to understand when the work is needed to be delivered as it may not be for “right now”. But if the team has a bad history of queue delays then we may be paying for the lack of trust when people want all for now.
Because of the nature of queues, unfortunately, some tickets will bubble down in priorities, so it’s a good practice to keep an eye on them and try to prioritize them and get them out of the way on a weekly basis at least. Some teams use Friday afternoons to go through them, others teams work on 1 or 2 a day to try to keep their queues under control.