Prioitizing a Scrum Backlog [closed]

Question

Our software company receives literally hundreds of support requests per day and there's a whole team working on our inbox. How can we gain effective metrics that map directly to our Scrum backlogs?

If we're too specific, the team has too constantly beware of changing metrics, if we're too general, the PO has to sort through too many emails to get reliable priority.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

What do you mean by "support requests"?

Assuming 3 broad buckets:

1. "How do I do x?" type questions
2. "This isn't working right" (i.e. a defect)
3. "It would be really helpful if it did y." enhancement requests

Within each of the categories (you may have more or less than 3, but 3 is a good number to work with), assign some tags that categorize the request. I like to organize the categories as labels for vertical columns, and put a 'flag' for each request in the column. This give a quick and dirty vertical bar chart, and I almost guarantee you'll see a Pareto ratio emerge, wherein 20% of the 'tags' result in 80% of the requests. Now your PO can prioritize among/across the 20% of each of the 3 broad buckets, knowing that they are the high-value ones.

You can keep this as a running exercise.