I've mostly worked in operations, which IME is a field with a very high concentration of stack people. Sysadmins (including myself!) tend to derive great pain f

I've mostly worked in operations, which IME is a field with a very high concentration of stack people. Sysadmins (including myself!) tend to derive great pain from the presence of a production issue and feel the need to fix it immediately, even if we could provide a greater overall win by focusing on project work. I've sometimes seen this result in five people working on an issue that could have been handled by one or two, simply because "it's broken and I need to fix it". One of the ways my current team tries to mitigate this is with an on-call rotation and an explicit escalation process. When a new ticket comes in, the on-call decides whether it is something they can fix quickly and easily, or it would require too many resources for an immediate fix. The first kind of ticket is handled immediately, or is added to the on-call's (short) task list for that day; the second kind goes into our regular queue and gets prioritized alongside project work. Meanwhile, everyone else on the team focuses on their current projects and handles issues according to the queue. Other team members are only called in to help immediately if the on-call judges the issue to be urgent but can't handle it themselves.