Our weekly Issues List is consistently dominated by operational fires from our customer service department, meaning we spend eighty percent of our IDS time solving their issues while sales, marketing, and finance priorities get neglected week after week. How do we balance our IDS priority setting so one loud department does not hijack the agenda?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

It is common for one highly operational department, like customer service or production, to dominate your weekly Issues List with their daily fires. However, allowing one department to hijack your IDS® time week after week means that critical, long-term issues in other areas like sales, marketing, or finance are continuously neglected.

To solve this, you must change how you prioritize during the meeting. When you transition to IDS®, you do not start at the top of the list, nor do you address issues in the order they were submitted. Instead, the leadership team must collectively look at the entire list and identify the top three most critical issues for the business as a whole.

If customer service has ten minor fires on the list, but sales has one issue that impacts company-wide revenue, the sales issue must be ranked number one.

- The facilitator should ask the team to vote on the top three priorities.
- Once those three are solved, you identify the next top three.

This approach prevents your weekly pulse from turning into a departmental fire drill and ensures your leadership team remains focused on the highest-leverage opportunities and bottlenecks across the entire company.