> Everyone is happy to smile and nod and the appropriate tickets are filed with deadlines attached
Once I did a final review of a backlog of a project that got decommissioned after a decade of development and use. Most of the "fix tech debt" tickets were still there in the backlog. And how could it be otherwise if the tech debt tickets always got assigned priority 2, and everything the management wanted done got assigned priority 1, and there were always more priority 1 tasks than we could fit into a spring?
Next time, I will have no confusion about what "priority 2" actually means. It's in the backlog to make you feel happy, but you are not supposed to actually ever do it. (If by some miracle all current "priority 1" tickets get done at some moment, some of your team members will be assigned to a different project.)
Once I did a final review of a backlog of a project that got decommissioned after a decade of development and use. Most of the "fix tech debt" tickets were still there in the backlog. And how could it be otherwise if the tech debt tickets always got assigned priority 2, and everything the management wanted done got assigned priority 1, and there were always more priority 1 tasks than we could fit into a spring?
Next time, I will have no confusion about what "priority 2" actually means. It's in the backlog to make you feel happy, but you are not supposed to actually ever do it. (If by some miracle all current "priority 1" tickets get done at some moment, some of your team members will be assigned to a different project.)