Priority rules and SLAs

Once requests are triaged, something has to decide which gets worked first. If that something is not a published rule, it becomes whoever escalates hardest, and your queue turns political.

A workable priority order

Most firms converge on a version of this: confirmed client work beats internal work; earlier start dates beat later ones; committed revenue beats pipeline; and within a band, first raised is first served. Your firm’s version may weight strategic clients or regulatory deadlines differently. The content of the rules matters less than the fact that they are written down where requesters can read them. A partner who can see why another request went first argues far less than one who suspects favouritism.

ProFinda supports this with a priority field set at triage, and the queue view sorts by it. Resist the urge to add priority levels; three is plenty. A five-level scheme decays into “everything is level one” within a month.

SLAs that mean something

Commit to what you control. You control response time: every request acknowledged and triaged within one working day, a first shortlist on urgent requests within two. You do not control whether a person with the right skills and availability exists, so never put “role filled within X days” in an SLA. When no strong candidates exist, the SLA obligation is to say so quickly, with the evidence, so the conversation about trade-offs (adjust the start date, lower the grade, look at contractors) starts on day two rather than day ten.

Escalations

An escalation path is healthy; frequent escalation is a symptom. Route escalations to a named person, not a mailbox, and log each one against the request. Review the log monthly. If the same practice area escalates every week, the fix is usually upstream: their requests arrive late, or their expectations were never set. The log turns that from a feeling into a finding you can act on.