How to tackle a HUGE backlog

[Community Alums]

A team within our organization reached out because they have found themselves heavily under water with nearly 1500 RITMs in their queue. Initially they need to get a grasp on exactly what is in their queue which I can help them do with Dashboards and Reporting. The struggle is degerming the best approach to presenting the data and organizing the workflow. I have looked into VTB and Agile but there are limitations on the number of items that can be presented and honestly it wouldn't be very effective to overload a screen with 1000 items. 

I am curious if anyone here has found themselves in a similar situation and if you found any effective approaches. Initially I came up with the following:

1. Identify what's in the queue and get it organized (Reports/Dashboards)

2. Enhance the dashboard the provide filtering

3. Look for opportunities to automate

Thanks

[Uncle Rob · Accepted solution]

VTB is exclusive to manageable collection of records.  No way it will help you here.
"Agile" is a practice, not a reporting methodology.  It *MAY* help you gain momentum, but remember that "agile" also includes backlog grooming.

First thing I'd do is get a report on what Catalog Item spawned all those RITMS.  If its all the same "General Request", well everyone learns an important lesson about "General Request" items and someone's got to brute-force the queue, and look at each one.

One doesn't report their way out of a 1500 item backlog.  Reporting should have been there from the getgo to warn about backlog growth, stale tickets, etc.

You could also start doing the embarassing scripted notification "do you still need this" routine.
Anything that is older than 6 months, Create an email to the user with a link to the request and say "hey, sorry we didn't touch these in so long but could you tell us if they're still needed?"