Yeah, everyone has a backlog like that. A lot of them have very little or negative business value in retrospect, but we can't know that now, so we prioritize, and it's a good thing, because if we ever actually got most of that backlog done we'd have seriously diminishing returns to the point where we would not even be covering our wages by the end.
If you don't believe me, and your system allows this to be reconstructed, find out what your full backlog looked like about 10 years ago, find everything on there that still hasn't been done, and find out what percentage of them actually would have significant business value today.
I know this is a gross generalization but we are dealing in generalities. This is what I have found across many projects. We are not always great at predicting what we will need, and the backlog is BY DEFINITION prioritized. By the time we get down to the lowest priority stuff the statistical expected value gets low enough that we are not even covering our own wages.
If you don't believe me, and your system allows this to be reconstructed, find out what your full backlog looked like about 10 years ago, find everything on there that still hasn't been done, and find out what percentage of them actually would have significant business value today.
I know this is a gross generalization but we are dealing in generalities. This is what I have found across many projects. We are not always great at predicting what we will need, and the backlog is BY DEFINITION prioritized. By the time we get down to the lowest priority stuff the statistical expected value gets low enough that we are not even covering our own wages.