A few years ago, I helped save a company by showing them a single picture that took almost no work to produce.

Although formally speaking, the picture was titled Issue Open vs. Close Rate Over a Four Month Period — I tend to refer to it as The Sad Graph of Death when discussing it in educational conversations. Here it is, in all its glory:
This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool.

In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses — you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don’t do an especially good job of communicating with one another.

Source: The sad graph of software death