Story Points

In a team of individuals where deliverable dates are pretty sensitive, story points can become pretty important; or they're at a minimum useful.

This is certainly controversial.

Unpointed tickets don't factor in the workload.

If you don't know the workload, it makes it much harder to deterministically say whether or not the ticket can be delivered in the available amount of time.

But storypoints have a really bad rap. Most people think they mean time estimates, but they don't. They mean effort (although in reality, that means it's a proxy for time).

I'll usually talk with my teams ahead of storypointing and take some time to philosophize on them for a bit. Figure out what the common consensus is. When everyone is contributing to the meaning of something, we can come to a common understanding - a common language. This helps in the next...hundreds of hours we spend together.

Get buy-in. Get deep understanding. Hear out the disagreements.