Prioritize Work Items overview

The Priority field sets the priority of a Work Item for project planning purposes. Work Item priority is a float type numeric value. In products that have the LivePlan feature, the item's numeric value is used in conjunction with other factors by the LivePlan engine when calculating and rendering the project plan. In every case, it is possible to query for Work Items based on the Priority value, and to show the results of such queries in Wiki pages.

There is also a set of priority "ranks". These are simply named ranges of priority values. The names of the ranks and the range of numeric priority values is specified in the global and/or project configuration, and are customizable by an administrator. For example, you might have ranks named High and Low with numeric value ranges of 51-100 and 1-50, respectively. (For a listing of the default rank names and range values, see Priority Ranks.) The Priority field displays the current Work Item's priority rank and numeric priority value.

The project workflow can be configured with an action that sets a default rank/value for new Work Items. This is useful when new items are created via import from Microsoft Office documents. For example, Priority of each new item might be set to Medium, and that rank might be configured to have a minimum value of 50.0.