Docs / How prioritization works
How prioritization works
A 0–100 score built from eight visible, weighted factors — meant to be arguable, not oracular.
Every task gets a score from 0 to 100. The task editor shows the full breakdown — every point traces back to a specific factor, its weight, and a sentence explaining why. If the ranking puts the wrong thing on top, that panel tells you which factor did it, and the weight sliders let you fix it.
The eight factors
| Factor | What it measures | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Urgency | Time sensitivity | The deadline, or a date you promised, whichever is sooner. Overridable. |
| Importance | Consequence, independent of timing | Azure DevOps priority/severity, Monday priority columns, or you. |
| Someone is waiting | Whether people or tasks are blocked on this | The "someone is waiting" flag, plus outgoing blocks links. |
| Impact | How far the effect reaches | Keyword inference over tags, area paths, board names, and the text. |
| Promised | Whether you told someone you'd do it | You. Counts for more once the promised date has passed. |
| Age | How long it has sat | The source system's creation date, not when Z3NTRA first saw it. |
| Quick win | Favors things you can finish now | Estimate fields, or you. Stops small work from quietly accumulating. |
| Org priority | Alignment with what your team is pushing on | The task's project, and the priority that project is tagged with. |
What happens after weighting
- A task blocked by unfinished work drops to 35% of its score. It doesn't vanish — you may need to go chase whoever is holding it — but it stops sitting at the top of a list of things you can't actually start yet.
- Done and snoozed tasks are held at zero.
- Pinned tasks sort above everything except finished ones.
Roles and weights
Priorities → Role loads a weight preset — a manager is measured on unblocking people and keeping promises, an exec on reach, an individual contributor on shipping what's in front of them. Every slider stays editable; touching one switches you to Custom.
Age pressure is configurable too — it sets how long something must sit before its age counts for the full Age weight.
Where the underlying attributes come from
Almost none of a task's twelve attributes are typed by hand. On every sync, Z3NTRA reads what the source system already knows — Azure DevOps' Priority (inverted, since 1 is highest there but lowest here) and Severity, Monday's priority-shaped status columns, story points and estimate fields for effort, and so on. Urgency and age come from dates; impact is inferred from keywords, tested highest-consequence-first so a "security incident for a customer" reads as compliance risk rather than generic customer work, and returns nothing rather than guessing when nothing matches.
A value you set by hand is never overwritten by a later sync. Fields carry a "user" or "derived" origin, and the interface marks derived ones "from source." Whatever's left over — importance or effort the source couldn't tell us — shows up under the Needs triage filter.