Concepts

Tasks

Settings

Setting up Scheduling Priorities

You can define your site’s priorities for scheduling work. You can use the scheduling priorities to filter and sort lists of tasks that are ready to be scheduled. Typically, you will enter the priorities that are already used at your site.

Mapping APM Scheduling Priorities to Microsoft® Office Project Priorities

In APM, you can match each of your scheduling priorities to an equivalent Microsoft Project priority. You should do this if you will be exporting APM schedules to work with in Microsoft Project.

Microsoft Project uses numbers to prioritize its tasks. A task can be assigned a priority from 0 to 999. The lower the number, the lower the priority. A priority of 1000 is a special value in Microsoft Project that indicates that the task will not be leveled. In APM you can specify that a specific scheduling priority means that schedule entries cannot be leveled.

For example, if in APM you have a simple list of three scheduling priority values of high, medium, and low, you could enter these matching Microsoft Project priority values

APM Scheduling Priority	Microsoft Project Priority
High	750
Medium	500
Low	250

APM comes with some scheduling priorities already defined. You can edit the existing priorities, or add new ones that are relevant to your organization. This topic explains how to create new scheduling priorities.

To Set up Scheduling Priorities

1.	From the Site window, select the Administration menu and then Work Management Settings. The Work Management Settings dialog appears. Select the Schedules tab.

Tip: You can also select the Work Management view on the site window. Select the Settings tab and then the Scheduling tab. Click the Scheduling settings node in the tree.

2.	Select the Scheduling Priorities tab.

3.	Click New. The Scheduling Priority dialog appears.

4.	Enter the scheduling priority settings:

Setting Name

Description

Priority name

The name of the scheduling priority. Selecting a scheduling priority for a work order task or a schedule entry will allow you to filter and sort lists of tasks and entries by scheduling priority. Scheduling priority names can be up to 50 characters long. Tip: To sort tables of tasks or entries by the urgency of the scheduling priority, you can type a number before each priority name. For example, you could enter: 1 High, 2 Medium, 3 Low. If you enter a sorting sequence for each priority, you can also sort tables using the Scheduling Priority Sequence column.

Sorting sequence

A number that represents the sequence of this scheduling priority. Lower numbers indicate higher priorities. For example, to have “High” priority items appear at the top of a list sorted by priority sequence number, enter a sequence number of 1. Note: To sort a table of schedule entries by schedule priority sequence, you must sort the table using the Schedule Priority Sequence column.

Scheduling priority leveling option

Select whether or not exported schedule entries with this scheduling priority can be leveled in Microsoft Project. If the entries can be leveled in Microsoft Project, you must also specify the MS Project priority.

MS Project priority

If exported entries can be leveled, enter the numerical Microsoft priority value that matches your APM scheduling priority.

5.	Select the Formatting tab to apply a font, text color, or back color if you wish to distinguish this priority from others when it appears in table rows.

Note: To have the formatting appear in a table’s rows, open the table configuration, select the Appearance tab, then the Grid tab and Row Formatting tab. Select the join path to the priority’s FontAndColorControl attribute.

6.	When you are finished, click OK to save the priority.

7.	Repeat steps 3 to 6 to enter all of your scheduling priorities.