When Everything is High Priority, Nothing Is...

[#1]

Hey Jira Admins – if you're like me, you've probably battled with a flood of "High Priority" tickets that make it nearly impossible to distinguish what really needs attention. Here's a quick, actionable guide to implementing a Priority Matrix that brings clarity and efficiency to your workflow.

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1. Define Your Priority Fields

Start by setting up two key custom fields: Impact and Urgency.

• Impact: How broadly does the issue affect your organization?
• Urgency: How much is the issue disrupting your team's workflow?

For example:

• High Impact: Affects the entire organization
• High Urgency: Work is completely blocked
  → These combine to mark an issue as Critical Priority.

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2. Create Your Priority Matrix

Visualize your priorities with a simple, color-coded table:

• Horizontal Axis (Impact): Low, Medium, High
• Vertical Axis (Urgency): Low, Medium, High

At the intersections, assign your priority levels:

• Critical Priority (High Impact & High Urgency): Red
• High Priority: Orange
• Medium Priority: Yellow
• Low Priority: Green

This mapping makes it clear which issues deserve immediate attention.

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3. Automate in Jira

Leverage Jira's powerful automation capabilities to assign priorities automatically based on the Impact and Urgency fields.

• Trigger: Issue Created (or Field Updated)
• Conditions: Check the values of Impact and Urgency
• Action: Update the Priority field accordingly

Automation minimizes manual intervention and ensures consistency across your projects.

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4. Test and Iterate

Before rolling this out organization-wide, run a pilot with a subset of issues.

• Gather feedback: See how the new matrix works in practice
• Refine: Adjust field definitions, matrix mappings, and automation rules as necessary

A test environment is a great place to start—ensure everything is tuned before going live.

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5. Configure SLAs

Boost your system by linking each priority level to specific Service Level Agreements. For example:

• Critical: 4-hour response
• High: 24-hour response
• Medium: 48-hour response
• Low: 96-hour response

This alignment ensures that issues are addressed promptly based on their true urgency.

Interested in how the Priority Matrix works?
It's a practical framework for making sense of Jira tickets, and we've put together a quick guide to break it all down. Feel free to take a look and share your thoughts!

It's for free here.

[Joe Pursel]

This article is very timely for me in my company's transition to Jira Service Management as an Enterprise.

Teaching users and managers how to prioritize is an ongoing dilemma, primarily when no priority matrix or standard is used.

[Bill Sheboy]

Greetings, community!

Rather than defining your own guidelines in Jira as an admin, I recommend contacting your company's Operations Team and Product Management Team to learn if there exist a Business Context Diagram and a Service / Application Criticality Matrix for your business.  With those, your organization may have already defined the terms Severity, Priority, and Impact, as well as their interrelationships.  And those together help create data and goal-based Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with stakeholders, and relevant measures.

Also, I recommend moving this article to the "App Central" area due to the vendor linking.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Kit Mitchell]

This is super clear, thank you for sharing :)

[Stefan Froehlich]

Thank you for the article. One question regarding this part:

• Conditions: Check the values of Impact and Urgency
  
  

Do we essentially have to build every possible combination of the matrix into the condition?