Prioritize what matters: How Attribute highlighting helps growing teams stay focused
Whether you’re a team of five or fifty — as your organization grows, so does the number of projects, tasks, and priorities. At some point, work packages that once fit on one board become a sea of cards, and keeping focus becomes a challenge.
That’s why we created the Attribute highlighting feature: it helps you immediately see what needs your attention most. In this article, we’ll walk you through a relatable scenario and show how this Enterprise add-on can support you in staying focused and scaling successfully.
You’ve grown — now it’s time to change how you work
Things are going well. Your organization is growing. More clients, more projects, more team members. But with growth comes complexity. What used to be a simple backlog is now a multi-project list of dozens — maybe hundreds — of open tasks. And suddenly, you’re no longer sure what’s urgent, what’s blocked, or what’s been waiting for weeks.
Your system hasn’t changed, but your needs have. And that’s a good thing — because it means it’s time to invest in new ways to keep your growing team aligned.
Clean up your work package table by highlighting priority, status or finish date
Let’s take your team’s work package table as an example.
You’ve filtered for this month’s deliverables — but the list is still long. You spot tasks with due dates coming up, some that are marked high priority, and one that was updated just now. But it takes a few minutes of scrolling and reading to get the full picture.
That’s where Attribute highlighting comes in. This Enterprise add-on allows you to visually emphasize specific values in your work package table using color: overdue tasks can turn red, high-priority items might stand out in orange, and different status values can appear in clearly distinguishable shades.
With just a glance, your team can now immediately see:
- What’s overdue,
- What’s marked as high or urgent priority,
- What’s resolved or in progress.
Important
The Attribute highlighting feature is part of the Enterprise add-ons in OpenProject. You can find more information about it in our documentation.
How Attribute highlighting works
Let’s say your team uses the Priority attribute and a custom status workflow. You can highlight individual attributes inline (Status, Priority, Finish date) or apply full-row highlighting based on Status, Type, or Priority.
Once you’ve set this up in the work package table view, your team sees these visual cues automatically — without needing to open each task individually.
Tip
You can configure which colors are used for each priority and status in the System administration. Learn how to adjust them for priorities and for statuses.
Let’s look at an example work package table and how it looks with different attributes highlighted. Please note that you can change the colors for work package attributes and that they might look different in dark mode or light mode.
1. No attribute highlighting
Image 1: A work package table in OpenProject, no attributes highlighted.
2. Status, Priority and Finish date highlighted inline
Image 2: A work package table in OpenProject, with inline-highlighted Status, Priority and Finish date.
3. Highlighted by Status
Image 3: A work package table in OpenProject, highlighted by Status.
4. Highlighted by Type
Image 4: A work package table in OpenProject, highlighted by Type.
5. Highlighted by Priority
Image 5: A work package table in OpenProject, highlighted by Priority.
Other helpful features for prioritizing work packages
Attribute highlighting works best in combination with other prioritization features. Here are a few tools to support your growing team:
-
Work package priorities
Assign Low, Normal, or High to indicate importance. -
Status workflows
Define which status transitions are possible and by whom, helping structure review and approval processes. -
Date alerts and reminders
Automatically notify assignees or watchers when a due date is approaching. -
Versions
Group work packages under a common version to align delivery and deadlines across tasks. -
Custom fields
Add structured information to work packages that you can then use for filtering, highlighting, or grouping.
Each of these features helps you bring structure to complexity — and together, they make it easier to stay focused.
Stay focused as you scale
Growth is exciting — but only sustainable if your tools grow with you. Features like Attribute highlighting can make a real difference: not by changing how you work, but by making it easier to see what matters.
With a growing team and more responsibilities, the ability to focus at a glance isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s essential. Let OpenProject help you take that next step.
