Thanks to the recent improvement, we can now integrate Plan with Outlook. Planner now integrates with a personal Task Management tool and allows a user to see personal as well as team-related tasks all in one place!Ī screenshot of To Do showing Planner Tasks Integration with Outlook Calendar This is a feature of Microsoft To Do, that I blogged about previously. By the way, if you are looking for alternate ways to maintain checklists in Office 365, please reference this post.Īs you participate in various Office 365 Groups and have multiple plans with tasks, it is always useful to see all the tasks from all plans in a single view. Instead of creating separate tasks in Plans, you can create subtasks (called Checklist) within a task panel. Sometimes a task, no matter how small it is, requires a few subtasks to be completed first. With Planner – it is front and center and allows users to see the comments and activity on a given task in chronological order. With MS Project and even with a SharePoint Task List, this was somewhat hidden and not obvious. The ability to provide comments on a task. It is very high-level, do not expect detailed reporting here, but still quite useful. The Planner Hub allows you to have a 10,000-foot view over your projects. – however you want to organize your tasks in a project. A bucket could be anything – phase of the project, a sprint in a Scrum project, category, etc. The task panel in Planner allows you to enter typical attributes of a task like a task name, due dates, assigned to, description, status, priority.Īs you create your tasks, you can organize them into buckets (board categories). OK, so now that we got the intro out of the way, let’s review the major features that make this tool unique and powerful! Tasks There are two ways to create a Plan in Planner, and I documented them all in this post. It is part of the Office 365 Group membership group, which means that it is members of the security group enjoy equal access to Planner, Outlook, SharePoint Site, and Teams. It is not just a task management list that floats in space. What makes Planner unique, compared to other tools out there, is that being part of an Office 365 eco-system it is also part of an Office 365 Group. It is social – unlike MS Project which is usually maintained by the project manager, Planner is built for the teams – any team member can create/edit tasks and comment on them.It is less formal – it does not have an ability to set dependencies, manage resources, etc.
Here are key attributes of Planner in comparison to MS Project. At one point, I provided a brief overview of the tool in this post. Planner is a light-weight task management tool that allows project managers and team members to build and maintain task plans for various projects. With this post, I would like to give a bit more insight into the Planner and explain its main components. It is simple, fun to use, and very useful. Planner, on the other hand, provides a light-weight alternative for regular team members. But MS Project is a serious tool, built for project managers and large, lengthy projects. As a project manager in my past career, I used MS Project extensively. In case you are not familiar or using Planner at the moment, I highly encourage you to get to learn and use the tool.