We are excited to bring you a new webinar series where we will focus on a different Microsoft 365 (formally Office 365) topic every month. For November, we will be focusing on Microsoft Planner. On November 16, we will hold a live Q & A webinar on Microsoft Planner. We encourage everyone to bring their questions about Microsoft Planner, and our founder, Jennifer Buchholz, will answer your questions and share tips and tricks about Microsoft Planner. In addition to the live Q & A webinar, Jennifer also recorded a great overview video for Microsoft Planner.

What is Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner is a way to organize teamwork and tasks – similar to Asana, Slack, or Trello for task/ project management. Planner provides a hub for team members to create plans, organize and assign tasks to different users, and check updates on progress through dashboards. It also provides a centralized place where files can be shared and give visibility to the whole team. As a Microsoft 365 app, you can find Planner within your Microsoft 365 home under your apps.

How Does Microsoft Planner Work?

At the heart of Microsoft Planner is its easily accessible web interface. Once they have connected, team members can plan tasks and handle simple projects without the hassle, complexity, or time commitment of a traditional project planning platform.

Microsoft Planner also gives users the ability to set deadlines, so supervisors can create projects, establish expectations, and let team members work to meet them. And since Microsoft Planner allows for accessible communication between team members, no one feels left out or underappreciated.

Who Has Access to Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner is part of the Microsoft 365 environment. That makes it accessible to companies of many different sizes. If your company has purchased a license for Microsoft 365, you should be able to access Microsoft Planner in addition to other tools in the suite.

One of the most significant advantages of Microsoft Planner is the fact that it integrates so well with other parts of the Microsoft 365 family. Microsoft Planner users can work on projects while they interface with Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and other popular Microsoft 365 tools.

Microsoft Planner also provides guest access, so users who do not yet have formal accounts can share their ideas, provide input on current projects, and contribute to the team. This is a useful feature for many companies, especially fast-growing firms who need to quickly bring new employees up to speed.

Transcript

Hello and thank you for joining us for our first edition of our topic of the month. Jennifer Buchholz with Excel and Flourish, and I'm here today to talk to you about Microsoft Planner. Now, I really love this new tool that Microsoft has introduced because for me, having done work in project management, there were oftentimes we were using a really great tool called Microsoft project, but that was a really elaborate tool. I consider it the high end of the spectrum. And oftentimes we needed a whole additional resource just to run our get charts and project plans in Microsoft project loved it. It's an extra cost and we needed more resources to use that tool. I don't have it anymore. So then what was our alternative tasks in outlook and not everybody even knows that you can assign tasks to people and you can, you know, sort of use that for running some stuff, but there was nothing in the middle until Planner. When I start to show you it with Microsoft Planner is going to hopefully help resolve this gap between using tasks, using other tools or going all the way over to Microsoft project. Welcome to Microsoft Planner.

Let me just give you a quick overview of what Planner can do for you. And then we'll make sure you know where to find it right now. I'm in teams and the team that we're in already has a plan going just a quick overview of what a plan will look like. A plan is organized in various buckets. So here we have the engineering bucket, the manufacturing bucket, and the launch bucket. You can add new buckets easily by clicking over here within the buckets. You have tasks, and they're basically laid out in a board fashion. And in this fashion, you're actually able to left click and drag and drop items. You can edit these items, move them around, and once you're done, mark them complete. And now they'll land on your completed items list.

What's great about this tool is that it's visual. It allows for very flexible movement, and it's a complete communication tool about all the tasks associated with whatever project you're working on. Each team can have multiple tasks and multiple projects and multiple plans. You can have more than one of anything that you want here. You also do not have to be using Microsoft teams to have the full value of Planner. You can also find a Planner when you go to portal.office.com and log in, you can actually get to all of your applications. Let's see if I can bring them up this way, all of your applications. And if you're not familiar with all of these, guess what, that's why we're doing topic of the month. To become more familiar with all the applications that you're already subscribing to and paying for click over to Planner. So whether you're in teams, leveraging teams as a tool for your organization and communication, or if you're outside of teams and just want to use Planner within a small group, and it can be internal or external, or even if you just want to use it for your own management of tasks, Planner can be used within Microsoft teams or outside Microsoft teams. Any of those are available options

In order to get started. We're just going to need to create a plan. To create our first plan. There's going to be some key things that are going to happen with every plan that we use the first is that your plan needs a name. I'm calling it. Test plan for topic of the month. Now you can go in and manually assign the individuals that you want to be a part of this plan, or you can add it to an existing Microsoft three 65 group. So if you do already have groups set up for your organization, you can add the plan to that group right here. Otherwise you're welcome to set it up as a public or a private group. I strongly suggest unless you want the group available to the entire organization, that you make it private. You can add a description here as well, that may not be necessary. Um, it certainly would be necessary for if it were a public plan. So we hit create plan. And now this is going to be a cloud based operation right now, by default, there's only you as the member of the plan to add new members to your plan, come on over and click to members. And then you just need to add people inside or outside your organization to be a part of that plan. And as you can see, it's searching as I'm typing, it's searching for the people, keep in mind that the people that you do add, they will be able to see everything in the whole plan. That is part of this communication tool. There are not private tasks and public tasks within a plan. So everyone who is listed as a member will have access. If you have added a plan to a group or a team, everyone who is a member of that group, or that team will have access to the plan, whether or not you have assigned any tasks to them. So keep in mind, as you're adding members are looking at how your structure and governance are that once they are added to the membership, they have access to everything within here.

The basic structure of your plan then will be in that board type of format that we saw earlier. You have the basic start of to-do and then you're welcome to add new buckets. So a new to add a new bucket, just click there. And again, let's just say, for example, that this was for the marketing group for this particular project. So if I want an easy way to see all the tasks that are assigned to marketing, I could add that bucket. If I want some for production, I can add a new bucket here. So you can have as many buckets as it makes sense. Again, part of this is about the visual appeal. So you may not want to go too far off, even though you can add them. That doesn't mean that you should. You can start a task anywhere. In fact, just because it's a little easier right now, I'm going to start it over here under production. We're going to do test run Video.


If I just hit enter right now, you'll see that that task has landed. That's the simplest way to get that task up on the board, even if you're not sure about all the details yet, if you know, something needs to be done, but you don't have a due date or you don't have who you're assigning it to, or any other details, at least putting it on the board means that you've captured it and you can fill in the blanks later. In fact, if you just want to create A bucket for those that need to be designed, you can then just drag and drop your tasks over to that bucket. So, you know, to go back in and assign those tasks when you need to, okay, I'm going to ask, make one more task here for marketing, just call it social media. And again, I'm just hitting enter to get it on the board. That's the first part quickly making a task and having it in the buckets where you need it. Simply, the next step is assigning the tasks who do we need to do it? You can click on the task and assign and select your person. Or you can actually drag a person from your list up here, drag a person to the task.

Sometimes those things work and sometimes they change the rules, go back in and assign. One of the things that I like about this as well is perhaps this is a team task and there need to be a couple people assigned to it. You can assign more than one person to a task. Assigning people to the task is what actually makes it show up on their to-do list. You want to make sure that if stuff needs to get done, people know who is responsible for getting it done.

Now that we know who is doing each project, we should probably add some details to the project. So they know what they're supposed to be doing in that moment. Let's take a look a little bit more in depth about all the details that are actually provided in a task and that are available. Again, this is a place where you can move what bucket it lands. Additionally, as Megan makes progress on this, it may help for her to indicate that it's in progress or process, because it's helpful to do that when we're using some of the management tools in here also priority can be set and there are visual indicators for priority right here. Again, it, as we all know, if everything is urgent or everything is important, then nothing is urgent or important. But if you use these sparingly and appropriately, they can really help call attention to things that need to get done.

You can assign a start date. You can assign a due date. The start date is not nearly as important as having the due dates in because that's, what's going to land on the calendar. This, when you have a start date in there, it will show a whole range. Not a problem. Now we have a few different places to add additional information, right within the task. Why do I love this? Come back on screen a little bit bigger here. I love this feature because I don't know about you, but I have found so many times when I'm working on something. And there's an email from here and an email from here and all these different communications about this thing that I'm supposed to be working on, and you can lose track of them, or you don't always have the latest and greatest stuff when you go to actually do it. And you don't want to have to go to your email first to then go get the task done. With the whole group, all working in this one tool to show what we've accomplished, now, the communication can take place right in that tool as well. Hopefully cutting down on email, which I think we'd all like. First of all, there's any notes. So if you have notes about project itself, put your notes here, especially for that specific task.

Also one of the things that I love is that if this is a multi-step process, you can put the steps in. So step one, then you can say, get sign off. Then you can say, actually post, whatever we're doing on that, you can have your checklist right here. And you have the option to either show your notes on the card or the checklist on the card. Or if you have an attachment that you want to add to this, you can add that to the card as well. Let me show you what that looks like when you show your checklist on the card. Now you can quickly see those sub tasks that need to get done for that thing to be considered accomplished. I love the visual of this because if I know that that's done and I check it off, it goes away. It's still in the post.

If you go to click on it, you'll see that it's there and it's crossed off, but you have some other tools that you can use with this. And if you look at this, Oh my gosh, what if getting sign off is actually a new task. I could actually promote that to be a new task. And we have the new tasks in the notes related to that created. It's just a really nice, easy, seamless system that doesn't take a lot of over management. So those are just some of the things that we would do when we put additional details to a task. Also, if you have additional collateral that you need to have, or points of reference, don't forget to add attachments. You can add file attachments here where you can go grab something from, you know, whatever your device is.

Of course my things all are gone. It didn't download my assets. There they are. Here we go. There's an example of one of the attachments that we could add. And again, we can add, have that show on the card, but there's not. They try to keep the board clean. You can't have all of that stuff showing on the card. You can pick one, you can also add links or you can add links to SharePoint files. You can keep all of that stuff contained in this one place. It makes it so much easier. Additionally, the comments is intended to be anybody else's conversation or comments about the status. So I could say can you send me an update or even better? Can you post and update? I know where they're at and I hit send. And now that also lands directly in the task. I'm going to close out of this. Keep in mind that this is cloud-based. So it's saving as we're going, which is nice as well. And now again, if you ever wanted to check and see what the status is, we can take a look there and here we go, we can see how far that's at and things like that.

Any other tools that you can use to get better visual management of what's happening on your board are actually labels. You can click on the three dots next to any task and use these labels. As you see fit. Now, these labels are actually customizable and let me actually open the task and customize it. I think we actually have to be in a task. There we go to edit the label. If we want that pink label to say, um, social media, so we can see, even if it's something that we're producing, that social media should be considered for that. We can go ahead and tag any of those tasks related to social media. Now, what I don't want to see folks doing though, is using these labels instead of using the things built into the task. Don't use labels. If you should have a bucket instead, don't use labels to consider in-progress types of work. Don't use labels to indicate urgency or importance or things like that. Those are built into the system, and those are going to be tools that we can use for gathering data and measurement in a moment. So I don't want you to sub in a tool that we can't measure. If we could just use a tool that we can measure.

A couple of the things as you saw, I clicked on these three dots is that, of course you can always add, you know, change your assignment here, but I love this. You can actually copy your tasks. If it's something that you have to do multiple times, I encourage you to copy the task. They do not currently have an option for recurring tasks. And part of me feels good about that because the recurring task, I could put like 50 of those out there, and then it would really skew my data if it was something that I needed to do every other day or something like that. Think about how you want to run that part of what you're doing. So instead, if I literally had to do social media 50 different times, I could leave this one task out there and change my checklist and change that to say, you know, whatever week I'm going call this the 34th week.

And we could just call that Monday of the 34th week. And then we could make another item that is 34th week and have that be Wednesday so that you, when you get those done, you can just Mark those off the checklist rather than having those be separate tasks. You need to think about it. It gives you all the flexibility of how you want to run your project and how you want to measure it and things like that. And then you just know that that was probably a task that always was going to be in progress rather than something that got completed. But because you have all that flexibility, don't over. Think it, goodness knows. If you were trying to make 50 social media posts and you had one task for each one of those posts, this board would get really cluttered. And I don't know that it would add a lot of value to the whole team to see it done that way.

So these are some of the things that when we get to the live Q and a, that we're doing, these are some of the things that you're going to be able to ask about, which is, you know, okay, this is the project I'm thinking about doing what are like three different ways. We could go about setting that up. There's no perfect way to do it. And the best part of Planner is that for each different plan that you're trying to put together, you can structure that entirely different. The experience from the user is going to be very similar because they're going to understand the concept of buckets. They're going to understand how to Mark things as completed. They're going to understand how to maybe change who it's assigned to that part stays consistent, but you have a lot of flexibility in how you design it so that it's giving you the data that you want to manage your projects and your tasks as well.

Speaking of measuring your projects and tasks. Now it's time to take a look at what does it look like from the overall overview of how this is working. I'm going to change plans for just a moment to show you this, want to have a plan that's a little bit more populated. For this example, I'm back in teams and you're going to see that the experience looks very similar to what you've seen so far. So again, they just have a few different buckets. They have a couple of tasks that are partially completed. We have a couple of things that may be past due. You can see where that lands

Your own personal review of all of the tasks that you have going on. We have a couple of different options right up here. One is how are you grouping the tasks? You can group it by bucket, which is what we've looked at so far. You can also group it by who it's assigned to. So now you can see workload on your team. That's one way to take a look at it. And within this view, you can actually drag and drop a task to assign it to another person. That's one way of working around that. You can filter those tasks as well, based on again, who it's assigned to and the due dates, group by progress. So now we have a grouped by not started in progress and completed. That's why I don't want you to use those other color coding systems to do that because you can't really group well by those labels, especially depending on outside of this particular plan, those labels are going to be different for every plan you're working on. I prefer that you use the progress to measure that due dates. Again, you can quickly see what's overdue.

You can group by labels when they're used. Again, I they're okay for a visual indicator. I don't know that they're great for management, but people might have a different idea on that. And that's fun to listen to as well. And then we can also group by priority. So again, this is just looking at this one particular plan. I'm taking it back to buckets, but so far everything we've been looking at has been in board view. We're again, it's more like you're using this board experience where you can pick up and move something and drag it. There are other views available here as well. Some people prefer a list of you. This is a quick and dirty, like, let's take a look at the list. We can group it by bucket. We can then quick search switch over here and group it by, or sort by when it's due. That is the list view. And from any of these views, you can actually add a task. Whatever you're more comfortable working in, try that

I'm going to actually take it a schedule view. Next schedule view is what looks at I'm going to change the I'm going to change it to weekly. Just because you can see more in this view schedule view is looking at the start date and the end date of any of these items. Let's just scroll through a little bit. So you'll see that this particular task starts on the 11th and then you can scroll through further and that one keeps going in this. They're sort of using it as a Gantt chart for a visual on a schedule, but they are not. We are, we don't have the technical ability here in Planner to turn it into something with dependencies, right? That's where Microsoft project is your better tool for that. And Planner, you can't go in and say, well, as soon as the launch is complete, then we can move on to this next task. That doesn't happen. That's a project feature, not a Planner feature. Just so you're clear on the difference. But again, this gives you a really good overview. You also can see if there's any unscheduled tasks, so there's no unscheduled tasks here, but if there were, you could review those.

Can we look at again, just how does this play out on any of these? You can dig into any of those dates and then always fair warning. Microsoft 365 is an online product, which is great because it's cloud based, but it also means that they can make changes and update it in a very agile fashion, which means there may come a time where this looks different than what I've showed you right now. Sorry, that's just, what's happening with Microsoft three 65. So this should be a good 90%, but within a few months, I bet there's going to be parts that are outdated, but let's get to my favorite part of how you can look at your tasks on Planner. My favorite way to measure your task progress on Planner is using charts. Okay, take a deep breath and go with me on this. For those of us who like data and like the visual ability to manage stuff, this is our status update. We clearly can see in here, how many are completed? How many are late? How many are not certain, how many are in progress? We can look at the buckets and get a view of those tasks. We can look at it by priority and we can look at it by who assigned how many tasks.

So this gives us again, I could consider this dashboard, my control panel for tasks and projects, because it gives me the ability to look at the whole thing in a holistic manner and get a sense of where is this thing. And now we can start to have conversations around that Now that you're all super excited about Planner. I also am curious if maybe you're starting to feel a little bit overwhelmed, like, Oh my gosh, if I have my own plan and I'm on some teams and people add me to their plan, how am I going to manage my own stuff? Never fear. Here's what we have in your team's application. You can actually get the Planner app. This is one place it comes out. Okay. I brought up a better example on this one for my tasks. Here's what happens when I'm in the Planner application on the web from portal.office.com. Here are some of my options. We have the Planner hub, by the way, it is giving me the reminder that you can have Planner in your packet and use a phone app for Planner as well. Disregard that. This is the best part it's showing me all of the plans that I am a part of. You can Mark them as favorite you can.

From here, just note, you can copy a plan, which I love, because then if I use a plan repeatedly, like in, for an annual event or something like that, I can just copy that plan and fill it in with new stuff. Um, also you can copy a link to a plan in case you're sending it out to people that need to jump on and review that plan. From here, I can navigate to any of those plans and see what's going on, but even better, I go to my tasks, you guys, my tasks. This pulls stuff from the various plans; this is the event plan. This is the product launch plan. It pulls it's like sucks all of the stuff in, because it's all tied together by your username. It pulls all of that stuff. And now you're able to go through and say, Oh, this is what I need to, you know, work on. This is what's in process. These are the deadlines, here's what I've completed. And you actually can run your own charts and you can look at your own schedule. And this is how you could go back and renegotiate. If some of these things aren't working out in your broader picture of what you're trying to achieve.

Thank you so much for joining us today for this first topic of the month that we're trying and really digging into Microsoft Planner. I'm sure you have a bunch of questions. That's the reason why we're doing our live Q &A webinar. If you've had a chance to watch these videos and maybe try practicing on your own systems, the Q and A webinar is going to be your chance to ask any questions and get some advice using best practices and everything else that I might know about other tools. Planner is a fabulous tool. I want to make sure that you're using the right tool, the right way for what you're trying to accomplish. I'm also excited because next month topic of the month is Microsoft to do so. I'm really trying to help you get all of your stuff in order before the end of the year. You can jump into 21 organized and ready to go with projects and tasks. Microsoft To Do is a fantastic product that not only brings in your emails from your outlook and your to do's or tasks in there, but it adds a whole bunch of other features and integrates the task six you've been assigned in Planner. So, it's a natural fit and flow to come after our Planner conversation. I look forward to seeing you, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you.