Microsoft Planner Questions

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Posted by Ken
Jun 27, 2024 at 05:21 PM

Apologies in advance for the rant, but I have said it before and I will say it again, that Planner is jut not my cup of tea. But my employer is predominately a Microsoft shop and I may need a task management too that I can share with others. I’ll skip my gripes about all of the needed features I think should be included in the product to make it useful, and just focus on one somewhat philosophical question I am struggling with.

Traditionally, Kanban-style boards are supposed to be set up to reflect the sate of the work (e.g. to-do, in progress, done), and I can do this with Planner, but I manage a number of projects and having a board for each project would also make sense on some levels as I can see all of the tasks under one board. The downside of this is that the dashboard chart feature of the program then becomes a whole lot less useful since others cannot easily see how much I am working on, how much I need to get to, and how much is on hold.

I know there are no right or wrong answers and I can do as I please, but I was wondering what others in the forum thought about this question, specific to working in Planner? I have played around a bit with both layouts, but my distaste for the program always seems to overwhelm my better judgement. The chasm between Planner and Project is so vast that I cannot believe that Microsoft cannot offer a well-featured task management product somewhere in the middle (or at least offer more features in Planner).

Thanks,

—Ken

Posted by satis
Jun 27, 2024 at 07:10 PM

While Planner can be optimized to some extent for your use case, its limitations in providing a comprehensive multi-project view might make it challenging for your specific needs. You may want to look into the more sophisticated Project for the web for managing multiple projects simultaneously. (see next post)

Planner optimizations:

- Use buckets for different projects or categories, to help organize tasks across multiple projects.

- Use color-coded labels to differentiate between projects or priority levels.

- Use the “My Tasks” view to see all tasks assigned to you across all plans.

- Integrating Planner tabs in Microsoft Teams can make it more convenient to collaborate and share plans.

- Microsoft To-Do integrates with Planner and can show tasks assigned to you across all plans. It might provide a better personal overview of your tasks.

Posted by satis
Jun 27, 2024 at 07:14 PM

(cont’d)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/planner/microsoft-project

Microsoft Project for the Web has advanced features for multi-project views and reporting compared to Microsoft Planner, making it more suitable for managing multiple projects simultaneously.

- Roadmap view lets you to visualize and manage multiple projects in a single view, providing a high-level overview of your entire portfolio. You can see timelines, milestones, and dependencies across different projects.

- Power BI integration offers robust reporting capabilities, allowing for for customizable, in-depth reports and dashboards that pull data from multiple projects.

- Timeline view (Gantt chart) view.

- Dependencies management: You can set and visually track dependencies between tasks, even across different projects.

- Project for the Web has better tools for managing resources across multiple projects

- Custom fields and views

- Microsoft Teams integration

- PowerApps and Power Automate integration let you or someone on your team build custom applications and automate workflows across multiple projects

Posted by satis
Jun 27, 2024 at 07:15 PM

So if you’re handling multiple projects you may need to jump that chasm…. or look into alternative apps.

Posted by Ken
Jun 27, 2024 at 09:15 PM

Thanks for the replies. I often found Project the wrong tool for my task management, but I have not had a chance to play around with Project for the Web, which may be a better fit. Unfortunately, I have not been granted access to either version, so I will have to see if I can be granted access, or just plow ahead with Planner (and wait for access to the new version of Planner as well). I had also considered using their color tags for each project, but I suspect the boards could be cluttered with lots of tasks, and I am not certain if I would work better with more boards for projects or less boards and more tagged tasks in each board. Neither greatly appeals to me. I am a big fan of saved views so I can see what I want the way I want and I do not believe that views can be saved.

—Ken

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