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Being able to bulk-assign tasks would also be useful, perhaps assigning someone to a bucket and having each task inherit that assignment.Īfter you get underway with your project and start marking tasks as complete, you can keep track of your progress with some neat charts.

Obviously with more than one member of a plan it makes sense to assign tasks to the appropriate person.

I went back through them all to assign them to me, just to see the effect it has on the progress charts. As the only member of this plan I skipped that step, which left all of the tasks unassigned (whoops). Even after you’ve set target completion dates for tasks, there’s no sorting within a bucket, except by manually dragging them into the correct order.Įach task in a bucket can be assigned to one or more people. Unfortunately, new tasks get added to the top of the list, so all my buckets were then displaying tasks in the wrong order. I added tasks to each bucket in the order they will be performed in.

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You can rearrange buckets, but can’t stack them or compress them (one of Kanban Flow’s useful features is the ability to collapse a board/column once you’re done with it for the week, to free up space). The scrolling is horizontal instead of vertical, so it doesn’t work with the scroll wheel on my mouse. I have a large display, but the layout of Planner wastes quite a lot of space, so I can’t fit more than four buckets on screen at once. I created a plan to manage the development of my latest Pluralsight course, and was able to map out each planned module as a bucket, and then add tasks for the production steps required for each module. To me it seems logical that a Group should be able to have multiple plans.Ĭreating buckets and tasks within a plan is easy. The other option is to re-use the same plan over and over, refreshing the tasks list each month, therefore losing visibility of previous months’ efforts.

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Creating a new plan every month will result in a sprawl of Groups, unless the previous months’ Groups are purged after they reach a certain age (life cycle management of Groups is entirely manual today). A simple example of this would be a team of IT admins who want to coordinate regular, routine tasks such as monthly security updates. It’s conceivable that a Group would have members that need to work on more than one plan. When you create a plan, a Group is created to host that plan. There is a 1:1 relationship between Groups and plans. This is also, in my view, somewhat of a downside as well. When you create a new plan, an Office 365 Group is created, along with all of the Group components such as the mailbox, calendar, document library for file storage, and OneNote notebook.

The best thing about Planner is that it is included free with your Office 365 tenant, and integrated with Office 365 services you’re already using. Creating a new plan is quick and easy from the Planner portal. I’m writing up some articles about that, but in this post I wanted to focus on what I’ve found to be good about Planner, and what I think it needs to improve on.

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Rather than approach Planner as purely a solo productivity tool, I’ve been looking at how to use it for managing small projects and collaborative tasks. Most recently I switched all my personal task and project management over to Todoist, which doesn’t have the Pomodoro integration but I can use a separate app for that. Kanban Flow also has a handy Pomodoro timer, which helps me stay focused (I switched to an iPhone timer while I’ve been using Planner). Trello has great integration with other services (at one stage I was using it with some IFTTT recipes), and also has handy templating. And of course, I’ve worked in many different companies that use Microsoft Project to manage projects. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. I’ve previously used Trello, which is often compared to Planner, and also Kanban Flow. But lately I’ve also been using it to track my own projects.Īs a solo operator a team-based collaboration tool like Microsoft Planner won’t always be a perfect fit. Being external collaborators in our on Office 365 tenants, using Planner was a bit challenging. After Microsoft released Planner as a preview in late 2015 (it was called Office 365 Planner back then), we started using it to track progress on book projects like Office 365 for IT Pros. For the last few months I’ve been using Microsoft Planner for projects and collaboration.

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