How to Use Microsoft Planner to Manage Your Project (2024)

Microsoft planner it can do so much more than what you're probably using it for today yes if you need to store documents and also file email and you're looking for other tools to do that in then don't overlook Microsoft planner because it does provide those capabilities not only that we can do more inside of task management to drive better reporting you can share with your colleagues and your stakeholders very easily using planner so let's take this opportunity to review how best you can man your next project when it comes to using planner and check out some capabilities that you may have not seen before that you can use today but before we move on here's a quick stat that might interest you 88% of viewers that watched our last video were not subscribed to our Channel and we would love it if you're part of the 88% hit the Subscribe button that will help us continue to create great content every single week to turn you into a productivity Superstar and learn the greatest tricks that you can use to become more productive with the tools you already have so let's dive in to Microsoft planner and see how best you can manage your next project and use all of those exciting capabilities to get started and create your plan what all we need to do is go to office.com they'll take you into your landing page for Microsoft 365 then click on the app launcher to the top left and you'll see all of the apps you have available to you now as you can see I don't see the planet icon in this list but not to worry all we need to do is go down and select explore all of your apps it'll then take you to a dedicated page to have access to all of your Microsoft 365 apps and services and here we can see that Microsoft planner is available to me in the bottom right of this page left clicking into planner takes us into Planner on the web this has more capability than what you may have seen inside the Microsoft teams you can quick access all of your plans all of your tasks across those plans and more but equally we can easily create oursel a brand new plan we can do that by going to the new plan option in the top left and here we now see an option that you may have not seen before because this is not available inside a Microsoft teams when you go and create a plan so what we can do is we can choose an available template to create our plan from for example a simple plan to organize some of your activities giving you a number of buckets and tasks you get started with quickly but what we're considering today is how best to manage one of your projects inside the planner so simple plan simply won't cut it instead let's go to our project management template and here we can see it's much more structured way to manage our own project it has boards and tasks from initiating planning and executing our project and more not forgetting we can customize these templates once we create our plan from them so it provides full customization for you to manage your own project in the best way so with that now selected we can now give your plan a title so here I'm going to go ahead and type in our project name with our project name defined we can now select whether I should attach this plan to an existing group because yes you can use these templates with an existing Microsoft team or group so if you're already part of a team you want to create your plan and attach it to one of those from one of these templates just select your team or group from this drop down to attach it into that team and share that security but we're not going to be doing that today instead this is going to be a brand new plan of a brand new security group so here it's really important to Define our security is your plan going to be available companywide without any restrictions in Access or equally should it be private and only visible to name people that you and your team bring in to able to share tasks inside of your plan and the majority of plans that we see working with customers they will select a private plan so here I'm going to leave it as private ensuring that only nine persons have access to tasks moving forward and that visibility is certainly restricted and it won't be available across the whole organization once you've done that select the create button and it'll create your new plan from that template inside the Microsoft planner and here we go just in a couple of seconds we have a plan that's already been created for us we have buckets and tasks that have also been created for us as well so inside of your plan you're now going to be given a number of buckets and tests pre created for you by Microsoft planner now if you're not happy with these buckets you can actually change them but the biggest question is what on Earth is a booket do we put liquid or water into it no inside a planner buckets hold all of your t task and we see different people approaching buckets in different ways for example in my template here the buckets initiating and planning have been set in a certain type of stage so the stage of the project for initiating is a bucket as is planning allowing us then to create tasks inside those buckets by the visual layout of our project moving forward but equally you might want to change these buckets you can easily do so click on the free dot menu next to any of your buckets select rename you can over type the bucket name and apply that into your plan equally to add another bucket scroll to the right and click on add new bucket and here you might want an area for financials because we need to go and check what's going on with our financials in our project well there we go we have a new bucket available to us now we do see some people using buckets to manage particular people so yes you could have buckets for particular team members within your project adding tasks beneath that bucket provide an easy visual layout when your team are working on tasks but equally when I'm working on one of my projects I like to see it by stage and close down tasks in particular stages aligning to buckets it's very simple to make your changes to make them work best for you but alongside buckets well we need tasks project plan is particularly useless with no tasks so let's consider how best to create our tasks well under financials we have this bucket here there are no tasks that have been created for it all we then need to do is click on add task and we can give it a task name for example I need to raise a purchase order to actually get this project up and running so let's go ahead and put raise PO for our purchase order now you'll see it's limited on what we're actually able to input here but don't worry planner does provide more capability than that all we need to do is firstly set a due date so I'm going to set it for the end of this week and then I need to assign it to one of our team and because this plan has been newly created I can only see the single person have access to it which is currently Alex here I'll go ahead and add this into Alex's task click on add task and you'll now see it says raise PO with a picture of Alex and also the date that's actually due on what we can then do is open up this task and we'll see more information that we can now be actually Import in sign of our task now it's important that labels should also not be overlooked if we left click into labels we'll see a number of colorcoded icons that you can customize for example I might want to be able to track a label that is everything with our finance team so here under Aqua I can click on the pencil icon and overtip the word aqua and I can actually change the word to finance team once I do that we'll then see the label has been updated left click and we now have a label noting Finance team you can change these labels however you would like to best manage your project moving forward provide a very clear visual indicator on particular areas and tasks that also have relevance to you now with that done we can also check out other information for example the progress in progress is it completed what is is going to be in progress the priority well it's very important so I'm going to mark it as an important task alongside that well the start date I'm going to start working on that today and should this ever repeat well not really I don't have to raise another po so I'm happy not to repeat this task but if you have things like project meetings weekly you want to mark off we can easily mark this as weekdays and have it reoccur every single weekday or weekly depending on your requirements now in addition to that notes can be really important for example as a project manager I might be off on a holiday enjoying my time off on the beach one of my team members comes in and sees his task to raise a PO but has no idea what a PO means so what we can then do is add further notes explaining who needs to have the PO raised and the reasons why so one of my team can easily understand this task and pick it up even when I'm not around with my notes done asking for a purchase order of a million dollars that's all done and added into the notes now what we can then do is a checklist of it activities this means a single task can have more relevance than just one that we just check off for example raising a PO is not a single task no I what I would expect to do is firstly raise a purchase order then I would expect to complete the purchase order information finally send it to the finance team with my checklist done I can now see all three of those points and of course I can add comments below and also at the bottom we can add suggested attachments this is content that you've worked to have inside a Microsoft 365 that could be helpful for this task well there's nothing here that's very helpful for this task so I can ignore that that effectively I'm not going to attach any content into this task itself now when I go ahead and close this down you'll then see visibly that our razor po task now has a checklist Associated to it and the good news is as we complete these activities I can check them directly in the card which syncs it in the back end I just checked off a purchase order you can actually see here it's been checked off as one of my activities and I can add further comments to help my team understand when that was done and what I done to achieve that task and why it's been ticked off the list so your plan can go a lot further than just managing your set of tasks because of course you're going to have to work with files inside of your plan and in this PO task we might need to attach the PO that I've sent on to our finance team to give actual information to the members of the team what's the best way we can achieve that what we can actually do is Click into raise Po and here we can add an attachment to this task by clicking add attachment we can browse to files on your computer from Microsoft teams or a link to a URL that could be a SharePoint file VI sharing link a one drive file much the same or even content on the web I have that PO on my desktop it's the worst place to keep it because I need to ensure the team has access to this PO so here let's select from computer and I'm going to go ahead and browse to my desktop going to go ahead and select the purchase order once I've done that I'll click open and we'll now see the purchase order has been inserted I can also Mark it to show on card that replaces the checklist but finds a visual indicator of the PO itself that might be helpful for my team once I've then done that I can go ahead and en close down the task and we'll then see the PO is noted here by again left clicking into this and then scrolling back down and left clicking into the purchase order it'll open up our purchase order inside the Microsoft Word but you're probably wondering where on Earth is this file stored it came from my desktop it was attached to planner and now it's magically available in word and it seems to be in a website of some type because it seems to be online but that's the power of Microsoft planner when we create plans in this way it actually sits in front of a Microsoft 365 group that provides additional capability for files and email management so let's go back into our plan and I'll show you how to visibly see where these files live we'll close out of our task and now we'll go into the freed dot menu and here we'll go down and select the files from the freed do menu now once we do that it'll then take us into a SharePoint site this SharePoint site has been created for us behind the scenes that powers our Microsoft planner the first time you access it you can even give it a design you can browse templates inside of SharePoint and you can even here choose a project management type theme so here select project management and use template and then in addition to your plan you'll have a SharePoint site using a template that provides more capabilities to manage your plan and that doesn't interfere with your Microsoft planner so let's go ahead and check out that template with that done we now see project launch countdown activities and also links into our documents you can customize using SharePoint but that's a quick way of creating a very simple and effective SharePoint site in just a couple of minutes that you can make changes to and improve further but of course we're interested in our files and under documents we can now see purchase order if I scroll to the left hand side and check out our documents area here we'll then see our purchase order by left clicking we now see the purchase order inside of word online once again and this is because the file lives inside of your SharePoint site for project winter that sits behind your Microsoft planner so it's really powerful to be able to upload other files and folders and also share them with your colleagues but why is that that is because the security of your plan is syn to your SharePoint site so very easily I could come in here and create a new folder for fin sign off or other files on the project and I could create sharing links and more to share them both within my team and outside of my team and it's not limited to what I'm actually have inside the planner so your SharePoint site that sits behind planner is the heart of where all of your documents live and it's really powerful to be able to share content and more and without doing that through other apps be able to all through the power of SharePoint and your plan so as we're talking about files and SharePoint let's let's consider our brand new learning course because you might need additional capabilities in understanding tools like Version Control sharing files with others securely who don't have access to your plan and we go into great detail in our brand new learning course and those type of topics and cover even more yes we've taken the best of all of our training content and put it into our brand new learning course which is all around how to better Master documents in SharePoint and teams if you'd like to come that Journey with us and master files and remove anxiety when it comes to using those tools why not check out the link below enroll in our course and have 247 access otherwise let's dive back into planner and check out more exciting capabilities but you're probably wondering right now well how does that SharePoint site work because you had security granted to your W your team well that's very simple inside a planner your security synchron iiz by the group itself as you add people to your plan they will also have access to the shared resources that will also give access to that SharePoint site I've just shown you and also a shared mailbox it's called a group inbox to able to hold all emails you've shared with your team so to add further people to your plan and those additional resources is very simple if we look at it for the lens of Microsoft planner all we need to do is go to the top right and click on the members drop down to see list of all of our members and here's where you add the rest of your project team for example Nestor I'll add him in he's a director of the company has an interest in our plan we also been supported by Megan by selecting Megan we can also provide access to Megan to the plan and all the associated resources and as simple as that I've added two people to the plan and all of our content but there's also an additional way we can do that which can also cause you significant problems if you're not sure sure on how this one works so let's go and check it out so going back into our raise po task I'm going to go ahead and open it up and as you actually saw earlier I only gave this task to Alex but this time clicking on the plus icon I can actually give this task to even Megan or Nestor cuz they also have access to our project plan so I can add them in a single click but instead I need to add it into another person's task Lisk that will be Henrietta so here's Henrietta here now when it's dropped down you'll then see it mentions non-member that is not Henri's job title it's actually saying to you this person has no access to this plan or any of the group content and in doing so you're going to invite them in so here I'm going to left click on henrietta's name and it will now bring up this dialogue here and it says this user isn't a member of this plan ass signing this task will add the users to the plan and Associated group membership and it'll give access to all plan data including files and teams channels well that's a nice summary because that's exactly what's going to happen by adding Henrietta to a single task will give access to the whole plan all of the tasks and all files that reside within this group within my SharePoint site and the emails that we may have filed as we're going to see later into our group mailbox I'm going to go ahead and click assign and add and now we see Henrietta is now additionally one of our task owners but of course I've also now granted access for Henrietta let look at all of our content in The Wider plan and all of that content now for any reason if you've done that incorrectly you can easily clean it up all we need to do is close this dialog down go into our members and we actually go next to henrietta's name and we can select the free. menu and select remove as we can see Henrietta disappears from this list of members by reopening our task Henrietta is still showing here as you can see has no access access to this task as they have no access to the group and therefore we need to read Henrietta to give access to this task and make it visible once again so very simple to add and remove people from your plan but being careful because of course they have access to much more than just a task you're granting them but with projects come emails and of course as we know your plan can certainly work with files we've seen that earlier in your dedicated SharePoint site and by attaching files into it through planner or just adding files into your SharePoint site for your colleagues but none of that works for emails so how could we potentially f one of your project emails so you can actually access it in your project team that's all come from your planner we can actually do that because we're going to use a technology that again comes from Microsoft 365 groups that allows us to have access to a shared mailbox it works a little differently because there are some limitations let's go ahead and open up Microsoft Outlook and go and check it out so here I am inside of Outlook we can actually see on the left hand side we have a group that's called project winter if we open it up we can actually see we've got the new winter group is ready and we've also added a further comment on a task which has only been shared within the group mailbox from planner itself now this project Pro winter mailbox then allows you to go ahead and file email into it and so that means that you and your colleagues can access this mailbox and pick up any email review it and take action you can do that in a variety of simple ways for example in my inbox I've got a lot of email here what I could just simply do is left click and drag an email and put it into project winter and then sync it by opening project winter we now see that that email has been synced and pushed into that shared mailbox to me and my team can access it it's very straightforward to do but likewise you might want to send an email to your team or simply copy them in so it appears in your group mailbox and how can we do that well if I go ahead and click on send email you'll see that your new mailbox comes with a dedicated email address and inside of project Winter by left clicking we can actually see it has four people granted access those are the two people we added inside of our plan in addition to Henrietta who we gave access to that task and therefore had wider access to your plan Itself by sending an email to this email address it'll be shared with all of those individuals they'll get access inside of your group mailbox so next time you want to send an email and copying your team using your group mailbox well go ahead and click on the CC or the two button inside of Outlook go to all groups and search for your project or your actual group name being project winter and here is the email address click on plus you now add in that email I could send the email to one of my colleagues such as Miriam chasing up the financial Po and once it's sent you'll see a copy of that email in your group mailbox that can be accessible both you and your team so if you're away from the office you'll know what emails have been sent now to pick up with them really quickly so who said planner was just all around task management so what's one thing that we all hate to do on projects that's chase people up when things become overdue and it's very simple in planner to manage tasks now to ensure that your team can access their task quickly by you sending notification emails or even teens messages yes any task we create inside a planner is synced into Microsoft too if you have your team installed on their computer or their mobile device any of the task you've assigned will then appear in their to-do list for example we can see here raise poo if I left click into it here's the purchase order I need to get sorted that's therefore due on Friday the 5th of Jan what I could do is Market add it to my day now here on my day I can very simply have access to it see the project it relates to and I can even check off the information that syncs directly into Microsoft planner meaning you as a project manager don't spend all day chasing people when it comes to managing tasks that sync directly to their to-do list but if your team don't want to use Microsoft to do or simply can't install on their computer not to worry head into Microsoft teams and then head into an app under the freed dot menu we're going to open the app called task by planner and to-do and guess what but it's exactly in the name here you'll see all of your assigned tasks across all of your different planners and here is our raise po task under assigned to me I can again go ahead and open it and have quick access to that task ask about going anywhere near the planner itself inside of the web or in teams as a separate tab here I can access all of my tasks make changes and more all inside of this direct integration in the Microsoft teams app so there's two great ways to share your tasks with your team and take all the Hees away when it comes to chasing them up and finally your project wouldn't be going anywhere without some management whil you can create fin F email and also consider the wider task management you're going to need to report on Project progress and that can take a lot of time when you're not using a tool light planner yes if you're using Excel or other tools you're going to spend a lot of time building pivot tables and charts to suit your project stakeholders which can have ever increasing demands on your time while using planner it's pretty simple to get those reports what we can do is click on charts inside of your plan and you'll now see a view of all of your available tasks inside of that plan we can also do things like filters so for example we see a view all of the tasks we've got nine not started one is in progress we see the priority the members and so forth now what we can do is go on the right hand side and we can actually filter this information for example I'm only interested where Henrietta is working on a task I can very visibly see that she has one task to do when the booket for financials and also has a priority of importance I could also again further filter that based upon due dates and so forth if I remove this actual filter I can also go to labels remember we created earlier our financial team label well as your task grow with that label we can go to finance team and review any tasks been allocated to our finance team using a simple color coded label and filters in our charts that's how powerful it is to be to report on audio information really quick quickly we can even do things by grouping by a bucket or a sign to for example and once again we can look on the right hand side at the groups who has tasked in the finance team be Alex and Henrietta because they're both working on that raise poo task it's very simple to get access to all of your individual charts but alongside that if we go to the schedule view well here you'll get a view of all of that across multiple days and weeks so that helps you understand both a calendar view what needs to be done and when by left clicking to any of your tasks have quick access to make edits to them as well so there you go Microsoft planner in a way you may have never seen it before be able to file emails and documents and do so much more now if you like this video please hit that like button not forgetting if you don't want to be part of that 88% hit the Subscribe button allowing us to grow this channel to create even more content every single week to turn you to productivity Superstar otherwise I'll be seeing you on the next [Applause] [Music] one

Channel: Scott Brant

Views: 84,387

Keywords: microsoft planner, microsoft 365, microsoft, planner, ms planner, project management, microsoft teams, microsoft project, office 365, microsoft planner tutorial, project, tutorial, tasks, task management, microsoft planner overview, 365, office, how to, microsoft to do, plans, charts, microsoft planner app, how to use microsoft planner, microsoft planner teams, microsoft planner for beginners, how to use planner, Your 365 Coach, Your365Coach, microsoft planner tutorial 2023, 2024

Id: qRJxJQCnZpw

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024