How to use Microsoft Planner

hi everyone my name is Kevin today I want to show you how you can use Microsoft planner in Microsoft teams and also how you could use Microsoft planner outside of Microsoft teams Before we jump into this as full disclosure I work at Microsoft as a full time employee my HR department requires me to say that so first off what is Microsoft planner well Microsoft planner allows you to organize tasks for your team what you could do is you could assign tasks to team members you could check in on progress of tasks with your team it allows you to efficiently track and distribute work across a team now one way to think of it is it's like a to-do list if you've ever used a to-do list before it's very much focused on you as an individual with Microsoft planner what it does is it's much more focused on the team if you've ever used any products before or say for instance Monday calm or Trello Microsoft planner will seem very familiar now today to show you what Microsoft planner is like I pull together a lot of how-to YouTube videos now it's really just me as an individual doing this but imagine I had a team of people let's say I had some employees part of my company and we're pulling together videos I'm gonna show you how planner could help with that all right well enough talk why don't we jump on the PC and I'll show you how you can get started with Microsoft planner ok well here I am on my desktop and I have Microsoft teams open and what I want to do is I mention that I have this how-to company with all these employees now I don't know where I got the funding for all these employees but let's say I have all these employees what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna create a team with all of my employees and so all the people who are part of this team will have access to my planner so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on first off create a team and I'm just gonna go ahead and create just an other type of team and so what I could do here is maybe I'll call this team YouTube video creators so that will be the name of my group I'm not going to enter a description and I'm gonna make this a public group and then I'm going to go ahead and click on next and this is going to create my team next it's going to ask me to add a few team members since this is an example I might as well recruit a few people to my company you know the more help I could get the better so let me pull in let's say three employees and I'm going to go ahead and add all of them to my team and it looks like all of them have been added as members so this looks great and there I go I have three members of my team including myself we have four and here I'm now in the general channel of my team so some of the things I have here we have our conversation view I have my file view but what I want to do is I want to use Microsoft planner to help organize the team so to do that what I'm going to do is up here on the tabs across the top there's this plus icon to add a new tab I'm gonna go ahead and let's click on that and it shows me a bunch of different types of tabs I can add and today what I want to do is I want to add a planner tab so I could organize my team so I'm gonna go ahead let's click on this one and I'm gonna create a new plan and this will be maybe the video plan so this way we could organize and structure the videos coming up you can also use an existing plan so let's say I already have a planner that exists in Microsoft planner I could pull that into Microsoft teams in this case though I don't have any existing plans so I'm gonna go ahead and just create a new plan and what I can also do is post to the channel about this tab this is a nice way where if I do this it'll post it in the chat so everyone can see it and everyone can easily access it so that seems like a good idea to check that and now I'm gonna save this and let's see what happens okay so now I'm back in the the main view here and it looks like it dropped me directly into the planner under video plan Before we jump into a video plan what I want to do is I'm gonna go back to posts quickly and here you can see that it automatically created a post telling everyone about the new tab at the top of the channel and clicking on this will bring me in or alternatively I could simply go to the tabs on top of the page and I could also access my video plan by clicking on this text so for all of the members of your team you simply go to the appropriate channel and then you could very quickly get into the plan so I'm gonna go ahead and click on this plan and right now it's a little barren in here so I have all these employees but we don't anything to work on I should probably come up with some work for the team to do otherwise I'm paying a lot of money and I'm not getting much return so what we could do here is there are different buckets within this view and so I need to create buckets of work the way you could think of a bucket is it's a logical grouping of work and so in the case of let's say a YouTube video maybe a bucket is each individual video so I'm going to click on this standard one that to do that planner automatically added and I'm just going to retitle this to how to use google meat so maybe that's one video that we're gonna pull together as a team I'm gonna add another bucket and maybe this is how to record screen using Microsoft PowerPoint yes Microsoft PowerPoint has a screen recorder built in it's not very well known but it does do that and I did a video on that in the past and then for a third bucket let's throw one more video in and maybe this one is just how to use Microsoft teams if you're trying to figure out how to use teams I have a video on that and you can check it out so here are the added three buckets of potential work let's say in your organization just think of a logical grouping of work and that could be a bucket and so within this bucket what I can do then is I have the option to add a task and so I'm gonna just focus on this how to use Google meat and what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and add a task here and maybe the first task for creating a video is well we need to write a script and what I could do is I could assign a due date on this and today's Thursday and you know my team works really hard so maybe we're gonna set this to be due on Saturday on the 9th my team might not like having work due on a weekend but let's see how they react and what I could do now is I could assign a person to this so Adele is a very good scriptwriter so let me assign this task to her and there is the first task as part of this bucket of work and what I could do then is I could go ahead and create some additional tasks and so another one that I might want to do is we need to film and we need the script first so I'll set the due date on this for the tenth once again on the weekend my morale will probably be low because of these due dates set on these different items and for the filming I could assign a down maybe Isaac I want him to be involved as well and so you could select multiple people or you could assign a task multiple people and then what I can do is I have the due date I have the people and I'm gonna go ahead and add that task and now I'll just add a few others maybe one of them is to upload the video and maybe I'll set this for the 11th and I could assign this to myself you know I should probably be doing something as well versus just having my team do all the work and I'm gonna add that and then as a very last task maybe once we put the video up we want to respond to comments and for this maybe I'll wait a few days and we'll do this on the 14th and I'll have Isaac take care of this task so now I'll just go ahead and let's add that task and so what you can see now is within this bucket I have a number of tasks all with different due dates set on them what I can also do here so within this view here I could click in I could very quickly assign a label so you have these different colors you could define what these different colors mean you could add additional people to assign the task to if you want to reuse this task let's say for Microsoft teams or for this PowerPoint screen recorder I could copy the task over since those will probably have very similar tasks I could copy a link to the task if I want to email or message it to someone I could also move the task to a different bucket although an easier way to do that is simply drag and drop and so within this task now if I click into it this will give me a more detailed view of all the items within here so here for write a script what I could see is it sits within this bucket here too I could also change the bucket I can set where it is right now it's not started is it any progress or is it completed I could set the priority on this I could set a start date the end time which I already did I could also type in a description here if I want to add some more details so I'm gonna write a quick bit of text and what I could do is I could even choose to have that show up on the card if I want I'll go ahead and check that and what you could do is one way to think of it is these tasks or your top level tasks within a bucket what you can also do is you can also add subtasks here so I'm gonna go ahead and add a few items so what we're gonna do is first we're gonna have Adele go ahead create the document she's gonna write a draft then she's gonna share it with the team and then we'll incorporate any edits so I can add all of these and once again I also have the option of having these show up on the card as well so we could see that on the top level if we'd like or could simply hide that so either way I'll go ahead and show that on the card for now and then what I can also do is I could add attachments let's say if I have any content that might help Adele with this task I could go ahead and add that here and then you could also type comments and have a discussion on the task item here all of this looks great I'm gonna go ahead and now close this task and so here I can see the overall view and I have the subtasks showing up within here and what I could do is I could go through for these other video ideas and I could add similar tasks under them or I could assign different people so here's where I could keep track of all my different tasks now what I've done is I've entered some initial tasks to really help the team get started but the power of planner is in all the different ways you could view the different tasks that you've created so what I'm gonna do next is I'm right now I'm on the board view so this gives me all the different items if I click into charts what's interesting is this will give me a nice visualization of all the work going on across the team so here I could see that across the entire team we have four tasks that we still need to get done I can see what bucket they sit in so all of them fall under this how to use Google meat but here I can see how we're progressing against each video idea I can also see the priority that you could set on each task so all of my tasks are medium priority but maybe one of my tasks is urgent so this way you can track the priority level on the different tasks and then in terms of load balancing you know I don't want to overwhelm any one team member with too many tasks this allows me to see how many tasks are on each member's plate so here I can see Isaac has a little bit of a heavier load but not too bad compared to the overall team what I can also do not only can I look at a visual view of charts but I can also click into a schedule view and what I did is for my different tasks I assigned due dates and what's nice here is will give me a month view and here I'm in the month of May 2020 here I could see all the different tasks and when they're due on a calendar so I could very quickly get a good sense of when different due due dates are approaching and here even if I click on this plus icon on a specific day what I can do is I can simply click on that now I'm going to go back to the board view and I want to show a few different ways you can filter and also visualize all the different tasks coming up and to do that we're going to go over to the right-hand side where we have the filter and with the filter what you could do is you could filter on different tags that you've applied to your different items so here I could filter based on due dates so let's say I want to see everything that's due today or maybe next week or what is due this week that isn't done yet so maybe I can help out my team you can also filter based on the priority labels different buckets and also by the person so here if I'm let's say I'm having a meeting or one-on-one with Isaac I could click on him and I could just get a view of what he's working on so a nice way to filter down the data to give me what I care about and then lastly there's also another drop-down here called group by bucket and so what's interesting here is right now all of these are grouped by the bucket what I can also do is I can group by assigned to so let's say you're having a scrum or a meeting where each person gives an update on what they're working on you could pull up this view to see what tasks sit under each individual clicking on the group by again I could also group by progress and here I see that nothing has been started and so maybe what maybe Adele has already gotten started so I'm gonna drag this over to in progress and maybe she's already created the document and she's written a draft so here I could see that two of four are done and this task is in progress of course we haven't started filming uploading and responding to comments yet because we're waiting on writing the script so a neat way especially if you say have a stand-up meeting or a scrum within your organization you can very quickly visualize where tasks sit and I can't move it to completed yet until I check that one off and so maybe that's done and we've moved on to the filming stage and that's now in progress what I can also do is here I could filter by or group by due dates so here I could see this week everything else that's coming up and it looks like we've finished all the tasks that are due this week and I can see for next week what's coming up and here I could also group by different labels I haven't used labels here they're all in or no label but let's say red might be urgent or a specific meaning and so you could put tasks under there and then lastly you could also group by priority as well so there are many different ways you could visualize data very quickly now this is the core planner view within Microsoft teams it's a great way to organize your team one other way you can also access planner if you open up your browser and you navigate to the website office.com what you can do is you could click into planner directly from here if you don't have it on your home page you could click into all apps and then enter planner through there in this case I've used it before and it shows up as one of my core app tiles I'm gonna click into planner and this will load planner on the web and not in Microsoft teams and here too what I can do is here I could see all of my tasks and so I'm on point to upload and I'm also on point to create a thumbnail for another video so I have a few different tasks showing up in here and this offers similar functionality where I could get charts or I could pull up the schedule view so lots of similar functionality within planner on the web here within planner on the web what I can also do is I'm going to click back into my video plan and here I get a similar view to what I had in teams all the functionality is pretty similar if I click on the ellipses or the dot-dot-dot I get a few additional things here where I could add it to my favorites or maybe I create a copy of the plan I can even export the plan to excel so I have a few additional options that I don't get in teams but overall Microsoft teams provides all the core functionality with an planner in fact there's an easy way to get back to Microsoft teams directly from planner all right well that was a quick overview of how you could use Microsoft planner to organize your team whether you're doing it from within Microsoft teams or whether you're doing it through the web by accessing planner through office comm either way allow you to get to it anyway if this video helped you create your first plan and start to organize your team please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification any time new content like this comes out and lastly if there are any other videos that you want to see me cover in the future leave a comment down below and I'll add it to my list of videos to create alright well that's all the content I had for you today I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 573,863

Rating: 4.9543414 out of 5

Keywords: microsoft planner, planner, plan, monday.com, trello, task management, team management, organize, task, tasks, to do, office 365, microsoft 365, 365, plans, due date, charts, project, examples, app, ms planner, teams, microsoft teams, teams planner, tab, calendar, tutorial, how to, kanban board, software

Id: To2EHXgqcJc

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020