Does planning and organising really float your boat? 

OR…do you live in a world of chaos, but long to kick-ass at organising? 

Either way, you might be surprised about how Microsoft tools can help you!  

In this blog you will learn: 

• How to use Microsoft Planner to manage a project 
• Why Planner is great for keeping on top of what’s important and timely in a project 
• How Planner can help you make sure your project stays on track 

What is Microsoft Planner 

If you know anything about Trello, then Microsoft Planner will look familiar. It’s a Microsoft project planning tool that sits in between To Do and Project. 

To Do is a really simple list-making tool, Planner gets into a bit more project detail, and Project is a bit scary and for hardcore project management that involves dependencies and baselines and milestones. (Eek!)

Don’t worry! If you need to manage a project, you don’t have to learn Project – you can use Planner to get your projects organised. 

If you use other Microsoft tools, you’ll likely have access to Planner. Just go to https://tasks.office.com/ 

You’ll get a welcome step-through of how it works – plus it offers you some ready-made templates that might suit your needs: 

Or you can just start with a blank plan. 

When you create a plan, you can decide if it’s private just for you, or if you want to share it with other people in your organisation. 

If you share it with others, you’ll be able to assign them tasks, which is handy!  

Let’s say you’re organising an internal summer event (lucky you – those things are never easy!) – you might want a plan that looks like this: 

Always start with the end in mind – in this case, you’ve got an event with a particular audience on a particular date. ‘The end’ is employees attending the event, having a good time and eating a meal. 

Now you can begin to break down that big task into themes, like: 

• Entertainment 
• Food & Drink 
• Travel & Accommodation 
• Comms 

And within those themes you can start breaking down your plan even further into action items.

Now you’ve got a plan for a big event where you can keep an eye on everything that needs to be done in one view. 

The vertical lists are called ‘buckets’ and the task cards are called ‘tasks’. 

When you create a task you get a bunch of different options for it:

• You can assign it to yourself or others in your organisation who have access to the plan. 
• Add a label (maybe you want to colour code things that are blocked in red for example)  
• Mark whether the task is not started, in progress, or complete 
• Give tasks a priority 
• Give tasks a start and end date 
• Repeat tasks 
• Add notes 
• Add a checklist within the task (there is a limit to the number of items per checklist) 
• Add an attachment 
• Add comments 

All of which will help you with your project, without having to go anywhere near Project! 

Why Planner is great for planning projects 

Well, the clue is in the name… 

Planner is great because it can help you keep track of lots of different project actions at one time, and it encourages you to break down big projects into smaller, manageable chunks as I’ve just described. 

You can also chop and change the view of your plan at any time so that you can focus on what’s important. Do this by using the options at the top of the screen: 

If you want to see the tasks due this week, click on schedule: 

If you want to see only tasks assigned to you, clicking on your name will highlight those for you: 

If you want to filter tasks by what you’ve labelled, you can do that too. Here I’m focusing on only tasks that are blocked, so that I can focus on getting them unblocked!: 

You can also get a view of tasks that are in progress or not started, so that you can see if anything needs a nudge along. 

All these different options mean that you can zoom in on tasks that are most important and urgent, while still being able to visualise the whole project task list any time. 

This zooming out and zooming in can help make your project feel more manageable. 

How Planner can help keep your project on track 

Like any tool, Planner is only as good as the information you put into it, and it won’t actually DO your work for you, but it can help to keep you on track. 

If you click on the 3 dots at the top of the plan, you have the option to add the plan to your Outlook calendar: 

There are a couple more steps to click through: 

And then tasks assigned to you on this plan will show up in your Outlook calendar: 

A great way of reminding you to actually do them! 

On the Plan settings menu, you can also tweak the email notifications that planner sends you: 

That way you’ll get email reminders from the plan about tasks that will soon be due – another good way to remind yourself to actually do the work. 

If you can get others on board with using Planner too, they’ll receive emails when they are assigned a task and reminders about when the task is due, so Planner can help you keep others accountable for their tasks too. 

Mainly, Planner is great because it gives you an easy way to keep on top of a desired outcome, without having to spend a week in a training course learning Microsoft Project. 

Bonus Points

If you want to start showing off, you can also: 

• Get the Planner app on your phone so that you can manage projects from a train station / the dentist waiting room / the loo (please don’t) 
• Change the background to something fancy (That’s under plan settings)
• You can also pin a plan to a channel or chat in Microsoft Teams to make it easier for others in your team to access and update the plan. (This won’t work if you’ve made your plan private.) 

If you’ve got a project to keep on top of, give Planner a go and hit me up in the comments with your thoughts.