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!  

My last Get Organised blog was all about Microsoft Planner, and how it can help you get organised with a plan, and keep you (and others) on track with your tasks. I think that it can easily be used to keep on track of a wide variety of projects and business-as-usual activities. 

In this blog you will learn 10 different ways to use Planner: 

1. To plan an event 
2. As a project plan 
3. As a Kanban board 
4. For an onboarding process 
5. For any workflow – like a contract review 
6. To keep track of your own professional development resources 
7. To plan your business Change Management activities using the ADKAR model
8. As an internal comms schedule 
9. To manage your sales leads 
10. For your GTD context-based lists 

1. To plan an event 

This is what I touched on in my last blog, using Planner to plan an event.

As always, start with the end in mind:

• What does a successful event look like? 
• Is it online or in person? 
• Is there an end goal, or is it just for fun? 

Working backwards from where you want to end up, you’ll be able to break the event down further into areas like:

• Venue 
• Travel 
• Accommodation 
• Food and drink 
• Entertainment 
• Awards ceremony 

Those would be your buckets. 

Then you can break down those buckets further into tasks. For example under the ‘Food and drink’ category you might have tasks like: 

• Create a form to ask people for any dietary requirements 
• Send the form and collate responses 
• Let the venue know dietary requirements details 
• Confirm final menu with venue by x date 

Your board would end up looking something like this: 

2. Project plan 

When you choose to set up a new Plan in Planner, handily there are some ready-made templates for you, and one of these is for generic project planning: 

This pre-poulates your plan with generic project stages (the buckets), moving chronologically from left to right, with suggestions on how you might structure your plan and tasks. 

If you’re new to managing projects, this gives you a handy place to start and saves you starting from a complete blank canvas. 

You can of course edit the project stages and buckets to suit your particular project. Again; start with the end in mind and work backwards from there! 

Comes with a nice background too! 

3. Kanban board 

You might have heard of Kanban boards, they’re a really visual way to keep track of work in progress; literally what is ‘to do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’. Kanbans work particularly well when a team of people can be working on things separately, which come together to create the whole end result, like in software development. 

They can also work well just for you as an individual too. 

There’s a whole methodology to using them, which is too much info for this blog! But in a nutshell:   

If you are working towards a defined end goal that is already split out into separate tasks, you can list all those tasks in the left hand ‘to do’ column, (ideally in priority order) and pick them off one by one. 

Put the tasks into the ‘doing’ column while they’re in progress. Others on the team can see what’s in progress and pick another item from the ‘to do’ list when they need something to work on. 

Items live in the ‘done’ list when they’re done. (That part is simple!) And then you pick another item off the to do list. 

Your board might look a bit like this:

4. Employee onboarding process 

When a new employee joins a business, there’s a lot that goes into making sure they get up to speed as quickly as possible. 

Employee onboarding is another of the pre-populated plan options that Planner has when you set up a new plan:

You can use the buckets to keep a handle on: 

• Training the employee needs to complete
• Key staff members the employee needs to meet 
• Paperwork due  

Assigning each activity with a deadline will help keep the new employee on track. 

You can see here there are also suggested tags, which is useful for filtering. You can invite your HR manager to the board and assign them tasks as necessary, and they can filter their view on the HR tagged items to see only what’s relevant: 

5. Any workflow – like a document review process

Planner is well suited to workflows because of how the buckets flow from left to right. If you’ve got a linear process to follow, why not map it out in Planner? 

For instance, if there is an internal process for reviewing sales proposals, your buckets could map to the different departments or review gates that the document needs to go through: 

• Pre-sales 
• Sales 
• Legal 
• PMO 

You can create a task for the one document and keep moving it along the buckets, assigning it to the next specific person who needs to review it, and setting deadlines. 

You could also link the card to the document in its original location so that there’s just one version, rather than creating duplicates all over the show. 

6. To keep track of your own professional development resources 

Does this sound familiar: 

“This blog/podcast/training video looks really interesting, but I don’t have time to consume it right now – I’ll put the link somewhere to come back to later.” 

Why not let that ‘somewhere’ be Planner! 

You could chop this up in a number of different ways with buckets for: 

• The type of content (ie blog / podcast / video) 
• The theme of content (writing / selling / making) 
• How much time it will take you to consume the content (under 30 mins / 30mins-1hr / over 1hr) 

(Or you can capture all of that information using a combination of buckets and tags – but the simpler it is to add things, the better, otherwise you’ll avoid doing it!) – then add your content links as tasks – voila! 

When you next carve out some time for research or professional development (yes I hear some of you laughing at this idea) – it’s all there ready and waiting for you. Organised. 

7. To plan your business Chage Management activities using the ADKAR model

This one’s for all my Prosci Change Management practitioners out there – why not align plan buckets to the ADKAR model of change management: 

• Awareness 
• Desire 
• Knowledge  
• Ability
• Reinforcement 

Fill the buckets with the tasks related to each stage of the change journey: 

8. Internal comms schedule

Internal communicators listen up; keeping on top of which comms are going out where and when can be a bit of a nightmare, but planner’s schedule view can help you keep on top of it all and make sure that your employees aren’t getting bombarded with different messages. 

As long as each task has a date, you’ll be able to use the schedule view to see each item in a calendar format, so you’ll be able to tell if there’s too much / not enough going out: 

Best of all you can drag items around on the calendar view itself to slot them into better dates; easy peasy. 

9. To manage your sales leads 

Maybe you’re a small company just starting out, and you don’t want to invest in an all-singing-all-dancing CRM system just yet. 

Set up a plan to help remind you to reach out to leads and encourage them through your sales process, from initial contact to follow-up meetings and proposals made: 

You can assign the items to yourself and set deadlines so that you don’t have to fret about remembering to reach out to that lead again. Plus you get a nice visual of how full or empty your pipeline is. 

10. For your GTD context-based lists 

If you’re a fan of Getting Things Done, you’ll know about context-based lists! 

GTD is a productivity method, and one of the vital parts to it is maintaining context based lists of activities. 

For example, if you regularly travel, having a ready-to-go list of tasks you can do on the train/plane helps you maximise that time. 

With it’s bucket structure, Planner would be the ideal place for you to keep your context based lists.

PHEW! 

That was a long one, but there you have it! Planner can be used for getting organised and keeping on track with pretty much anything.  

Again, it won’t do your work for you, but if you take the time to set it up in the first place it can take the pain out of getting organised and keeping yourself on track.  

What do you use Microsoft Planner for? Tell me in the comments! 

And if you know someone who might like this blog – share it share it!