Best Practices For Task Management In Microsoft Planner

When it comes to task management Microsoft has simple tool - for some an alternative to Trello - called Planner, that is part of Office 365. Microsoft Planner is an easy-to-use light tool and it is visual way to organize teamwork which is also based on groups like the other applications in Office 365. If you want to manage all the tasks you need to have done in your team and you should learn Planner too.

Thinking about team productivity and managing teamwork we have to handle communication, files, notes, all kind of documents and tasks. Virtual communication is done in Microsoft Teams, notes in OneNote, files sharing in SharePoint or in OneDrive and task management just in Planner. 

PS: If you would like to manage bigger projects, you should rather prefer Microsoft Project instead. 

But let's focus on Planner today. 

Even if you do not use Planner in your business licence of Office 365, it is always following your activity in the background. With every newly created team in Microsoft Teams, there is automatically new SharePoint site created, OneNote notebook and just Planner plan. It is just about connecting your activity in the Teams with Planner and starting managing all the tasks.

Planner does not have so far a desktop app, but still you may access all the information from the mobile app, online version or from within Microsoft Teams. To make your Planner to look like a desktop app, use Chrome’s “Add to Desktop” functionality – this will allow you at at least to pin Planner to your taskbar.

Here are the 17 best practices for your team to use Microsoft Planner:

• 1) Microsoft Planner best practice #1: Add plans as a tab within Microsoft Teams
• 2) Microsoft Planner best practice #2: Create master plan or sub plans
• 3) Microsoft Planner best practice #3: Always select a start date and due date
• 4) Microsoft Planner best practice #4: Organize by the amount of effort instead of priority
• 5) Microsoft Planner best practice #5: Categorize the tasks by buckets and by labels too
• 6) Microsoft Planner best practice #6: Create rules for label grouping
• 7) Microsoft Planner best practice #7: Combine filtering and grouping of tasks
• 8) Microsoft Planner best practice #8: Use comments and notes
• 9) Microsoft Planner best practice #9: Attach files, links or SharePoint
• 10) Microsoft Planner best practice #10: Create checklist with items
• 11) Microsoft Planner best practice #11: Prioritize the tasks
• 12) Microsoft Planner best practice #12: Use the Charts or Schedule view too
• 13) Microsoft Planner best practice #13: Assign the task to stakeholders too
• 14) Microsoft Planner best practice #14: Duplicate the tasks or the whole plan
• 15) Microsoft Planner best practice #15: Pin Planner to the left navigation bar
• 16) Microsoft Planner best practice #16: Use Planner shortcuts
• 17) Microsoft Planner best practice #17: Sharing links to tasks

1) Microsoft Planner best practice: Add plans as a tab within Microsoft Teams

You can use either the online version of Planner or the version of this app in Teams where you connect specific team with a plan you create. In other words you have to connect your plan with a specific group. 

You can always create a new plan for your team, connect your team with already existing plan or with the default plan that is automatically created in the background. That way all your team members can be assigned to specific tasks. 

Best practice is to connect your plan to your team so that everyone from your team can access this plan. Also newly added team members will have access to these plans. Everyone can assign a task to everyone in that team. All assignments are restricted just to those of that plan. 

At the moment you connect a plan with your team you can decide to post it or not in a channel to inform others about that update.

2) Microsoft Planner best practice: Create master plan or sub plans

Another best practice is to use Planner in the General channel or in each of the individual channels. In other words you can have one master-plan for the whole team or sub-plans for all the individual channels. That depends on the reporting needs. 

Think about the reporting needs what makes sense for your team and how you agree on with your team members. Do you need to report across all aspects of a Team or do you want to drill down to each topic individually?

3) Microsoft Planner best practice: Always select a start date and due date

Always select a start date and a due date – even if it will change, even if this is not important. 

There are two good reasons for.

1. First when you select a due date and assign to a person, or people, Planner knows who to send reminders to. If you do not set due date Planner can not sent reminders to individual team members. 
2. Second if you do not select start date and due date, you will not be able to see the tasks in the schedule view to analyze these in time.

4) Microsoft Planner best practice: Organize by the amount of effort instead of priority

For example, categories like “quick tasks,” “medium effort,” and “high effort/strategic” might be quite helpful depending on the time constraints. Also, the Planner’s click-and-drag functionality makes it very easy to rearrange tasks closer to the top.

5) Microsoft Planner best practice: Categorize the tasks by buckets and by labels too

If You want to group the tasks you may categorize the tasks by buckets and by labels. Grouping rearranges the clusters of tasks on the plan page for further analysis. The default grouping is by bucket. 

Your buckets in Planner are your columns like labels.The advantage of using labels and buckets for farther grouping is that you may define these categories of tasks on your own. For each of the plans you may define up to six colorful labels and much more buckets.

Grouping by buckets and by labels enables you deeper and brighter analytical options in Planner you may define on your own. While defining the categories of buckets and labels think about prioritizing, connection, field of action, quality, distribution, quantity, interconnection, types of tasks, methods of delivery, etc.

6) Microsoft Planner best practice: Create rules for label grouping

Grouping by labels is limited to six categories for one plan. Your plans will grow bigger with the time. You will find it helpful to start using labels to quickly identify certain tasks. 

Color coding your labels is a common practice – use them for different task owners, priorities, or types, etc. Some other examples you have above too.

7) Microsoft Planner best practice: Combine filtering and grouping of tasks

Combination of grouping and filtering gives you specific analytical results and overview of all the tasks in your team. For example if you would like to see the tasks assigned to one individual for the next week with the urgent priority, this is exactly what you have to do.

If you would like to apply next filtering and grouping on the tasks never forget to clear the last filtering. 

8) Microsoft Planner best practice: Use comments and notes

One of the most important activities in Planner is the communication, better to say over communication. If you do not use notes and comments in the details of a task, you do not use the full potential of this tool. 

1. Use notes for providing some instructions to the assigned team members like what to do, where to find the files, where to safe the reports, who to contact, etc. on my own notes related to the task
2. Best communication about your task is to use the comments section. By adding a comment this message will be send (an email notification about this assignment) to the people whose assignment this is. The person can reply by email or in the comments. If I want to be informed about what is going on in this assignment I have to be part of this task. This is also good example why to have stakeholders assigned to all the plan’s tasks. 

On the general level it can help in the communication you set up a start date. Others will be able to see if you started on the task or if it is in progress. That way you can also track the tasks in the schedule view.

9) Microsoft Planner best practice: Attach files, links or SharePoint

You can add attachment of any kind (files, links or SharePoint links) to the task. You can upload up to nine files per task. Make a decision what attachment you would like to show on the card (the task preview). This way you can be visually sure what task has attachment and which not. 

Planner plans are associated with Office 365 Groups, and the files for Office 365 Groups are stored in an associated SharePoint document library. But be aware of the fact that attached files are not automatically saved in the files tab of the team. If you want to have files attached stored and saved for later use, go first in to the files tab a upload it there first.

10) Microsoft Planner best practice: Create checklist with items 

 In the details of a task you can add detailed items in a form of a checklist. This way you can make sure what exact steps needs to be accomplished, what not to forget, what is related to the task, etc. If you are ready with the item mark the item in the checklist as complete.

Always remember whoever is assigned to the task cam mark the items in the checklist as completed. If necessary assign individual tasks / items to individual team members, so that they can mark their own progress. 

On the card preview you see then the number of completed items vs the total number of items in the checklist. Checklist can be shown on the card preview too. It is up to you what do you prefer, if attachments or checklist to be shown on the card.

11) Microsoft Planner best practice: Prioritize the tasks

Prioritizing tasks is easy. By default all the tasks in Planner have Medium priority but you can change it to Urgent, Important or to lower the priority to Low importance. 

You can define a priority for a task to indicate how important the task is or what to do first, second, etc. It is up to you and your team how you will define importance - the Priority of your tasks. Maybe Urgent tasks could be done by specific individuals and Low tasks can be accomplished by anyone. That could be also a way how to understand the priority of a task.

12) Microsoft Planner best practice: Use the Charts or Schedule view too

Planner has besides the Board view the Charts view and the Schedule view too. That different view options allow you to analyze the tasks by time in the Schedule view or by visual view in the Charts view. That way you understand the status of all the tasks better.

The calendar view allows you to have better visual understanding of all the tasks. In the Charts view you can analyze these tasks by the Status, by the buckets, Priority or by Members. You still can apply filters and you still have the option to group the tasks.

In the calendar view you'll see all the tasks with set up start date and due date. Other tasks without any set start date and due date will be not displayed in this view. So always remember to set up a start and due date to the tasks. 

If you are really busy in the Plan, change the calendar view to week view, to see all the team’s task. To see details of a task click on the task in the calendar and make the necessary changes or comments.

That same view on the tasks you can also have in Outlook. You have to connect that plan with your online version of Outlook. There you just see the time slot of the task without the option to see the details. 

Also in the Chart view and Schedule view you may apply filtering and grouping.

13) Microsoft Planner best practice: Assign the task to stakeholders too

It was mentioned between the lines, but it is good tip to be aware of. You could have one person in your plan that takes care for. It could your program manager or stakeholder who oversees the activities in your team when it comes to task management. That person could take care of the progress could push the communication related to individual tasks etc.

14) Microsoft Planner best practice: Duplicate the tasks or the whole plan 

Sometimes we have similar tasks in different teams/ plans. For this purpose you can copy - duplicate - individual tasks or even whole plans. You save time if you copy a tasks or plans because you do not have to create these from scratch.

You may copy a task and save it into a different plan. Just remember that way you are not able to copy assignments, progress and dates, attachments and labels. These you have to define afterwards in the new plan.

15) Microsoft Planner best practice: Pin Planner to the left navigation bar

To have better access to your tasks straight ahead from Microsoft Teams, you can pin Planner with the right mouse click to the left navigation bar. That way you have direct view on your tasks directly from the navigation bar.

16) Microsoft Planner best practice: Use Planner shortcuts

Yes, also in Planner you can use shortcuts. Microsoft Planner offers many different keyboard shortcuts. See the table below for details.

17) Microsoft Planner best practice: Sharing links to tasks

To share a link to a single task is easy. From More options (...) you select the option Copy link to task and than share it with other team members.

What are your tips for Planner?

Share your ideas in the comments below.