Getting Started With Planner In Microsoft Teams
Planner in Microsoft Teams is the best way of ensuring everyone in your business is on the same page when it comes to working remotely on projects.
Getting Started With Planner In Microsoft Teams
We recently switched from our third-party project management tool to Planner and we haven’t looked back. It’s great if you like everything you need to get on with work to be in one place, as well as have a visual representation of projects. Today, we’re walking you through some of the basics of Planner and how you can get started.
Getting set up.
You can launch Planner with one click in the Microsoft 365 app. From here, you can create new plans, build a team and assign tasks.
Add your plans to Teams Channels
It’s easy to add plans to different Teams channels, which is extremely useful if you have dedicated teams or departments working on the same projects.
Simply click the plus button at the top of your Teams channel to add a tab, from there you can add Planner and create a new plan, or add an existing one.
This plan will then be visible to everyone within that Team.
Collaborate within Teams channels.
What’s clever about Planner is that you can add files to tasks and, if they’re stored in Microsoft 365, you can collaborate with your colleagues and co-author documents in real-time.
This also ensures everything is in one place, in one version of a document, instead of receiving feedback and additional discussions about topics and projects across different applications and programmes.
While the My Tasks view provides a list of the tasks assigned to you, you’ll also be able to see what tasks are distributed to other members of your team, so you always know who is working on what.
Visualising your workload.
Your plan is set out like a board, where you can organise tasks into columns.
This is really handy when seeing how much progress your team has made on a specific project, as you can divide tasks up into categories, such as “To do”, “In progress” and “Completed”, or by priority (medium, low, high), or even by the due date.
In the Planner hub (web-based version of Planner), you can also convert your plans to charts.
Save time by duplication.
One of the most important features for us at Singularitee is Planner’s ability to duplicate copies of plans.
Before, you would have to manually recreate plans, which can obviously be quite time-consuming. However, now you can easily make a copy of an existing plan from the Planner hub by selecting “…” menu on the plan you’d like to copy and hitting Copy Plan.
Manage Notifications.
By default, you’ll get a notification and email whenever you’re assigned a new task or added to a conversation.
This way, you never have to worry about missing important discussions or a crucial deadline.
Of course, you can tailor notification preferences to suit your style of working too, if you want to reduce the frequency of distractions.
If you’d like any support with setting up Planner in Microsoft Teams, get in touch with us today.