How to use Planner with Microsoft Teams to manage your tasks

Introduction

Microsoft 365 productivity suite provides various apps to effectively collaborate as a team. Microsoft Teams is one such app that connects remote teams together and is used as an official collaboration platform in many organizations. Also, teams that particularly work on projects with a deadline often use Microsoft Planner app for effective task management. To manage tasks conveniently in both these apps, Planner can be integrated with Microsoft Teams to achieve best results.

In this blog, we will see how to use MS Planner with Teams to elevate user experience and productivity. Let’s start –

Add a plan to your team

To add Planner to Microsoft Teams, click Add a tab  next to your tabs at the top of a channel or chat in MS Teams. Select Planner, then click Create a new plan and type a name for the new Planner board or click Use an existing plan to select an existing Planner board from the menu. Next, you can add a task and assign a user to it.

Open all tasks in one place via MS Teams

To see all your tasks at one place without switching from tab to tab, click the ellipsis (…) on the sidebar of Teams app and select Planner. Now, you can see all your tasks, planned, and assigned to you in the standard view and global view.

Customize tasks

To find more details about a task, you can click into the new task you created, then add a description, set a start and due date, give it a priority, add attachments, and provide notes. To give a structure to your tasks, you can convert them into buckets which are categories of tasks. You can add new bucket and manage your tasks by dragging and dropping tasks between buckets. Also, by clicking Charts, you can get an overview of all your tasks.

Move or copy tasks between multiple schedulers

If you have set up a task in a team that you want to share with other team members, you can copy or move it. to do this press Copy task, select a team under Plan name to which you want to copy the tasks. You can create multiple task lists in a team.

Turn Planner to project management dashboard

To get a visual overview, you can use Power BI reporting tool to turn Microsoft Teams Planner to automated project management dashboard. Power Automate is a low code option to automate data handling and create flexible project management solution with Power BI. Power BI reports deliver a view of the data, analytics, and insights that are crucial for project decision-makers who work with Microsoft Planner daily.

Microsoft Planner analytics promotes data-driven management which allows creating a better collaboration framework between managers and teams, where both are always on the same page. You can trace progress and workload from different angles and see the bigger picture of tasks, plans, and resources.

MS Teams and Planner go hand in hand but managing multiple plans in hundreds of thousands of teams is not easy. If such is a case, we suggest using a third-party governance solution such as TeamsHub.io to make process simple.

To learn more about TeamsHub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo