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microsoft planner

Plan the Work and Work the Plan with Microsoft Planner

How-To |

Microsoft Planner is a task management application that is part of Microsoft 365, both as a desktop and a web app. Like SharePoint and Teams, Microsoft designed Planner for team collaboration. Where Planner shines is the board view, which uses a Kanban-style UI to manage tasks. Kanban is a visual signal to trigger an action and translates literally to "card you can see." Kanban is used heavily in software development as part of the Agile Project Management process but can also work well for construction projects. Let's take a look at how you can use Microsoft Planner for your projects.

How Microsoft Planner Works

When a user creates a new plan, either from Planner directly or within Microsoft Teams, the applications automatically includes prebuilt tabs for a board, chart, and schedule views. It also offers the ability to add other related tools such as a OneNote notebook. You can even add your plan to Outlook or export it to Excel. Also, each plan you create has an Office 365 group automatically created. To find out more about Office 365, groups read our prior post – "Office 365 Groups - What are They and How Are They Used?"

The board tab is where you define buckets, which are logical groupings of work for your project. This view is where you will spend most of your time. Within each bucket, you add tasks, set due dates, assign the responsible people, track progress, and establish sub-tasks with the checklist functionality. Once created, each task stacks under its associated bucket, but you can quickly drag and drop items between buckets to reorganize, as needed. You can even move tasks between statuses and the responsible person when you change the board's groupings, which is pretty powerful. Tasks get a visual strike through as they are marked complete.

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The charts view displays the progress of the tasks in a straightforward and easy to understand dashboard. You can use this view for load balancing to see which resources are assigned more tasks than others and adjust accordingly. You could also see all open tasks' status, click through to see the person responsible, and make updates all from the same chart view. The schedule tab displays tasks in a calendar view by week or month. You can edit or even add new tasks easily within the same calendar view.

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Reasons to Use Microsoft Planner for Construction Projects

Microsoft Planner offers several compelling benefits for construction project teams:

  • It's free. Your Microsoft 365 subscription includes the Planner App.
  • Share plans with your team. You can determine who has access to your plan so you can share it with your entire project team.
  • Add your plan in Teams. You can easily create or add an existing plan to a Microsoft Team to track and share all of the tasks with your project team(s).
  • Collaborate in SharePoint. If you are using SharePoint Online to manage your projects, you can quickly add your plan to a SharePoint web page to track your tasks and collaborate with your team(s).
  • View all plans and your tasks. If you create a new Team for every project, you may be assigned tasks in many plans. It seems like this would be cumbersome to manage, but Planner includes a "My Tasks" view where you can see your specific tasks across all plans and even update those tasks in your board, charts, and schedule Views, which is quite handy.
  • Do more with Microsoft Power Automate. Plan data is accessible in Microsoft Power Automate flows. So, you could build a workflow that alerts users when they have a new task, when approval is needed, or even send Planner data to another application that you frequently use, like Excel.
  • Mobile app. There is a Planner app with all the features of the web version.

Some Limitations of Planner to Consider

While Planner is an excellent tool for task management, especially if you are using Teams, there are a few things to consider:

  • Which Microsoft 365 task management tool is best for you? Organizations need to evaluate the best software application to manage tasks. Microsoft 365 comes with many different task management applications. Outlook has a "My Task" feature, and To-Do is a stand-alone app for task management. The new Lists app for Teams may also be used as a task management tool, while SharePoint has its own issue tracker. Microsoft Project tracks tasks in a Gantt chart, and you can also track tasks in OneNote.
  • Planner does not link tasks to forms or documents. There is typically content in construction, such as a form or a document, that stakeholders need to review as part of an assigned task. Unfortunately, Planner is a stand-alone application that does not natively link tasks to forms and documents. To achieve that capability for a Planner task, you will need to configure or customize a solution using the Power Platform or SharePoint.
  • No consolidated plan. There is no consolidation of plans across your project teams to allow you to view all your team members' tasks in one place. You can view your tasks across all the plans but not each team member, creating additional steps for overall project/program management. You could create a single plan and use it for all your teams so that there is a consolidated view across all of your projects, but you will have to assign it to every user, and there is no metadata to relate it to a specific project or team.
  • Planner data is not available in Power BI. As of now, Planner data is not available for Power BI, so you would have to look for a third-party tool to provide that reporting or build a Power Automate workflow to send the data to a SharePoint List for reporting.

Microsoft Planner is an interesting task management and collaboration tool with a lot of great functionality. Like most Microsoft products, it will continue to become more robust with new features over time.

Get Help with Microsoft Office 365 for Your Organization

If you need any help with Microsoft 365, check out our Managed Services and sign up for a free consultation. If you are interested in a prebuilt enterprise-ready construction project management solution integrated with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, Construction Viz is our offering. Find out more about Construction Viz or submit a demo request.

Keeping you on track with Microsoft To Do

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If your organization has transitioned to Microsoft 365, you are probably surprised at how many task management applications there are. From Planner to Outlook, each one has its own task management functionality for assigning tasks and alerting users when they need to take an action. What separates Microsoft To Do from the pack is the pure simplicity of the tool, its ability to focus on your specific tasks in an easy-to-use UI and having its own dedicated app available across devices. But To Do is much more than a simple task management app and Microsoft has bigger plans for To Do in the future. Read on to see what makes To Do so great and how it can be used in the construction industry.

First a little bit of history.

Microsoft bought Wunderlist in 2015 and subsequently retired it in 2020. Wunderlist was a great task management application that worked across OS devices from Android to even a Windows Phone. This Wunderlist acquisition gave Microsoft an "in" across OSs, an already established user base, and fit in nicely to Microsoft's broader app strategy for gaining traction on mobile devices. In the two years following the acquisition, Microsoft released its own task management application, To Do. Clearly, Microsoft learned from what worked and what didn't with Wunderlist and built their own task management tool that was more integrated with Microsoft 365. At the start, critics were harsh on To Do, as the tech was still being developed, but it has now evolved into a concrete task management product for users.

What makes To Do so great and how can I use it for construction?

Microsoft To Do:

• Is free. To Do is free with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
• Offers a single task management location. All your specific tasks across the suite of Microsoft 365 applications can integrate with To Do using Power Automate, the Microsoft workflow engine. So, while the tasks could be created in other Microsoft 365 applications, they can then be surfaced for the individual user to manage in their To Do application.
• Is an app that you can download to any device. To Do is an app that can be installed on any device so you can use online or offline for managing your task as you transition from the field to the office. Also, with a recent update, To Do will support push notifications on shared list activities.
• Offers a robust API. Microsoft released a new To Do Application Programming Interface (API). This allows other applications, including Microsoft Graph to integrate with To Do. So, if you have a PMIS (Project Management Information System) to manage your projects, you could use the APIs to connect tasks from other applications and systems with To Do. You would then manage your team tasks in your PMIS and let users manage their own tasks in To Do.
• Allows users to create and share task lists. You can create a task list in To Do, share with team members, and assign tasks to your team. The To Do task list resides in To Do and is managed by the owner of the list.

Are there any considerations to be made aware of?

While To Do is an excellent tool for user-specific Task Management, there are a few things to consider.

• Which Microsoft 365 task management tool should I use? Organizations need to evaluate the best software application to manage tasks. Microsoft 365 comes with many different task management applications. Outlook has its own ‘My Task’ functionality, the new Lists app for Teams may also be used as a task management tool, Planner has Plans for team task management (check out our Planner post), SharePoint has its own issue tracker, Microsoft Project tracks tasks in a Gantt chart, and you can also track tasks in One Note.
• To Do is not a consolidated task management solution. Since To Do is a user-specific task management application, you are unable to view all your team member’s tasks in one place unless you created the shared To Do task list.
• Its data is not available in Power BI. As of now, To Do data is not available for Power BI, so you would have to look for a third-party tool to provide that reporting. Another option would be to build a Power Automate workflow to send the data to a SharePoint list and then use that list to report against.

Task management is fundamentally at the core of most systems and most likely will not be replaced with another task management solution. With all the applications across the enterprise, users could easily be overwhelmed with having to log into those systems to update the status of their tasks. Separating creating a task, in the system of record, from the user disposition of their tasks with To Do, makes complete sense and could be a shift in your day-to-day work behavior. We will see where To Do fits as adoption increases with more companies transitioning to Microsoft 365.

Overall, To Do is a solid user-specific task management application, like most Microsoft products, it will continue to become more robust with new features over time.

Get Project Management Expertise from Lydon Solutions

Need help with Microsoft 365 for your construction organization? Check out our managed services and sign up for a free consultation. Or if you are interested in a prebuilt enterprise-ready PMIS for your Microsoft 365, learn more about Construction Viz.

Microsoft 365 is an ideal collaboration tool for challenging times

How-To |

Efforts across the nation to combat the spread of Coronavirus have transformed the workplace overnight by emptying offices, halting business travel, and promoting remote work. We can all hope that the need for these measures will be short-lived, but it is safe to say that the future of how we work and interact will potentially be forever changed.

Some businesses were already ahead of the curve embracing digital collaboration and remote productivity tools. But many organizations, particularly in construction, are playing catch up. Fortunately, most companies already have access to best-in-class collaboration and remote work tools with Microsoft 365.

Read on to learn how the Microsoft 365 suite can empower your employees to be productive no matter where they are. And if your organization needs expert guidance getting up to speed on remote collaboration, Lydon Solutions is here help. Contact us for a free consultation today.

Using Microsoft 365 for Remote Collaboration

Microsoft 365 offers many features to improve collaboration across the enterprise that extend well beyond Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. The service includes a host of new applications that let teams easily share information, manage projects, and effectively collaborate while working remotely.

Collaboration Tools in Microsoft 365

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SharePoint Online is a web-based enterprise content management (ECM) tool that integrates with Microsoft Office. You can use SharePoint as a document repository and information portal to share and manage content, make information quickly searchable, empower teamwork, and enable seamless collaboration across the organization. SharePoint is also the backend to many of the popular applications in Office 365, such as Teams, Planner, Project, and Yammer. Microsoft has a getting-started resource for SharePoint here.

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform combining persistent workplace chat, video meetings, voice-over-IP (VoIP), file storage, real-time document collaboration, and integration with a growing list of apps from Microsoft and third-parties. This impressive lineup of features is why the application is fast becoming an easy-to-use project management aid that can help you organize small teams, manage progress, and store project information. You can even combine Teams with Microsoft Whiteboard for real-time visual brainstorming and problem-solving. You can learn more about Microsoft Teams here.

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Microsoft Planner is a project management application that allows organizations to create, assign, and organize work visually with support for private or shared plans for collaboration. This easy-to-use tool is an excellent option for those that prefer to manage simple projects using Kanban, calendars, and task lists. You can learn more about Microsoft Planner here.

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Microsoft Project Online is a cloud-based tool to help project managers develop a schedule, assign resources to tasks, track progress, manage the budget, and analyze workloads. Microsoft Project is a staple in the construction industry for managing project schedules, and both the cloud-based and on-premise versions integrate deeply with the rest of the Office 365 suite, including other collaboration tools like SharePoint and Teams.

Reporting in Microsoft 365

Power BI is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data, making it easy to share insights across your organization or embed reports in your app, SharePoint sites, and websites. With Power BI, you can connect to hundreds of data sources and bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports. Power BI is a great reporting solution for creating interactive dashboards that can embed in SharePoint pages or external websites with the ability to permission control reports.

Workflow Automation Across Microsoft 365

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Power Automate is an Office 365 service that makes it practical and simple for line-of-business users to build workflows that automate time-consuming business tasks and processes across applications and services. Power Automate is Microsoft’s workflow engine, and it continues to gain more and more connectors and functionality. Users can work smarter by creating workflows to automate manual processes such as approvals, alerts, and data integration, even sharing them with the rest of the organization.

Build Custom Applications in Microsoft 365

Power Apps is a suite of services, connectors, and a data platform that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. With Power Apps, you could create custom forms and make them available as a standalone application or post it to SharePoint Online.

Get Expert Help with Microsoft 365

Are you feeling a little intimidated by all the features and options found in Microsoft 365? Lydon Solutions can offer expert assistance if you need help setting up your Microsoft 365 tenant to manage projects. We also offer a complete turnkey solution for construction teams called Construction Viz that is powered by SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

Contact us today to request a free consultation.

Please be safe and look out for one another during these challenging times.