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Microsoft Planner vs. Project: Which Should You Use for Team Tasks? 

Microsoft News |

Microsoft offers two similar products in Microsoft 365 for managing team tasks. Which one will work best for your needs? Read on to discover the pros and cons of Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project. 

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Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner helps teams organize their work visually. Users create a plan that can include grid, board, chart, and schedule views to manage tasks, with file attachments stored in SharePoint Online. Each view provides different insights into managing tasks: 

  • Grid view - displays tasks assignable to team members in a log view. 
  • Board view – provides a Kanban view that organizes tasks into buckets such as status. Users can drag and drop tasks between team members and statuses. 
  • Charts - provides several graphs displaying the progress of your tasks. 
  • Schedule - shows a calendar view of your tasks by due date.  

Microsoft Planner Pros

  • Plans are typically created from Microsoft Teams, which makes setup easy.  
  • There are Planner templates available so you can hit the ground running. 
  • The user interface and process to manage tasks are intuitive. 
  • Microsoft 365 subscriptions include Planner, so there is no additional cost. 

Microsoft Planner Cons

  • Plans in Planner do not relate to “projects.” Instead, you can create plans in the app with a project name or from a team within Microsoft Teams with a project title, but Microsoft Planner is otherwise a stand-alone task-tracking application. 
  • There is no Planner rollup to see tasks across multiple plans. 

You can learn more about the app on the Microsoft Planner learning and support page. Or you can access Microsoft Planner on the web here if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. 

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Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project has two versions: Project for the Web (PFTW) and Project Web App (PWA). Check out this article to find out more about these two products. Since PFTW focuses more on task management and is the modern version of Project, we will compare this product to Microsoft Planner.  

When you sign into PFTW, you can create a new project or a roadmap. PFTW stores data in the Microsoft Dataverse as opposed to SharePoint (where Planner stores its data).  

A project in PFTW includes the following views: 

  • Grid – allows you to create a task, assign team members, add schedule information such as start date and duration, update % complete, calculate effort, define dependencies such as start to finish, and add custom columns. 
  • Board - provides a Kanban view that organizes tasks into buckets such as status. Users can drag and drop tasks between team members and statuses. 
  • Timeline – displays the traditional Gantt chart view where users drag and drop dependencies and update tasks from the bars. 
  • Charts - provides several graphs displaying the progress of your tasks 
  • People – shows a Kanban view by team members for managing the status of their tasks. 
  • Goals – provides a way to organize tasks into specific goals. 
  • Assignments – gives a view of team members’ tasks and their hours of effort planned and expended. 
  • Roadmap – shows one or more project tasks in a Timeline view. 

Microsoft Project Pros

  • Tasks reside in projects, giving you a consolidated view of multiple projects in the roadmap view. 
  • You can create projects or roadmaps from within Teams, making setting up easy. 
  • Custom columns can be added to projects to define and categorize tasks further. 
  • Dependencies are available so that you can add logic between tasks. 
  • Managing team resources and level of effort across tasks is easy and intuitive.   

Microsoft Project Cons

  • Microsoft Project might have too much functionality depending on the level of detail and controls you use to track tasks. 
  • PFTW is an additional cost to your Microsoft 365 subscription. 

Final Thoughts on Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project

Cost, quality, and time to market are all factors when evaluating products or services. If we use this criteria to compare and contrast Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project, here’s how they stack up: 

  • Cost – Microsoft Planner is free 
  • Quality – Both products are easy-to-use modern applications. Planner focuses on task management, while PFTW includes scheduling and resource management functionality. 
  • Time to Market – Updates by Microsoft to both products have been slow. 

Summary: 

Microsoft Planner may be the best option if you are looking for a simple task management solution that solely focuses on when a task is due and who is assigned.  

Microsoft Project for the Web (PFTW) might be a better solution if you don’t mind paying more for project-specific task tracking with scheduling and resource capabilities.  

The good news is that both products have a similar UI and can be added to Microsoft Teams, so you could start with Microsoft Planner and then move to PFTW later if you need the additional horsepower. 

Keeping you on track with Microsoft To Do

Microsoft News |

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.

Filter your SharePoint view to show documents requiring your action

Tips from the Field |

Learn how to configure your SharePoint view to show items you created or that require your review

SharePoint makes it easy to configure a view to see the items you need.  You can set one or more filter parameters when you create or edit a view. This comes in handy when you need to see just the documents you created or modified – or items requiring action by you.

The best part is that once you understand how to a configure a view, most apps across SharePoint (e.g. lists, libraries, etc.) behave the exact same way.

Scenario 1:  Show only your documents

The SharePoint document library can be a crowded place if you are part of a big team. But SharePoint has a quick out-of-the-box filter to create a view showing only your own documents. Here’s how:

  1. Select a list or library
  2. Click “Create” and select “Standard View”
  3. Scroll down to the “Filter Options” in the View Menu
  4. Select “Show items only when the following is true”
  5. Under “Show the items when column,” select following options from the dropdown box:
    • the field you want to filter (e.g. “Created By” or “Modified By”)
    • the “is equal to” condition
  6. Enter “[Me]”) in the filter criteria box
  7. Click “OK” at the bottom of the screen to create the view

Scenario 2: Show items requiring your review

Maybe your team wants to implement a document review process. In this case, it would be helpful to have a view showing documents where you are a reviewer. SharePoint makes it simple to do this.

First you will need to have a column to track reviewers:

(Your SharePoint administrator may need to help you with these steps)

1.       Add a Column called “Reviewer” to your SharePoint List or Library.

2.       Under “The type of information in this column is,” select “Person or Group”

3.        Go down to the “Additional Column Settings” section. Under “Show field,” select  “Name (with presence)”

You now have a new column called “Reviewers.” Make sure that when items are added to the List or Library, this field is populated with a name.

Follow the steps above in Scenario 1 to configure a new view, but use “Reviewer” as the filter instead of “Created By” or “Modified By.”

Scenario 3:  Show all items requiring review

Here is a variation on Scenario 2. Maybe you need to see all the documents or items that are pending review from everyone on your team. A status field column would be helpful here.

Once again, you may need your SharePoint administrator’s help depending on your user permissions.

1.       Create a new Column called “Status”

2.       For “The type of information in this column is,” select “Choice (menu to choose from)”

3.       Type each status choice in the box below.

4.       Under “Default Value,” select the appropriate status. For example, “Open.”

Make sure all new Documents or Items added to the List or Library have the new Status field populated.

Now you can group the Documents or Items by their status (e.g. Open, For Review, and Reviewed) by selecting the “Group By” option when creating or editing a view.

That’s it. You now have a new view showing all your documents and list items by Status where you are the Reviewer.

SharePoint has many other view options that you can access in same way to create custom filtered views. You can also edit existing views to customize what they display.

Want more tips and tricks for construction project management professionals?

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And if you are an Excel user, be sure to check out last month’s installment to learn how to export your project data from SharePoint to Excel and keep it automatically up-to-date!