In the same way Power BI has made analysing company data a lot easier to digest with its colourful, easy to assemble visual dashboards, Microsoft has added to its suite of Office 365 applications with Office 365 Planner to revolutionise task management.
What is it?
Currently available for first release tenants, this lightweight task management tool has evolved project and task planning, allowing for an agile approach. With its easy to read dashboards, Project Managers can get quick insights to the team’s progress, and assign (new) tasks to groups and individuals.
Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.
Office 365 Planner lives within Office 365 Groups –every plan needs a group and every group needs a plan.
How does it work?
Every new Plan has its own Board, and each new task is represented by a Card that can have deadlines, attachments, categories and conversations associated with it. Cards can be assigned to individual team members and those individuals are sent a notification via email to let them know when a new task has been assigned to them.
Cards can be organised on the Board into customisable columns also known as ‘buckets’, which can be prioritised and tagged with coloured labels (i.e. red for tasks classed as high priority). At a glance, each of the cards can be understood owing to the rich image previews.
Planner’s Best Features
If you’d like to find out more or see Planner and the other great Office 365 features
You may also be interested in this blog post