Microsoft Planner was used to track action items and provide visibility across the organization of team members workload capacity. It was helpful in prioritizing daily tasks, keeping the team organized and focused, and preventing things from “slipping through the cracks”. It was very helpful to managers to see what the team had accomplished in a given day/week and what outstanding items remained.
Pros
Being able to assign/reassign a task to a particular team member was super helpful. Sometimes when a particular person has too much to do, it was easy to move it to someone else with more availability.
The customizable board view was also very helpful so that a pipeline could be created to prioritize tasks based on multiple factors like due date, priority level, or what sub tasks remained.
Being able to add a collaborator on tasks was also super helpful so that each of us could work on individual subtasks but know that we have visibility on the main task that we’re both responsible for.
Cons
Being able to add custom tags to be able to sort the tasks more easily would be helpful
A “search function” within the tasks feels like a pretty basic need that wasn’t provided
Being able to set more complex “rules” for tasks like other softwares provide
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for organizing daily tasks but works better for a small team. As our team started to grow, we ultimately decided to purchase a software that could be customized to accommodate our specific needs.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Product Management (Non-profit Organization Management company, 11-50 employees)
Our Marcomm department uses Planner to organize tasks and workflows. We also use the forms function to allow other departments to submit a request that we can then assign to the correct user for execution. This allows the team to prioritize requests instead of taking orders.
Pros
Organize tasks by person
Cons
Assigning dates to sub-tasks
Making tasks dependent on one another
Calendar
Likelihood to Recommend
I think this is a good built-in option for someone using Office 365 and doesn't want to spend additional money on a project management tool.
VU
Verified User
Director in Marketing (Non-profit Organization Management company, 51-200 employees)
