I run small projects in the ERP selection space for which Microsoft Project is overkill. What are your thoughts on Microsoft Planner? I've never used it, but we use Teams so in some ways it may be the logical go-to. What are Planner's strengths and limitations? TIA. Saving Changes...
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Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I used it as a way to introduce a Kaban board to my teams, taking into account that the only thing you can implement is the colored piece of papers. Saving Changes...
It works well as a personal organization and task/goal tracking tool. It has the potential to do more, assuming adoption by all involved with projects.
At a former company, several years ago, when assigned a project, I would create a sharepoint "project" site, create the task list, risk list, issues list, stakeholders list (and give them access), and so on. Some people would go to the site, as needed, but it was usually me sharing the site in meetings. I became very proficient in SharePoint.
With Planner, I create a new plan and it automatically creates a Group site for me, with document repository, notebook, and shared calendar/messaging. I need to add members. I can easily add the plan to Outlook. But, I still have the same challenge - getting people who do the project work to use Planner. Very few people in my organization are using Planner to track their work, and some especially IT, are already using other tools to track their work (tools like Jira and Azure DevOps). There is no mandate to use Planner, and the IT managers aren't going to ask their team to update both ADO & Planner. Which means that if I were to switch to Planner, I'd be doing pretty much the same thing I do with MS Project today, except that MS Project has more features that I find helpful as a PM.
If you're already using Teams for collaboration, it might not be a stretch to use Teams and Planner for your projects. You can use the "Tasks by Planner and To Do" app (added from within Teams) to bring Planner functionality, for shared plans, into Teams. It might be worth it to try it out and see how the team feels about it. Saving Changes...
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