If you have access to the O365 suite of tools, you have probably come across Planner. If you haven’t had the chance to use Planner, then this guide will show you the best ways to implement it in your business.
By creating ‘buckets’ you can make a set of assignable tasks, with a range of features to help with collaboration. In its most basic use, you can set due dates and the option for ‘in progress’ so your colleagues will know not to bug you about if you have started that report.
You may already be using it in your digital strategy, but there are so many fantastic ways to use this tool.
Here are our 3 top ways to get the best out of Planner.
1. Synchronising Planner with your other Office 365 tools and your SharePoint sites
The great thing about using Office 365 is its integrative quality. Rather than silo off all your tools, you can make them work together. In Microsoft Teams, you can add a ‘to do’ tab which will sync up to Planner and will pull your tasks through to Teams.
In Modern SharePoint, you can also pull your Planner through to your Team Sites!
2. Adding detail to your tasks.
Sometimes just ‘do blog’ is not enough information to help you keep going with a task. We all have those endless to-do lists that never get crossed off, and this is Microsoft’s answer. Here you have ‘Buckets’ which can be used and titled as projects, clients, or whatever your business is focusing on. In our Marketing Planner, you can filter to only view one bucket and the associated tasks e.g. ‘Blogs’
From here you create tasks, with a variety of options to add detail. Editable labels, start/end dates, and descriptions all go toward keeping on track with your tasks and ensuring productivity. The checklist feature is particularly useful for those tricky problems that seemed simple at first but turn out to have a longer process. Planner allows you to promote items from the checklist to tasks, and to cross off completed checklists. You can also attach related files and leave comments on tasks.
Planner also has a useful calendar view, along with a satisfying chart view to see how productive you are being.
3) Enhance how you view Planner with ClerksWell customisation
Whilst Planner is incredibly useful just out of the box, at ClerksWell we saw an opportunity to get even more out of it. Microsoft’s Planner when surfaced has one view and will pull through all the buckets and tasks associated with that site. We decided to develop a way of filling the gap and surfacing relevant tasks in relevant places.
For example, say you created a team site to keep documentation on a client of yours and wanted to surface Planner on that site, with Microsoft you would pull through buckets and tasks that are unrelated to that client, but with ClerksWell you could pull through a specific bucket, or tasks assigned to one person, or a particular couple of buckets etc. Specificity and multiple views are our way of getting the most out of Planner, helping our clients to easily work cohesively.
