MS Planner Advice Needed

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Posted by Ken
Jun 8, 2022 at 05:59 PM

As I have mentioned in many a past post, I work in an (almost) all Microsoft shop. And since I mostly work solo in my shop, I have used personal software (currently Clickup) to track and manage projects and tasks (without any data that needs to be retained or should be secured due to its contents). We will be hiring an employee to work with me and I will both have to train her and manage her work assignments. I would love to use a program similar to Clickup or its competitors, but when I asked about software options, I was basically told that I could use Project and/or Planner. Project seems like overkill, so that leaves me with Planner.

To be honest, I find Planner very underwhelming and have tried to avoid it if at all possible. But I believe that some tool is better than no tool, and I am looking at how to configure Planner to track multiple tasks from multiple projects. Rather than use a traditional Kanban board layout, I was considering a column per project and then list all the tasks for that project in the column. This is not an ideal arrangement, but the only other thoughts I had were to embed the project name in each task (e.g. Project A-Verify Insurance) or assign a color to each project, and neither of these is that appealing as I will be working with somebody who may be new to Kanban boards and task management.

It kills me that Planner cannot easily accommodate multiple projects with some type of folder arrangement. And you cannot even copy or duplicate their “buckets” (columns). But I’ll get off of my soapbox and ask if anybody has any suggestions on how to use Planner more effectively.

Thanks,

—Ken

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