Microsoft Teams And Microsoft 365 Project Management Tools
Updated: Nov 23, 2021
If you're getting confused about all the ways you can do tasks and project management in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams then this is the video for you ๐
In this tutorial, we take a look at all the Microsoft Teams Project Management tools and apps available in the Microsoft 365 suite, the difference in features and how they all fit together.
This is the first in a three part series on making Lists more useful for task management. Click here see part 2 and here to see part 3.
If you're getting confused about all the ways you can do tasks and project management in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams then this is the video for you. So, by the end of this video you'll know all of the different options you've got available in the Microsoft suite to do task and project management, the interactions between them, and the benefits, and negatives of each one. If you wanna jump ahead to part 2, that's where I'm gonna look at how to make Microsoft Lists a bit more useful than its out-of-the-box functionality at the time of recording. It's gonna look something like this. And if you're watching this right now, or I don't know when you're watching it, that one might not be available yet. So if you wanna be notified when that comes out, then make sure you had hit the Subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified every time I release a new video. I'm Gavin Jones, founder at MeeTime and we help companies save time by using the tools they've got their disposal, which is the Microsoft 365 suite, leading with Microsoft teams. If you're interested in working together, then stick around to the end, to find out a little more. Okay. So, here we are in the new Microsoft whiteboard, which I'll just use to show you some of the interactions between the Microsoft 365 apps to do with task and project management. And then we'll dive into a couple of, to see how they interact and what some of the limitations are. So, in terms of go-to places to do your tasks, if you're using teams, which presumably are cause it's 2021 after all. You will be used to using a planner, hopefully. So planners the out of the box solution, which goes into a teams channel looks really nice. It's based on sort of Can Ban framework off, of Trello, but does have some limitations there. The benefits of planner is so it's out of the box. It's in teams. It works really well with teams. It steadies, it's a set-up, and it notifies people for you. So all of that chasing is done ahead of you. It's also one of the few options that gives you out-of-the-box reporting. So if you wanna set up quite simple project, this is usually your go to. Downsides of the planner is, unlike Trello, it doesn't have very good auditing. So you could come into the board and find that everything's been moved around. They have started to say, you know, what changes have happened? Some changes have happened rather since you've been back in, but it doesn't actually tell you what those are. Whereas Trello would say, Gavin has moved this, task to this place. And you've got an entire list of everything that's happened. That doesn't happen in planner at the time of recording.
So, the other go-to place to do your task management at least is Microsoft to-do. So, that is similar to one drive and SharePoint. To-do should be for your personal tasks that you then might choose to share individual ones over. And planner is like SharePoint, where everything there is shared by default to the people that have got access to that plan. If you set it up into a team, then the permissions are shared. The same permissions from the team, as it goes into the planner, plan. Like my other video on to-do and how to manage outlook tasks and things between them. If you assign a planner a task to somebody that will also, if I go onto the new arrow tool. Let's have a look at this. Go into, to-do for you. And I have a quick look at that a bit later, because we assign a planner task to somebody it's gonna go in their to-do. So if they're using to-do already, then obviously everything that they need to-do, both their own and stuff they've been assigned from elsewhere is gonna go into there to-do, which is a good reason why you wanna get people on to using to-do eventually. And this is what we help people do once we've got people through to teams, because when you get people on teams, they'll then pick a planner. And if they pick up planner and then pick up to-do, and then it starts to be everything feeding together, which is great.
Now the other, apart from projects, the most obvious place that then people might wanna put tasks and run their project from is lists. And whilst this was a, I'll see if that turns into a square. Yeah. My dodgy email skills, was, this was just about to come out. A lot of my clients thought this might be the golden age, Elixir, whatever the word is, my clients thought this was gonna be the solution to all their problems. They're seeing, ya know, adverts from monday.com has all this, this short, you guys have seen a lot of those on YouTube. If you're watching this might even be popped up during this video, who knows. They thought that list was gonna be the place that, you know, is the monday.com of the Microsoft 365 suite. And unfortunately at the time of recording, it is not that. If you wanna do a list than it's great, you can do a list. If you want it to notify someone, it doesn't do that out-of-the-box. If you wanna assign people, you can, but then it doesn't actually go anywhere. You can make it look nicer if you want, but then you might strain to need in some code from Jason. And it just, it, the thing that you most probably wanna do kind of fall through the cracks of what lists can do out of the box, but we can do some quick reminders and power automations around it to make it a bit more useful, which we'll have a look at in part two. So check out this video next. So, if you are running a project, then you also might wanna have some notes around that project or whatever you're doing. You've got some notes and some tasks and wouldn't it be great if you can have the notes and the tasks all in one place? Well, you then think that one note might be your best friend, but again, that's got some downsides. So although you obviously put notes in one note and you can put tasks, we'll have a look at some of the nuances in a little bit where you can put a, I think they call it to-do in there, which is nothing to do with Microsoft to-do. It just stays in one note. And then depending on which version of one note you're using at the time recording, it's very complicated, but we'll go through it. You can insert an outlook task in there. And if you insert an outlet task in there, as we looked at in the Microsoft to-do video, which you can check out here, if you wanna learn about a bit more about those interactions that will sink into Microsoft to-do. So, If I go back to my little arrow tool and find outlook, if you do an outlook task that will go in to outlook, which I did a little arrow on myself, there didn't I. And then that outlook will sink into Microsoft to-do for you or ask quite tricky, not to do your own arrow. You used to using apple notes. There we go. So the one note outlook tasks or sync into outlook, obviously, and then if, once it's in outlook that will sync into, to-do for you, but at least keeps all your notes and your actions together. But if you're not using the right version of one note, especially if you're using a tablet, you can't do this. That's not gonna go anywhere. So you need to be mindful that which task you are adding into one note also, it's only gonna go into your outlook tasks. You can't assign anyone else, a task. An outlook task from one note. So again, it could be amazing, but let's us down at the last hurdle.
If you are a project manager, the most obvious thing that you are gonna be using is Microsoft projects. You might have used Microsoft project for ages. It's very, very detailed. We used to be just a desktop app. Now it's quite complicated because it's a desktop app. It's a desktop app with online storage and it's just project on the web is online only. And it's a bit like planner on steroids and also it needs a license an additional license. And so if you're not a project manager, that's got project already, you are, I would say from my experience, most likely not to have a license and not be able to get one from your organization. So you're stuck with using something else to run your project. Most people, therefore, most normal people do normal jobs that just need to get their job done and are not a professional project manager. That's got project management role in the organization. They might be a branch manager. There might be someone that just put onto a project to run a project, or even if you're a professional project manager and you've got a project plan, and then you haven't got enough licenses that anyone else can see that plan, or it's not useful for them to see the plan because they don't, they can't, they're not getting notified about stuff that's assigned to them anyway. You're probably just gonna be using Excel and lots of big businesses run everything on Excel still despite all of this technology. And so have a quick look at the end about how you can then use some of the new functionality in Excel. To hopefully at least get some of those benefits of having, being able to lay out the project, how you want, and then also be able to notify people. And then lastly, just to make sure that the box is all squared off, oh shoot we've forgot outlook, which is where you can put outlook tasks just for yourself and they don't go anywhere else, although you can assign them to other people a bit like to-do. So, if you did wanna put it from one note, if you did an outlook task of one note, you could then go into outlook and assign that outlook task to somebody else. You could go wait until that thing's in to-do, and then go in to to-do and assign that to somebody else. Partially then that isn't going back into one note. So you can't then see the notes and see who's assigned to, unless you put it in the note or in the task who is assigned to. Very confusing. And we're gonna have a quick, deep dive into all of these. And then if you wanna learn anything else, make sure you let me know in the comments below. Because that at the time of recording lots of different options and also lots of different options within the options because of how far the various apps, web apps, iOS apps are all in competing versions, which may have some functionality missing than others as well. So we'll have a look at all of that, that stuff coming up right now. So stick around to the end, if you're interested in anything that we've just been through to do with task and project management.
Oh, and of course not forgetting Microsoft teams. So teams is gonna be able to put most stuff into it. And I've just done this at the end. So, graphs getting quit, quite messy, obviously, you can pin an Excel document into teams so that she uses Excel on the web, which has the latest functionality. You can do tasks in. Then you can have a OneNote pinned into teams. You can have planner go into teams. You can probably, although have not tried it, pin a project on the web, a website into teams. You can definitely have lists in teams. You could pin you outlook whereabouts into a teams channel. If you wanted to. And to do And planner are sort of amalgamated at the moment, called tasks by planner and to-do or whatever they've come to somebody called it. Whatever they've cobbled together at the moment to make that transition for it's just all tasks. But then if they don't get rid of outlook tasks at the same time as that's called task, that'll get quite confusing. So hopefully sort all that. This is all the Malay that we're just gonna go through right now. So let's go and have a quick look. So that was a quick whistle-stop tour of some of the complexities of project and task management in Microsoft teams. If you wanna watch the second part where we're gonna go through a bit more depth and have a look at how to make lists a bit more useful than make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified every time a new video comes out. If you like this one already, then remember to give us a thumbs up. It helps in the YouTube algorithm. And if you really liked it, consider buying me a beer, using the link in the description below, it would help support the channel and keep free contents coming out on YouTube. So, thanks for watching so far. And we'll see in the next video.
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