I want to love Microsoft Planner. But there are some things it has in it that just confound me. Rather, I should say it has omissions that confound me and make me question its usability.
For the uninitiated, Planner is a user-friendly project management tool designed for teams to collaborate and stay organized. Planner helps users create tasks, assign them to team members, set due dates, and track progress visually on customizable boards. It’s not a full and formal project management software, like its older sibling Microsoft Project, which is way more robust and suitable for complex projects with intricate timelines and resource management. Planner is more accessible; Project is more involved. Still, Planner excels at promoting collaboration, task management, and maintaining an overview of project activities, making it ideal for smaller teams and less complex projects.
Here’s a perfect example for Planner that we’ve rolled out at my company: organizing all of the activities and tasks around what it takes to bring a new employee onboard and for their first few months on the job. It’s a perfect solution for that, because there are different buckets of tasks, a deadline for those tasks to take place, and different people responsible for those tasks (be it IT, HR, or the new employee’s manager). Instead of having these tasks live in a spreadsheet on someone’s desktop, they can now live in a collaborative environment.
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