(upbeat music)
- Hi there, I'm Cathy Harley and I'm a Program Manager
on the team that builds Project and Planner.
Today, I'm going to talk to you
about managing your work in Teams.
We constantly hear stories from people
about how they're spending way too much time
managing their work.
Studies show that information workers spend less than half
of their day on the primary duties of their job.
Instead, they're in meetings, responding to interruptions,
asking for and waiting on approvals,
gathering and reporting status
and understanding the best ways to meet their priorities.
Today, I'm going to show you how your team can collaborate
with Planner, Project, and Teams
so that you can manage work no matter what the complexity is
and spend more time doing work that's truly meaningful.
I'm going to start off by quickly
introducing you to our tools
then I'll show you how to collaborate using M365 roups.
We'll walk through best practices for how and when
to use Planner and Project with Teams
and finally, I'll show you how Teams can help you stay
up to date and organized with all of your work
and collaboration streams.
Now I'm going to jump right into our toolbox
and make sure that you're familiar
with the most important tools.
Teams has one hub for all of your work in M365.
It connects everything and everyone in one place
and it's the central location
for all discussion and collaboration.
In Planner, you can create boards using task cards
assigned to members of your team with files,
checklists, labels, and more that promote transparency
and accountability across your team.
Centralization of everything allows your team
to spend less time searching for work.
Project has additional tools on top of the basics in Planner
to help you and your team stay focused,
organized, and in control.
When deadlines matter, you can plan
with the power of Dynamic Scheduling.
You can add custom data to your tasks in Project
and create dashboards in Power BI
to visually track any details critical to your bottom line.
Now, team collaboration is so baked in
to the Project and Planner experience,
it's there as soon as you get started.
Here in Planner, I can go create a brand new plan.
I'll name it something fun like learning how to collaborate.
And right away, I have the option to add this
to an existing M365 Group that I'm a member of.
However, I'm actually going to go right ahead
and create a brand new plan for us,
which will also create a brand new M365 Group
for us to go work with.
Now, let's say right away,
I want to get started working with my teammate Nancy
and I have something very important for her to go work on.
Well, I can create this very important task.
I can click assign
and type my coworker's Nancy's name
into the task assignment.
Right here, I immediately see her
come up under a non-member.
So I can go click her name, and Planner lets me know
that Nancy isn't a member of the plan,
but that assigning a task to her will share the plan
with her and add her
to the group the plan's associated with.
I'm going to go ahead and do that.
Project and Planner both use M365 Groups for sharing.
Members of an M365 Group can access
all of the projects, plans, documents,
and Teams channels that are shared with the M365 group.
This makes things easy because you can just all of the plans
and projects your team is working on
with the same M365 Group
without having to remember exactly
who to share with each time.
No more typing in a huge list of names or even worse,
accidentally offending someone
because you forgot to type their name
into the shared dialogue.
M365 Groups are flexible
and they can contain people from all over your company
and even guest users.
Note that even the project requires an additional license
on top of M365 to edit,
everyone can view all projects in an M365 Group
that's shared with them.
I often hear questions from customers about how
and when they should be using different tools in M365.
While there's no one way to work,
I'll spend the next few minutes
walking through best practices.
Planner is really helpful when it comes to keeping track
of ideas on your team around a certain goal
and turning those ideas into a reality.
One example is planning a big team meeting or an event.
Let's say that the Green Team here
is ready to plan our annual Green Day event.
Now I want to make sure
that I plan this in the context of our meetings channel
where everyone on my team goes to for events anyway.
I can go add a new tab to this channel right here
and I can select add a Tasks Board to the channel.
When I go and add my Tasks Board,
I have the option to create a brand new plan
or I can add an existing plan
that's already been shared with my team.
I'm going to go and create a brand new one.
Call it Green Day
and I can be confident right away that this will get shared
with every single person on my team
so I don't have to worry about people being able to view it.
Now, once I go get started,
I want to just start brainstorming a little bit.
I know I spent a lot of time planning this event last year
so I know that we're going to have to come up with
topics to talk about on Green Day
and we're also going to have to come up with logistics.
In terms of topics,
I know that we're definitely going to want to talk about
carbon reductions and we're also probably
going to want to talk about composting best practices.
I'll let the rest of my team come in later
and brainstorm their ideas.
For logistics, I spent a ton of time
working on this last year
so I have a pretty good idea of what we'll want to do.
We're definitely going to need to build the events schedule,
we'll have to send out invites
and we'll need to prepare breakout rooms
especially because we're going to be remote this year.
Now, I was the head Schedule Builder last year
and I did a really good job
and I think I'm ready to pass off the torch
to someone new this year.
I want to make sure that I pick someone on my team
that'll really be successful.
I can go take a look
and under the task assignment actually browse
through my team members.
I think Jeremy would actually be a great fit for this
so I'm going to go assign the task to him.
Now, I want to make sure that Jeremy
is really prepared for this
so I want to give him some pro tips and a checklist.
Allow 15 minutes between sessions.
Make sure you end at 4:00 PM sharp
and definitely vary the topics by hours
that people stay interested.
Finally, I want to make sure
that Jeremy has the schedule that I built last year
as an example.
I'm pretty sure that this is shared to my team's SharePoint,
so I can go add the attachment here,
look on my team SharePoint and when I scroll down,
I actually find it right here, the 2020 Green Day schedule.
I can save this to the task
and I know that right now it's linked,
everyone on my team will be able to collaborate
on this document and it will be super easy to work together.
If this document was stored on my computer for some reason
and not already in my team's SharePoint,
when I want to go add an attachment,
it would just be a file
that would get uploaded to my team's SharePoint
and I know that everyone has access to the plan
would also have access to collaborate on the document.
Now I want to make sure that I go schedule
all of these tasks so that my team knows
about when they need to get done.
Now, Planner tasks have a due date
that I could just fill out,
but I'm someone that has trouble visualizing
exactly when to schedule things.
So what I prefer to do actually
is go to the schedule view.
Here in the schedule view,
I can go fast forward to April when we're actually
going to have our Green Day event,
let me just mark the calendar here, make it easy.
And I can actually just drag and drop my tasks
onto the calendar to make it really easy
to visualize when things need to get done.
So I know that invites probably need to be sent
two weeks before the event so boom, here we go.
Dragged and dropped.
Building out the schedule should happen
about a week in advance and preparing breakout rooms
should happen definitely just the day before
as things tend to change.
As you can see, when I go open the task,
the due date is automatically updated
for my entire team to see.
Now Planner is great for organizing a simple event
like this team event, but I know that we often have events
that are a little bit more complicated.
Project is a very helpful tool
when you're working on something that's more complex
or tracking details and deadlines matters.
Project can help you understand how changes
to one particular task impacts a chain of dependencies
down the line.
Now I'm going to show you a market research project
that my team has been working on.
This is something that has over six months of work
with pretty complex dependencies
and it's really critical that we make this work on time.
Project is a great place to track this.
Now immediately when I went and got into this Project,
I noticed that it looked like we were starting to fall
a little bit behind on some of our tasks.
It looks like things related to gathering requirements
and actually defining the project scope
look like they're starting to run late.
I don't know exactly what's happening on the team,
but I definitely want to check in.
I can open up the team chat right here
and I can tag my collaborator Nancy and ask her why things
look like they're running late right now.
My whole team will be able to look at the chat
in the same place and it's super contextual
which will help us stay focused on the task at hand.
Now the bread and butter of Project
is the timeline view.
In the timeline view, I can get a sense
of when the work on my team is scheduled to happen over time
which again is super valuable for any complex project.
Here, you can see that Project helps me track tasks
that are dependent on each other.
Let's say that I realize that this task here
actually can't start until I finish this one off.
I can simply go in and drag a dependency
right there
and automatically all of my tasks update, not just for me,
but for everyone I'm working with.
This makes things super easy
and saves me a ton of time making and communicating
all of these updates to the rest of my team.
Now, Project is fantastic
for really getting into the details of one big work stream.
But I know a lot of you work on multiple projects at once
and it's really important for you to get a view
of exactly what your team is working on holistically
rather than in just one work stream.
For that, we have a tool called Roadmap
which is another feature in Project
that lets you view multiple Projects together.
Here, I can go check on my team's cumulative planning
for the whole year, and I can open up my yearly planning
which is also just a tab in our Teams channel.
Here, this Roadmap is going to show a summary
of all of the projects going on on my team at the same time.
So here's the Market Research plan that we were just in
as well as our Marketing Campaign
and the compliance updates that we're working on.
The great thing about Roadmap is it can help me understand
if there might be additional risk
for multiple things happening at the same time
or maybe there's just an additional opportunity
for my team to collaborate when similar things
are going on around the same time.
Now I know that
working on a lot of things at once
can be especially challenging
and while getting a holistic view
of all of your projects is helpful for planning,
I know that it's important to have more power
to help you stay in sync on a day-to-day basis
and just feel more in control.
It can be challenging to stay on top of multiple projects
at once especially when they span different subjects
and teams of people.
We've built tools to help you stay up to date and focused.
Once a planner board is added to Teams,
you'll receive a notification
if a task is assigned to you by another person.
Following this notification brings you
to the tasks app in Teams where you can see
all of the work that's assigned to you
across all of your plans.
This is a great place to prioritize your work
across all of your planner boards for a given day or week.
In this view, you can also see a list
of all of your planner boards.
This is a helpful way to check in on your work once
without having to leave Teams
or navigate through different channels.
All of this functionality is coming to Project
as well in the future
so you'll be able to see notifications
and a list of your tasks from across M365
in a single place in Teams.
Now you have all the tools that you need to manage
any type of work with your team.
The next step is to actually get started
and the easiest way is to add a planner board or a project
to any of your favorite channels in Teams.
Then assign a task to one of your teammates to get started.
We'd love to hear your feedback and make sure
that Teams continues to be the best place
to manage your work
so please look for the little smiley face icon
in the upper right hand corner
of any of your apps and send us some feedback, thanks again.
(upbeat music)