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Hello everybody, it's Matt.
Welcome to Collaboration Coach.
In my recent video about the future of tasks in Microsoft 365,
one of the big questions that came through the comments was "what about Microsoft Project?"
So in this video we're going to have a look at Microsoft Project
and compare it to some of the other project related apps and services that Microsoft has on offer.
First of all, before we get started,
we're going to have a look at the three different project offerings that Microsoft has at the moment
because they're all completely separate and don't integrate with each other at all at the moment.
So first of all, Planner.
Planner is a simple task management system built specifically for Office 365.
It is easy to learn and use and it's good for managing small projects and teamwork.
There's no extra charge for Planner
as it's included with all the Office 365 plans for business enterprise and education.
Project Online, which is also known as Project Web App was ported from the on-premises version of Project.
It's based on the classic version of SharePoint Online
and doesn't work very well with modern SharePoint sites.
It does include more advanced project management features like resource and financial management
but you do pay a lot for these features so it's expensive and it's an add-on to an existing Office 365 license.
Although it's still being supported by Microsoft, they aren't developing for it and it's considered a legacy app.
So in this video I'm going to show you Project for the Web, which is also just known as Project.
This was built from scratch for Office 365
and it's all browser-based, there's no app or client
and it has a very simple interface that looks and feels a lot like Planner
but it has the addition of gantt views, and you can add things called road maps
to get an overview of how a number of different projects are progressing.
Project for the Web is not free,
it's an add-on to an existing Office 365 license, so let's take a look.
When Project is activated in your Office 365 subscription
you can access it through an icon in the app launcher.
When you do that, you land on the home page and from there you can create your first blank project or roadmap.
I've created a project to show you how the tasks and views work together,
and I've also made it a favourite so I can just click on the tile here and open it up.
Your project starts out in grid view which is basically a list of tasks.
We also have the board and timeline views that I'll show you later.
Notice on the far right there's a "group members" link.
When I click on that I see all the people that have access to my project plan.
This is because I attached the plan to a Microsoft 365 group -
the sales and marketing group.
This makes managing permissions to the plan really simple
and is one of the advantages that this version of Project has over the legacy Project Online app.
The grid view starts out blank and I've added a list of new tasks here.
I can move the tasks around.
I can copy, paste and delete them and I can get more info about them.
I have some tasks that are subtasks
and some that are summary tasks like these ones called "video" and "thumbnails"
and I can make any task a subtask as well.
I have an "assigned to" column here where I can add people from my organisation
and I can see the duration of the task and I added a "completed" column here
and I can add more columns if I need to.
You can add new tasks from here.
I'm just going to add one called "update thumbnails". I'm going to assign it to Alex.
So when I type it here it will draw names from my organisation directory and it will suggest them to me
and then I can add more than one if I need to.
Once I have my task I can open it and I can add some more detail like a start and end date
and also how much of the task has been completed.
Also see here that I can add the task to a bucket.
I've got buckets here called "art" and "content".
To show you what a bucket is and what it's used for...
...I'm going to switch now to the board view.
In board view, tasks appear as cards and can be moved around into different buckets.
So it's a way of organising and categorising the tasks.
Tasks can be dragged and dropped between buckets
and you can create new buckets if you need to.
You can also change the view of the tasks.
Right now we're looking at the buckets but we can also switch to a "progress" view.
This shows the Project Manager which tasks have not been started and which ones are in progress and have been completed.
The ones marked in red here are overdue,
and if I wanted to go in and mark that task as completed,
I could either just press the circle in the top left here
or I can open up the task and change the percentage to 100 percent.
Notice that when I do that, it moves the task to the "completed" column.
I could also just drag the task from the "in progress" column,
it has exactly the same effect.
I also have a "finish date" view where I can see which tasks are due and when.
In this view I get four columns: "late", "today", "tomorrow", and "this week".
The timeline view is like a traditional gantt view
where you can see the tasks mapped across the timeline.
I can zoom in and out of the timeline using the slider here
and I can hover over the tasks and summaries to easily see what they're scheduled for.
I can change the duration by dragging the task either from the left or the right,
and I can also create dependencies by dragging from this little dot at the end here...
...to connect this task to another one,
and I can click on tasks here to open them up and see the information pane on the right hand side.
We can also add road maps, which are like consolidated views of a number of different projects.
So this is not quite programme management
but it does give you a high level view of all the work going on in your projects
so this would be useful for someone who was responsible for the delivery of a number of projects
or a stakeholder that wanted to get an overview of how things were progressing.
I've created a roadmap for Collaboration Coach and I've added two of my projects to it.
The "website refresh" and the "youtube updates".
So you can see my two projects here, who the project managers are,
what the key dates are and the work going on within them.
I can choose which tasks from the projects I include on the roadmap
and I can add key dates to my roadmap
so I can see at a glance whether my projects are on track or not.
I've added two here: "testing" and "go live".
Then I can add risk categories to the tasks in the projects.
Here one of the tasks looks like it's going over one of my milestones
so I'm going to set it to "high risk".
The last thing I wanted to add was the integration between Project and Teams.
So from any Teams channel, you can add a tab that allows access to your Project.
I can come to the plus button to add a new tab in any channel
and I can either find the Project app or search for "Project".
Then it will ask me if I want to create a new project or add an existing one.
So if I just choose this existing project and press save, it then adds the project to my Teams channel
and I can view the project tasks just like I can in the browser
so: "grid", "board" and "timeline" view.
And I can interact with them just in the same way as I do in the browser but straight out of Teams.
So there's your review of Microsoft Project.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
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