Item: Microsoft Planner
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Planner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft Planner as a project management tool to manage projects across multiple teams within our organization. It's used for tracking purposes, assigning to different owners and communicating on the status of each project. It is used across the entire organization and all departments. It's used as the primary form of communication for project.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creating tasks
Having different boards for different teams/purposes
Email reminders about due dates

Cons

Basic version doesn't allow assigning someone to specific subtasks
Can't see tasks assigned to someone on your team across multiple boards
People have to comment to opt in for notifications for a particular task
You can't @ someone in the comments or the notes to bring it to their attention
You can't edit a comment once it's submitted
You can't pin a comment to make it important & ensure everyone sees it
You can't click through on links in the comments (doesn't automatically hyperlink)

Return on Investment

In my experience, productivity is negatively impacted because assigning subtasks aren't clear on Microsoft Planner
Managers aren't able to track direct reports' tasks across multiple boards -- leading to poor visibility for us
Notifications aren't always sent to inbox, so you rely on people's own project management skills to follow the communication on tasks they're assigned to. In my experience, this leads to missed deadlines impacting customer relationships.

Usability

In my opinion, Mircosoft Planner's overall usability is very poor on the free basic version. There are a lot of extra steps you have to take to ensure you're receiving notifications and that others are seeing what you need. I think there's a lot of improvement needed to make Microsoft Planner effective to use across multiple teams. On the most basic level, it cannot handle projects with multiple steps needed and it doesn't make it clear who owns what part.

Alternatives Considered

Asana, Adaptive and Trello

In my experience, Microsoft Planner has much less features and less effective than other project management tools. But, it's free and included as part of Microsoft 365, so senior management may think it's saving them money. However, the poor productivity and the inefficient communications leads to missed deadlines and a lot of extra time spent on project management for us. I would not recommend saving a few dollars by using Microsoft Planner.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Planner delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Microsoft Planner's feature set?

Did Microsoft Planner live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Microsoft Planner go as expected?

Would you buy Microsoft Planner again?

Other Software Used

Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator CC

Likelihood to Recommend

I think the basic free version of Microsoft Planner is well suited for managing your own individual list of basic tasks. However, if you're trying to work across teams and collaborate on large scale projects with multiple parts, in my experience, it becomes very clunky to work with. If you have a large project that needs subtasks, you're only able to assign multiple people to the general task, not each subtask. So, there's a lot of confusion on who owns what part, and what subtask part is done because all the comments just goes in the general task. I would recommend upgrading to the paid version.

Comments

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In my opinion, Don't cheap out on Project Management with Microsoft Planner