MicrosoftMicrosoftI am concerned that MS will do all this work & still miss fixing the small critical features that stopped planner from being useful.
I've been on a few teams now that tried & failed to use Planner successfully. We eventually fell back to MS Project, Azure DevOps, or Jira Advanced Roadmaps.
MS has done a lot to get all the tasks/TODO's back to the individuals, but very little to help get across the "Big picture".
It becomes less useful when staff are driven by multiple inputs; (i) Planned "project" work, (ii) Urgent unplanned work (ie: help desk tickets, crisis), (iii) Re-occurring complex/multi-step tasks/mini projects ( eg: Monthly data center maintenance, EOM Reconciliation activities or similar checklists which likely take several people, several days to complete). Yes for this last one planner tasks can be recreated by FLOW each month. But Outlook lets you have reoccurring meetings. This is similar but each reoccurring group of tasks need to have there own independent task completion & comments fields. But also the ability to set instructions & checklists common to all
Important features.
1. The ability to control the level of detail you need.
We need the ability to indent subtasks, and a view that lets you collapse & expand them. (individually or all at once (like Excel's Group levels)
Why?
Because the higher level "features" can be shrunk out of the way, while you drill down into one area. Then it can be collapsed, so you can focus on something else.
In contrast.
Planners can't be aggregated to be viewed on one pane of glass. You are clicking between teams & tabs to see the next one. You can't collapse the buckets. Buckets don't have sub-buckets. Tasks take up a fixed amount of space. So you can't easily get them out of the road. (yes you can filter, but then you lose context of where you are in the set of activities). You can't see the impact of tasks being blocked.
The ability to create tasks with checklists etc is really nice. But no ability to see the dependency on one checklist item with some other item in another task assigned to someone else. (something you get with MS Project &/ AZ DevOps
2. The ability to spot things that are missed.
The benefit of having an indented hierarchy is that it helps you think & brainstorm. Letting you rapidly add activities, restructure, prioritizes, see dependencies. Set something to blocked & visualize the impact of that blockage succinctly down the page.
MS Project lets you set font & colour, foreground & background on tasks, this also helped draw attention to transient problems. or areas where your planning is tentative or incomplete.
Example:
I had 5 teams reporting to me (+ cross teams); DBA(SQL), DBA(other), Data Engineers, Data Storage, ETL & Analytics, + Security & Infrastructure. Each team could run with its own planner. A lot of what they did was of no interest to the other teams. But often project activities cut across all teams. eg: Planning/Building a new Application VM needs Certificates, Storage, VM, Database, ETL & Reporting. (the final build can be automated, but not the design & approval)
It is important to see if something will be delayed because an item was assigned to the one person on the team who called in sick.
With Az DevOps hierarchies you see it immediately. In Planner, the tool doesn't help.
3. Removing clutter ; Template Tasks & Done Tasks.
These can be created & then filtered out to keep the board clean. But annoying to need to set the filter every time.
Basically I'd like the tool to help plan & manage the work.
To have a hierarchical list. And the ability to roll up the planners I nominate into a single list. To be able to see the dependencies down to checklist item level. And to visualise impact when a task is blocked. To readily zoom into the detail while maintaining the context of where it fits in the big picture.
I hope this feedback helps you to turn all these distinct 365 components into the type of complete solution Microsoft is famous for.
