Forum Discussion
Organisation Executive view of project plans and progress
Within my organisation, we have up to 20+ projects in various stages of their lifecycle going at any one time. Each project has activities relevant to specific departments within the organisation and each department has many team members that will be assigned tasks across multiple projects. Each department exists as a 'team' within teams. Each department manager is responsible for assigning the work for their staff and meeting KPIs but not every staff member is involved in every project. Basically, each department has their own project/planner relevant to their specific work activity which they assign out to their staff, but no single department owns the entire project (they are responsible for components of the project). I need an organisation view of all ongoing projects, and the ability to see the task activity (i.e. workload and deadlines) for each department relevant to each project and the entire organisation.
Can planner be set up so that detailed plans can exist within overarching project plans? Or can plans in planner be set up such that tasks with the plan can be assigned to a bucket and buckets within the plan assigned to teams (i.e. departments rather than assigned to individual users) where the department manager can assign the tasks to their staff. The objective of this approach is to have staff allocated tasks through planner (ToDo) and the completion of their individual task feed back into the departments overall assigned activities, and ultimately back up to the project, and overall executive summary of all organisation projects.
5 Replies
I would like to add on the above posts as I think these all are related. I have a client that running many outsource projects on behalf of their clients. They currently use PWA, they have the standard BI reporting which provide dashboards. Example Risks, Issues as well as project status related to updates. With the PWA moving into planner premium, how will these reporting be managed? I do notice that you need to use lists for your risk/issues/decision registers. You need to create separate storage space on SharePoint to store data. Anyone else have an easier solution? Reporting on all projects across all clients. We are talking in excess of 100 projects at any given time.
I think the closest you could get to meeting your requirements with native Planner functionality, although likely not ideal, would be to put all work in one Plan. Premium plans (Project for the web) now support managing 3,000 tasks and 2,000 dependencies.
- Create an "Organization Projects" Plan
- Project Managers Create Summary Tasks for each Project as well as a Bucket for each project
- Tasks are associated with Summary Tasks and Project Buckets; use labels to associate tasks to departments
- Department Managers can go into the Plan, view as Board and use combinations of group by buckets and filter by labels (or vice versa) to see work broken out by their department's contribution to each project
- Resources will see all tasks assignments in Tasks but will not be able to determine what tasks are associated with what projects unless the go into the Plan
Thank you very much for contributing.
We have access to the premium plans in Planner. Is your suggestion for the basic form of Planner or the premium version? You mentioned "native" above, but I'm not 100% sure what you meant by that.
The above solution would require the owner of the project to be assigned either a Planner Plan 1 or Planner and Project Plan 3. With that licensing you can create a premium plan that includes tasks and subtasks.
I'm looking forward to seeing the replies to this. We have a similar requirement and aim.
