Microsoft Planner: Linking Plans to a Project task

[DeletedBrianSmith]

First published on MSDN on Aug 29, 2017

For those on the Office Insider builds – or First Release – you will already be seeing a new link in the ribbon for Tasks in Project Online Desktop Client.  This is a feature only available for the subscription client – so don’t expect to see this in Project Professional 2016 if you own the perpetual license.  The new link enables you to link a task in Project Online to a Plan in Microsoft Planner, assuming you have an Office 365 subscription that includes Planner.  Let’s take a look and think about how you might use this.

You can see the link on the upper right – and clicking opens up the guide on the left.

Clicking the link gives a selection box for the Office 365 Group (not the Plan – as a Group can have more than one Plan – from Teams for example) and starting to type will find Groups that match the entered string

Selecting the plan then tells you who will get added to the Group – if they are not already there – and these will be  the assigned user and current user.  The project and the task need to have been published at this point to be able to make the link (You will get a message if they are not).

The right hand screenshot below shows the result when a Group is chosen that has more than one plan – and also in this case is adding the assigned resource (Sara) as well as me.

Once the link is made you get a link in the guide and a Planner icon in the grid.

You can have links to multiple plans – and clicking the link will take you to the plan – as you might expect:

NOTE: No new tasks get added to the plan - you can link to a plan with existing tasks or no tasks - but the action of linking does not add any tasks to the plan.

But you can’t link two different task to the same plan – and the thinking here is you wouldn’t know which task the plan progress was being made against if you linked one plan to two tasks:

In this initial release it is purely a link – so it enables the project manager to offload the tracking of that task to someone else who will be managing it in Planner.  The PM can then see how progress is going and update the project task accordingly after reviewing the progress of tasks and possibly checklists in the plan.  We are keen to hear what ways you might consider using this and future features you would want to see.  Use either the feedback option under the smiley top right in Project – or the Project UserVoice site.  If your feedback is more about the Planner end of the equation – then Planner has a UserVoice too!

[fabiom705]

Hi, 

I need to link more than one project task to the same planner plan. Is it possible now? 

[Mickael94]

Hi,

Yes I don't really understand this:

"But you can’t link two different task to the same plan – and the thinking here is you wouldn’t know which task the plan progress was being made against if you linked one plan to two tasks: "

[nstaels]

Hello,

I'm new in Project Online. I want to setup a link between Project Online and Planner so each task in Project becomes a task in Planner as well (with more detailed information & assign people to them).

I downloaded the Project Online Professional Desktop client (trial) and want to link it with a new plan (test) in the Office365 Group (test).

My problem is that I don't get a dropdown list of available plans in Project Online (not even when I type "test" in that field), so I can't link them.

Anyone can help me, please?

Thanks!

Nico

[Mickael94]

Hi Nico,

You are almost there. You need to publish your plan first so you can see it in the list.

Publish it into a project web app site of your choice.

Hope this helps!

[Joanne Wingate]

Hi

I have through flow, enabled a new task in Project once published, to be duplicated in planner, albeit it brings up an error if I include the start/finish dates (cannot figure out why?)

is there a way I can create a task in Planner that would then appear in Project Online, subsequently desktop too?

hope you can help :)

[fliaquat]

@ BrainSmith   I tried the LINK TO PLAN feature by clicking planner but found this option grayed out. Any suggestion on how can i resolve this. 

Farhan

[Mickael94]

@fliaquat 

You need to publish your plan on PWA first.

Hope this helps!

[JChesnut]

Hi,

I also do not understand the logic behind restricting Project-Planner utilization to only a single Project task per Plan.  I would like to allow task owners to track and update all of their assigned tasks in one location, but do not want them to edit the overall Project.  In order to do this, I need to link multiple tasks to the same plan.

How do I do this?

Thanks,

Jessica

[Decha_T]

I try to link Planner and MS Project task together, but it always show an error "The link cloud not be linked".

How do I do this?

Thanks,

Decha

[axdena]

@Decha_T make sure your default connection to PWA is something like this: https://TENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa and not something like this: https://TENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa/default.aspx 

I battled with this one for a long time

[CBozE360]

When linking an item in Project Professional to Planner, there is only the option to link the first bucket in the Plan. Why can't I link to the other buckets? 

Ideally, I would like to have the choice of linking to an individual task or a bucket.

[Charlesgil]

Someone said to publish the plan to pwa? How can you publish Planner to pwa? 

[Asanele]

Hi all,

I'm using Project Professional  desktop and I understand that my project needs to be published. But where exactly should I publish the project to be able to link it to to Planner? 

[velardi2100]

the best way to use project+planner would be a two way sync between task of project and task of planner...for now this feature isn't useful...

[ThomasBN]

Hi All,

My tasks will not sync to planner, any ideas?
Its published and saved ++

[fritzsolutuscoza]

Hi all, 

as @ThomasBN also mentioned, I've created a simple project, published it to pwa, then linked tasks to a planner, tried various plans, but none of the project tasks is created or listed under planner.

What am i missing here?

[JorgeCarlosRamirez]

Suggestion for Version 2.0: Having a link to Planner so that the PM can check the status by reading it and then updating manually Microsoft Project is not enough.

This should at least create the task or tasks in planner and then synchronize with project desktop to update the status.

[TonyB1975]

I was quite excited by the prospect of this functionality, but have been gravely disappointed , I'm in agreement with all the users that this needs to at least "create the task or tasks in planner and then synchronize with project desktop to update the status". It is also quite a convoluted process with little benefit. I think syncing project to SharePoint tasks or visualising data via Power BI from PWA offer far greater benefits at the moment. 

[Boxie]

OK so  i tried this . Made a site and made a  project. made a group  and linked that group plan to the project  after publish and then publish it again.

Now what is the link.  ?

? i do not see items of planner in project and vice versa

? if i keep the task name same nothing gets updated from planner to project and vice versa

Am i  missing something

[kateshepardphd]

This feature was rolled out in 2019 -- is there any progress on the feature beyond showing a link icon? I'm not seeing the point here... Tasks assigned to a resource in Project should be duplicated in Planner, assigned to the resource, for automated tracking.. Otherwise, what is the point??

[SimonHyland]

What.

This is a PITA to setup, just understanding what Project Plan 3 is compared to Project Online or Project for the Web is bad enough. But I have a dream.... project managers with their projects, team members with their tasks from the project plan, all living in harmony through Teams. All sync'd and looking good.

This is not that dream.

I feel like this enhancement is similar to giving my kids a Christmas present which turns out to be a PS5 box that's empty except for a photo of a store window that sells PS5s. Just to make sure I'm understanding this right (I've signed up for a community account just to post this), we now have the option after 4,000,000 hours of configuration, to have a project plan, which *drum roll* has a link in it to a Planner plan that may or may not have related tasks in it and which doesn't sync between them.

[Piers_Sadler]

I'm new to this, so don't know quite where to post my question.  I note this post is a few years old, but I keep being pointed to it.  I run a small consultancy business in construction  - currently 3 people and growing.  We have been using Tasks by Planner in teams for about a year now.  We now want to link the Tasks to Projects.  This blog seems to suggest that that is possible, but I am using Project Online - free trial at the moment and I don't find the same feature.  Does it exist?  What do i need to do to get this integration?

[pseudoelvis-F5]

Link to Planner is a feature put in Project Desktop to allow you to reference Planner tasks in your Microsoft Project Desktop Project Plans (.mpp files) published to a Project Web Access (PWA) SharePoint site. It is one-way only, i.e. you are only allowed to insert references to existing Microsoft 365 Planner tasks into your Project Desktop file. It does not work in the opposite direction, i.e. you cannot create tasks in a Project Desktop plan and publish them to Planner projects.

This feature ONLY works if You have:

• The subscription-based Project for the Desktop client installed, which is only available as a licensed download from a Microsoft 365 account,
• The Project 3 or Project 5 subscription attached to your Microsoft 365 user account,
• Deployed a PWA SharePoint site through the Microsoft 365 Administrative console,
• Published your plans to a PWA using the aforementioned Project for the Desktop client. 

Why care? Planner is nice for an Individual Contributor or Manager to manage tactical tasks. A nice side benefit is that these tasks also automatically show up in the Microsoft To-Do app under 'Assigned to Me'. Planner also provides nice web and mobile applications for these, and you can pin Planner projects in Teams Channels for easy collaboration at a working level. Some people also like to run Power Automate and Power BI against planner data for various other uses.

The Link to Planner feature is not a sync conduit to publish tasks created in the Project Desktop Client .mpp back to Planner. I imagine the poor development of these integrations comes from splitting resources to work on Project Online, a reimplementation of Project for the Desktop in Microsoft 365 using a Web Application. Unfortunately, the Project Online client does not provide feature parity with the Project Desktop client, and therefore is kind of useless as a replacement for complex .mpp projects requiring things like real resource management. 

I really wish Microsoft would improve their naming because all of this mess is terribly confusing, as they are attempting to keep brand consistency for the Project family, but are failing to articulate it effectively even in their own documentation. Looking at the 'roadmap', I sadly can't find a meaningful indicator they are actively developing anything but a token feature every now and again. Like Visio, the Project suite is probably too big to die and too small to resource effectively to properly evolve.

Good luck out there, there are alternatives, but many seem to be leaning towards the lighter weight side of project management and don't always provide a realistic replacement for some more complex or obscure features in Project for the Desktop . 

*PWA - a centralized SharePoint site with special extensions to support the Project Desktop Client. 

[Paulabrj]

I have tried all the options above. All I could reach is a link from my PROJECT to a specific Planner. It is not task by task, and it is not a sync option. It is just a very simple lync.

If you need to sync two different microsoft products (Project and Planner), you need to acquire solutions from third parties and pay for them.

Any idea when Microsoft will launch this kind of integration/sync ?

Thanks,

Paula

[JimMcL61]

Wow.  Such a sad realization from @pseudoelvis-F5, making PWA about useless.  Definitely not worth the Plan 5 upgrade.

[lukeeccy92]

I have also just checked the 365 Roadmap and do not see where in the plan is to update when the project task assignment to planner/to do link is going to arrive. My company and myself as a project manager really need this feature to allow teams who work across a wide range of projects to have a single 'assigned to' location eg. planner and to do as per current apps where they can see all assigned tasks and not necessarily close to the project to be working on the sole project as is the case currently.

As per @Paulabrj comment in september '22 and other previous, does anyone (@Pernille-Eskebo )else have any more information or update on this feature rollout? 

Thanks, 

Luke

[dov2211]

Hi all, I was looking for an answer to this particular question and i was wondering is there any better alternative? But re entering data from planner to another app is a. headache. Also has anyone tried viva goals? 

[APansecchi]

Hi,

I found not very helpful if the task is not created in automatic in the group, it is not efficient. Also only one, in my personal opinion, does not make real sense. I need to link more than one task to the same group ,maybe in different baskets. Could you please look into this? The software is powerful but could be improved. 

Thank you.