How to best use Planner with Teams for dozens of Project Plans

Copper Contributor

I work for an event center that handles business events and concerts.  We also have a restaurant and tavern as well as the ranch that sells homes.  So, between these companies, we have a lot of projects!  In the past I have used Asana to manage dozens of project boards with numerous tasks in each board, especially the concerts.  I would like to start using Planner since our whole team switched to using Teams, but I have issues I can't seem to figure out.  Any suggestions would be very helpful.

 

1. I am use to making a separate Board (or Plan) for each project and then adding tasks (or cards) inside each board that allows for uploading files, comments and status applied to each card.  This keep everything very clean and easy to follow since all the tasks are separated for each larger project. Planner does the same thing which is great, but then if I want to add this project to Teams, it becomes a tab across the top of the Team. Well, once I finish the migration from Asana to Planner, I would have 13 project tabs, or more, across the top for each team and that is not a reasonable way to see a list of projects. So, my question is:  Is there a way to see a list of all Plans from Planner for a current Team in Teams?  Seeing a list of Plans instead of tabs for each one would be a much better solution to the integration with Teams for companies that have more than 1-2 jobs at a time.... which it most every company.

 

2. I could make just one master Plan per team and have separate cards for each project in the Plan, instead of making a separate Plan for each project, and this would help with the above question and clean up the Teams tabs at the top.  BUT, each of our projects are not just one task.  Example: Each of our concerts have 20 things that need to get done by 5 different people.  If I make a concert a Card instead of a Plan, then how can I track each of the 20 tasks (billboard design, website page, social media ad, etc, etc), upload files for each to be reviewed and approved and assign people to them? I could use the checklist inside the card, but that does not allow for assigning, uploading or commenting about just that part of the larger project. Making 20 cards for each inside the Plan will just over populate the Plan with cards if and when I have 5-10 concerts running at one time.

 

3. Can anyone show me a better way to use Planner, or how I can continue using Asana with Teams and not have all these darn tabs across the top for each Project we build?  FYI: The Asana plugin is a similar issue to Planner where you have to manually add each project board into Teams (Why manually and not just pull all open project board?) and it shows up as a tab across the top. There is no way to just show a list of projects from Asana in Teams either.

 

We can't be the only company that has this issue.  Any help with this would be very helpful.  Thanks.

 

3 Replies

@tomschiemerThis might not be how it was intended but we have made our Teams into Projects. This way just one planner tab at the top of each Team/Project and also one connected SharePoint site for said project. Unfortunately we have not yet decided on how to implement a Gantt chart or visual timeline without the cumbersome Excel template....

Thank you for your thoughts on how to do this. I will discuss this option with our team and may try this option for the concerts.

@tomschiemer Why wouldn't you have a separate channel for each project, then all the conversations, files, plans and other services that are relevant to that project are also in one place. This is one of the key benefits of Teams, preserving context, everything I need for one topic in one place.