Setting goals for your plan is crucial for creating alignment within your team and among stakeholders to ensure that everyone knows what top work is most important and how it is being prioritized. Many teams find it challenging to keep everyone on the same page when it comes to goals. Misaligned priorities, lack of visibility, and difficulty in tracking progress can lead to missed deadlines and unmet objectives. The new Microsoft Planner’s Goals feature can address these challenges.
With Goals in the new Microsoft Planner, you can easily set and track goals for your plan, and even link them to tasks to ensure that the work you have defined aligns with your goals. Copilot helps you quickly add specific and measurable goals tailored to your scenario.
How it works
- To get started, open a premium plan in Planner and navigate to the Goals view by selecting Goals in the header.
- Create goals by selecting Add goal and entering some initial details, such as the title, end date, status, and a unique color.
Additionally, Copilot in Planner (preview) can help you set meaningful goals for your plan.* Simply ask Copilot to add goals based on your specific needs, and Copilot will add a set of measurable goals to help you get started.
- Add additional details by selecting a goal and adding a description, start date, and priority.
- Link tasks to goals by selecting Connect tasks and choosing the tasks that are related to the given goal.
Goals in other views
Board view
In the Board view, you can group by goal to see how tasks are distributed among goals and if there are any tasks that are not helping to achieve your set goals. From here, you can redistribute tasks, add new tasks to goals, and even make edits to the goals themselves by selecting their title.
You can also filter by goal in the Board view to see a subset of tasks that are aligned to your goal of focus.
People view
In the People view, you can also group or filter by goal. This allows you to see who is responsible for achieving which goals, so you know who to follow up with if there are questions about the state of a goal.
You can also filter by goal in the People view to see a subset of tasks that are aligned to your goal of focus.
Grid View
In the Grid view, you can add a Goal column to easily see which goal a task is linked to. You can also filter by goal to see a subset of tasks that are aligned to your goal of focus.
Charts View
In the Charts view, you can filter by Goal to see analytics on how tasks working toward your goal of focus are burning down. This is especially helpful to get a quick understanding of the state of a goal.
How can I use goals?
The following are a few examples of how goals can transform your plan:
- Brainstorm relevant objectives: Working in a new space and not quite sure what reasonable goals may be? Ask Copilot to help! Open the Copilot pane, type in “Add a set of goals for [launching a new drone delivery service]” (just replace the text in the brackets with your own scenario) and watch the magic happen!
- See individual contributions to goals: Select Group by Goals in People view to track what each team member is working on towards each goal. This helps to track team contributions and allows each team member to see how they are directly impacting the team’s objectives.
- Status reporting: Need to report progress towards your goals? Simply update the status field for each goal to represent the current state and add a few details in the goal description. Then, the Goals view serves as an easily digestible location for all stakeholders to see the latest status.
Availability
Goals is available to all Planner users who have a Planner Plan 1 or greater license. If you do not have a premium Planner license, you can simply click on the diamond icon within the app to start a free 30-day trial of advanced capabilities in Planner or request a premium license.
* While final pricing for Copilot in Planner has not been announced, users with a Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 license can preview Copilot in Planner capabilities.
FAQs:
Who can view, create, and edit my plan’s goals?
Users with a Planner Plan 1 or higher license can view, create, and edit goals within a plan. Users with only a Microsoft 365 license who are invited to your plan will be unable to see or interact with your goals in any way.
Is there a limit on how many goals I can create?
Each plan is limited to 10 goals. This limit is created intentionally to encourage best practices for creating goals, where each plan has a limited set of objectives that it is looking to achieve. Setting too many goals is overwhelming and often unachievable; limiting your plan to 3-5 well scoped goals ensures the highest level of focus to drive success.
Which tasks can I link to goals?
Any task which is not a summary task can be linked to a goal. Additionally, each task can only be linked to one goal at a time.
Learn more about the new Planner
- Check out the recently refreshed
- Sign up to receive future communication about Planner.
- Check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap for feature descriptions and estimated release dates for Planner.
- Watch Planner demos for inspiration on how to get the most out of the new Planner app in Microsoft Teams.
- Get your questions answered in the newly updated Frequently Asked Questions.
- And finally, we’ve got a lot more ‘planned’ for Planner this year! Stay tuned to the Planner blog for the latest news.
- Watch the recording from April’s "Ask Microsoft Anything“ event about the new Planner.
Share your feedback
You can share feedback through the new Planner app in Teams directly. You can also send us your feedback via the Planner Feedback Portal.