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Stephan Swinford's avatar
Stephan Swinford
Steel Contributor
Oct 26, 2016

How Does Your Org Use Planner?

Specifically, how do you work around these two issues, because I feel like I'm going to lose interest on this (especially with senior leadership who want something that works now, not in 6 months) and everyone is going to jump to another product, which is a little disheartening since I see Groups being, as a whole, really strong.

 

  1. Users not being notified of tasks (or, alternatively, users being notified of every task in a Plan)
    We have a couple larger groups (approx. 20-30 people) that revolve around big projects. It would be information-overload if members subscribe to the Plan/Group, but without subscribing they sometimes never know that a task was assigned to them. How can we overcome this until notification emails are set/fixed?
  2. Users not being reminded about tasks and not completing them
    I've had reports from a few users and Group/Plan owners that tasks went past their deadline, mostly due to the user forgetting they even had the task. How do you get your teams to make sure they're getting things done on time? Were you able to get everyone to check the Planner Hub daily? Again, might work for small, dedicated teams, but to get everyone in our org to do that... well, that probably wouldn't happen.

 

Please help! I desperately want Office 365 Groups and Planner to work for us, and many of the users want to stay in the same app/have one login, but these issues are causing some serious adoption problems.

Planner
User Adoption
  • Loryan Strant's avatar
    Loryan Strant
    MVP
    Oct 30, 2016

    It's a challenging one, and with the product really on the market for 4 months there's still a lot of tweaks coming down the line that will help with user adoption.

    While everyone works differently, my advice to people is to keep tasks.office.com open (as well as Yammer, but that's for other reasons) for the majority of their day so they can quickly and easily see what they have on their plate.

    Unfortunately we can't force people to be subscribed to notifications, so it's an overall adoption thing of working together as a team and regularly checking the tool they work with.

     

    I know that's not an ideal answer to your question, and the immediate user resistance will come from having to open another page/app where they already have a bunch open. Unfortunately I've found this is the best approach though - to make people want to keep on top of it.

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