The Planner team uses the sprints feature in premium plans to schedule tasks, balance our team’s workload, and run team retrospectives. Today, we want to share some of our tips for how sprints planning in the new Planner app in Teams can transform both your individual task management and collaborative team processes.
Why use sprints?
If you find yourself or your team needing to break down a complex project into manageable chunks, sprints are the tool for you. By separating tasks into time-boxed iterations, sprints allow you to focus on a set of tasks within a defined period so that your team can deliver value rapidly and continuously adapt to feedback.
Getting started
To use sprints in the new Planner, you’ll need a premium license. If you don’t have a premium license, you can still try the feature by acquiring a free 30-day trial.
To view and schedule your tasks by sprints, follow these three steps:
- Open any premium plan in Planner. Note: To jumpstart the process and see what sprints could look like in a pre-existing plan, you can select our Sprint Planning template. This template can be found when creating a new plan.
- Change to the Board view.
- Select Group by > Sprint. In this view, you can set dates for each sprint and assign tasks to sprints. These sprints can be viewed in the Grid, Timeline and Charts views by selecting Filters > Sprints.
How should I use sprints?
The following is a list of ways our team uses sprints in our feature development processes. How else do you use sprints on your team? Feel free to drop a comment down below!
- Scheduling tasks: Select Group by > Sprint in Board view to add tasks to sprints, create new sprints, or view all sprints and their associated tasks at a glance.
- Balancing workloads: Select the Sprints filter in People view to track what each team member is working on for the sprint. You can modify team members’ workloads by dragging and dropping tasks from one person to another in this view.
- Sprint retrospectives: Use Filters > Sprints in Board view to reflect on your team’s accomplishments by evaluating task progress and remaining tasks in the sprint. You can also create buckets in the general Board view to track what went well and what could be better.
Share your feedback
Your feedback helps inform our feature updates and we look forward to hearing from you as you try out Planner’s new and existing capabilities! To share your feedback about the new Planner app in Teams, you can navigate to the ? icon in the Planner app and select 'Feedback' as seen in the GIF below. We also encourage you to share any features you would like to see in the app by adding it to our Planner Feedback Portal.
Learn more about the new Planner
- To get the inside scoop on the new Planner watch the Meet the Makers and our AMA.
- Read about our investments for organizations using the new Planner with frontline workers.
- Check out the new Planner adoption website and explore new resources such as Day in the Life Guides to use Planner for task management, collaborative work management and project management.
- We’ve got a lot more ‘planned’ for the new Planner this year! Stay tuned to the Planner Blog - Microsoft Community Hub for news.
- For future updates coming to the new Planner app, please view the Microsoft 365 roadmap here.
- Learn about Planner and Project plans and pricing here.
- Read the FAQs here.
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