Rob Dawson, our Business Development Manager here at ServiceScaler is sharing a quick tutorial on how to use our favourite task management tool, Microsoft Planner!

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Find Skye’s review of planner here https://servicescaler.com/blog/microsoft-planner-review/

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey guys Rob here from service gala. In today’s video we’re going to be talking about planning in the year 2021 and a great tool that you might be able to use for planning in 2021 is Microsoft’s tool, Microsoft. Planner. It’s available as part of Microsoft 365 subscriptions.. Not all of them, but most of them and what it allows you to do is create a series of tasks assigned to people, set a due date for them and push those out to both yourself as an individual and your team. Now, if you are a follower of service Gallery, you will have seen a blog post come up from our recently appointed marketing Coordinator Sky who jumped in and did a review of planner so someone non technical has come into the application and started playing around with it and created her own plans around our marketing schedule and what we need to do. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’ll drop a link down in the comments here below now. At. Polls record. OK, So what we’re going to do here now is we’re going to do a quick run through or an introduction to Microsoft Planner, and hopefully this will give you the confidence to jump in and have a bit of a look at. Planner and what you can do. Is it through the January period?. While things are a bit quieter and the circuits closed down might be a good opportunity for you to do it, so I’m just going to share my screen through here. And what we can say is that I am already logged into office.com, so if you’re a Microsoft 365 or an Office 365 user you go to office.com. Login with your credentials and that will take you through to this interface.. Now, over on the left hand side we can see right down the bottom that we have all apps. So if we select that, it’s going to show all apps that are available to us. You can see there’s quite a few here in the Office 365 portal, particularly for those who are on a higher tier of license like me. If you do need to know anything about any of those applications and how they work, feel free to reach out to me or anyone at the team at service. Kayla would be more than happy to help you so we can see in our list of applications here that we have planner which is over on the left hand side on mine. Could be anywhere on yours but all we do is select planner and that’s going to take us through to the Microsoft Planner interface. Now we can see here that I don’t have anything created yet, so this is to reflect what you are going to see when you log in. So if you’re not a current Planner user, this is exactly what you will see when you log in. So the first thing that we’re going to do here is we’re going to create a plan Now there’s a couple of different ways you can do this. If you are already using. Planner, you will have to go new plan over on the left hand side here, but because we’ve never created one, what we want to do is create one. Now, if you’re not a Planner user, I implore you go in and do this. You can’t break anything. You might get a notification or two that you haven’t done a task yet. But you certainly can’t break anything. So we’re going to create a plan. Now there’s a couple of things that we can do here. We can give the Planner name. I’m just going to call hours test just for the sake of this video. Now we can add that to an existing Microsoft 365 group, but I think just as an introductory thing will just have a look at the couple of privacy options here. So we have public and private. Basically, if you set it to public, anyone in your organization will be able to see the plan so it will come up in their list and everything will be visible. If it’s private only members you add, so it’s by add permission. You add them into the group and that will allow them. As a member and I will allow them to see the plan. What I’m going to do for this one isn’t going to make it private so I can show you adding Members into that group. And all I need to do is correct plan. That’ll do it’s little process there for a second, creating our plan, and we’re done. So what we can see now is this is our plan. This is the interface and all we need to do is put in tasks. So this one I’m going to do for based around marketing. So for our marketing we know we need to write blogs. We know we need to do videos. We know we need to do lots of things that our practice management system isn’t going to drive our behavior, so it’s not going to say hey Rob, you have to have this done by this time you have Rob. Here’s a thing that you need to create or here’s something that you need to collaborate on or here’s a contribution that you need to make. To part of our business that doesn’t exist within our practice management system. That’s where you use this. That’s where it’s a powerful tool. So for this one I’m going to say create video. I’m going to set the due date is today when I’m doing it. And I’m going to assign it to myself. Just hit add task and that’s it.. That task is created. I want to create a second task. And delegate it to somebody else. I could assign the due date as being Friday. And I can assign somebody else to this. So if we have a look here will say that Tristan, my colleague has come up as a non member now that’s because I haven’t. This is a private plan and I haven’t added any members in yet so we can still add Tristan from here and what it’s going to prompt for is to add the user to the plan so we can say assign an ad. That’s fine, we’re OK with that.. And then we just go add task. Very simple now if we wanted to add other Members to this plan so that we didn’t have to go through that process but also that they could see it. We simply go up to the right hand side, here to Members and we start typing in somebody’s name. Now, because this is a fresh tenant, I don’t know how many users we have in here. So we have Steve so will drop Steve in. He can be a member on this plan as well. And now Steve will be able to see the plans and the tasks that are in it. Now he doesn’t have anything assigned to him, so he’s not going to have anything come up in his To Do List which can be seen over here on the left hand side. If you go to my tasks. It will show you the tasks that are assigned to you. If we shoot back over to our plan, a hub will be able to see our test plan here. Now there’s some other functions that we have that are worthwhile looking at. The first one that I like is scheduled so we can see in the tabs across the top. Here is schedule. I can see the things that are upcoming in context of this plan specifically things that are upcoming so we can see create video. We can see upload video, all of the bits and pieces that we need to do around that plan. Now if this plan was going to be, for example a marketing plan, so this was going to be for our marketing team, we might say, OK, well we have a marketing plan, but there’s a few different things. Or a few different groups of tasks that we need to do so one might be blog writing for stuff for the website and the other might be creating videos. What we can do to start grouping the task together is to add a new bucket. So very simple.. This one might be. Video production. And we can add a new bucket. And this one might be called. Blog writing. Now it’s very, very simple to move tasks around, so video production. All I need to do is drag and drop the tile. And that’s now into the video production. I can add task directly in here. So it might be too. Write blog posts on. Planner. The due date might be for let’s say next Friday and I might assign that Steve just so that he has something to work on as well. So that’s the basics of planner.. Now behind the scenes some other things are going on. If we go across to all apps, I’m going to have a look at outlook. Because we should have received a notification that a plant task has been assigned to us. So if you have a plan manager and someone says OK, I need Rob to perform this task. Can you please assign him a task to do that job? Once that’s done, you’ll get the notification come through here. So this is saying I have tasks due today, so it’s sort of driving that behavior that hey, you have things that need to be done come to me in terms of planner. Get these things done and get them actioned. So there’s links in here that will take us through, but we can basically just see that through in there now. There’s another really quick tool just before we wrap up on planner that makes it really, really simple to find all of the things that you need to do. It sort of consolidate everything and it’s called to do so. If you go to office.com and you bring up all apps, you’ll be able to see to do as an application. Now it will bring in things from planning your tasks that have been assigned there. It will also bring in your To Do List from outlook. It will set or demonstrate or show. The things that are due today, the things that are upcoming and just give you some visibility over all the places around the Microsoft 3656 where you have tasks or activities assigned to you that need to be done. It will consolidate them all in one place. Super super simple. It’s one of the things that I know that I use every day because I have, you know, follow ups in Outlook I have things in planner, I just have stuff that I need to do again. This is a blank Microsoft tendency so you won’t see anything here but we can see what it’s doing now is just getting my list ready. OK, so we can see there that I don’t have any tasks because I don’t have anything created out of outlook, but I can see that I have things planned and I have things assigned to me and I can also look at my day so it has some suggestions here I can start planning stuff out so if you do have things being assigned to you from different locations out of the three 65 stack, you should have a look at. Microsoft to do to give you your todo list. Makes a really really simple view so that you can see what you need to get done for the day. Speaking of things, you need to get done for the day. If you do have any questions or you need additional help with licensing around 365 to access planner in to do and some of the other Microsoft 365 applications, make sure you reach out to us before the end of year so that we can. **** you into a session with you in January while you have some down time. And if we don’t catch up with you before then, have a great Christmas and we’ll see you next year. Cheers.