Task Management (one approach)

Organizations typically need to keep track of projects but do not necessarily have a Project Management office or admin staff to run high end project management software. In Office 365 there are a number of ways to do a light version of Project Management or better yet we might call it Task Management – fundamentally there is a need to create and assign tasks, group tasks in to projects and get some summary reporting to know how well work is progressing.

The context here is a small team solution that is low cost, low admin and light task management. Applicable tools in Office 365 include:

• Outlook tasks (which is now integrated with Microsoft’s ToDo application)
  • Tasks in outlook are great for personal to-do items, tracking email and calendar activities but not geared so much for teams.
• SharePoint online Task list
  • SharePoint has been around for almost 20 years and has loads of collaborative tools such as task lists. Task lists are flexible allowing you to create custom metadata, views, versioning, etc., however, Microsoft signals indicate this is not their investment direction and as such there have not been much advancement of task lists nor have they been modernized.
• Planner
  • With the introduction of Groups and now Teams we are seeing great upswing in usage and clearly this is where Microsoft is making investments. Planner is also part of the new players in the suite of O365 tools. It uses the agile approach Kanban boards for managing tasks, provides a simple user interface and very nice built in summary reports.

So, using the best-bet tools (Groups, Planner, Teams, SharePoint), how do we create a solution for doing task management with the ability to add custom metadata to describe projects and more summary reporting. One approach is to use create a Team called Projects which will create a Group and SharePoint site for you automatically, then create a Projects list on the SharePoint site with the metadata you need to track. The next part is to develop a Power Automate (formerly Flow) that triggers off the Project list and creates an associated Planner plan for task management. You can now add tabs to the a Teams channel which can surface all of the SharePoint project site content (i.e. files), Planner plans, and allow your team to have persistent messaging around all your projects.