This might be “plan retreat” or “organize family reunion” or “deliver operational review to the board of directors.” Plans contain tasks and buckets, as described below.

Plans are just that - your projects, or the objective or central theme around a set of tasks. (Click any image in this story to enlarge it.) Plans in Planner include a series of tasks grouped into “buckets” for stages of a project or any other tracking scheme you like. Here’s a look at a small plan to deliver an in-person workshop, had 2020 not been so, well, 2020: IDG Planner makes it pretty simple to organize a fundamental level of thinking around any multi-step set of actions: plans, tasks, and buckets. This cheat sheet will help you get started in Planner so your team can get right to work. It’s meant for simple task management and is akin to popular collaborative tools like Trello and Asana. Planner is aimed at everyday business users working together in small teams.

What about Microsoft Project, the company’s venerable project management application? That’s meant for project management professionals who plan and track complex projects, especially among larger teams that cross departments in a big organization. Microsoft Planner, a relatively new tool available exclusively to Office 365/Microsoft 365 subscribers under most business and education plans, is meant to solve this problem by helping teams plan projects, assign tasks, share information, and collaborate. Teams working on projects together need a central place not only to store documents and files but also to provide a “single version of the truth” when it comes to distributing work through tasks and tracking progress.

Tracking who is responsible for what, what deadlines exist, what the objectives of the project are, and all of the attendant supporting documentation and materials can be very difficult - or perhaps just time-consuming. Have you ever worked with several other members of your organization on a single project? You probably have, in which case you know that as soon as more than two or three people get together and start planning things, staying organized is difficult.

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