Don’t Lose Oversight Of Your Project Tasks: How To Integrate Microsoft’s Toolkit For Effective Project Management
Cut right through the plethora of project management tools with this PM set-up.
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Key Takeaways
Integrating the different tools Microsoft offers us for project and task management can be difficult to figure out.
Know which tools to use for what and leverage six of the most used MS platforms.
Find what works for you and your team and re-iterate constantly to improve your tool set-up.
Microsoft offers a wide variety of tools for project and task management. But you can easily lose oversight with all the platforms they offer. Today’s issue is about solving this puzzle. I will show you how I organise my projects and multidisciplinary teams effectively.
Collaboration and organising cross-departmental and cross-team projects efficiently is a challenge of its own. Which tool to use for what? And how to integrate all the different digital platforms for a central management of your projects?
Here is the set-up I use in my daily work as a project manager in digitalisation:
Let’s jump right in!
Microsoft Project – Project Planning
First things first, setting up a project plan in MS Project.
I use MS Project as our team’s central tool for project planning. Here, milestones, schedules, and resources are defined. MS Project is used exclusively for planning at the project level and not for task or task management. This is important in order to maintain a clear distinction between planning and operational execution.
Because once you start to interlink your project plan with task management, it can become messy, quite easily. My suggestion to you: Don’t use MS Project for task scheduling, just for project planning on a macro level.
Microsoft Planner – Task Management for the Team
MS Planner is our primary tool for task management on the team level. Here, all tasks are centrally created, managed, and assigned to the team/team members. Tasks are organized in "buckets" and can be tagged with specific "tags" to categorize and structure them further.
The buckets I use – also to structure a Kanban board - are as follows:
Inbox: Collection point for unstructured tasks and ideas.
Backlog: Tasks that are formulated, assigned, and scheduled, including subtasks and attachments.
Doing: Tasks that are currently being worked on.
Waiting / Feedback: Tasks waiting for feedback or further input.
Done: All completed tasks are stored here. Instead of just ticking the checkbox of a task, I love to move the task to "Done" to see what the team accomplished already. This also adds a bit of a motivation boost.
If I need to work on a project where we have to keep track of functionalities to be developed and deployed in a digital tool, I use two additional buckets:
Testing: Here go all the features we need to test.
Ready for deployment: This bucket shows all the features that are ready for deployment.
With this structure, it’s easy to keep track and stay on top of things.
If you work with cross-organisational teams, add tags to each task depending on which team needs to do the work.
Examples are:
01 – General
02 – Sales
03 – Marketing/PM
04 – Purchasing
05 – Production
06 – IT
07 – Finance
08 – HR
Each task is tagged with at least one of the above tags, allowing them to be filtered or sorted by these tags, improving task visibility.
Microsoft Teams – Communication and Document Management
MS Teams is used as the team’s central communication and coordination hub.
Here, we can communicate in real-time and store all the relevant project documents (which are saved in a SharePoint folder). To enhance collaboration, MS Planner, MS Loop and MS Project are integrated as individual tabs in MS Teams.
The team calendar is integrated by default, so we see what appointments and deadlines we have as a team as well.
Microsoft Loop – Notes, Meeting Minutes and Documentation
We use MS Loop as our central place for notes and documentation because it is very well integrated into the Microsoft Suite and allows easy updates across various tools through Loop components.
Loop components, such as embedded Planner integration, enable dynamic content adjustments without needing to make repeated changes. You can add Loop components to e-mails, notebooks or appointments.
If there are subteams or -projects within the project itself, each team gets their own subpage in the project’s workspace on Loop.
Agenda and Minutes
Agendas and minutes for meetings are centrally recorded per team.
A meeting agenda can be easily inserted into an Outlook appointment using a Loop component. The advantage of this method is that the agenda can be continuously updated in Loop without needing to make adjustment to the Outlook appointment itself (avoiding constant e-mail updates). Simply prepare the template in Loop (ideally by using a Loop template), copy the Loop component into the Outlook appointment, and add participants to the participant table (which is part of our agenda template in Loop). The meeting participants are then automatically added to both the Loop component and the appointment on Outlook.
Integration of MS Planner into MS Loop
Create a separate Loop page where the team task board/list (on MS Planner) is integrated.
Tasks can be created directly on the Loop page and managed as they would in MS Planner. This is a big advantage over the other task lists Loop offers but which have limited functionality.
You can add and use tags within the MS Planner integration in Loop to ensure a structured task overview.
Knowledge Documentation
Within the respective team's page in Loop, additional subpages can be created. These serve to document knowledge relevant to the entire team. Think of it as of a OneNote - but with more collaboration power and live-updating.
The structured knowledge documentation in Loop ensures that all team members benefit from each other's knowledge and can easily access it.
But maybe you haven’t heard of MS Loop yet, since it is a fairly new addition to the Microsoft toolkit. I included a selection of YouTube videos below that help you get a better understanding of MS Loop and how to use it:
What is MS Loop?
How to use MS Loop:
MS Loop for Project Management:
Integrating MS Loop and MS Planner:
MS Loop in MS Teams (German):
Microsoft To Do – Personal Task Management
MS To Do is used as a personal task management tool to keep track of all tasks you are involved in.
However, team tasks should always be created in MS Planner or through the MS Planner integration in Loop to ensure centralized management and use of tags.
The great advantage of MS To Do is that all the tasks you are assigned to, are collected in one place, even if they come from different plans (on MS Planner).
Microsoft Outlook – E-Mails and Calendar
MS Outlook is one of the most widely used business tools there is.
I manage my e-mails and calendars through Outlook. No task management here, I use Planner and To Do for that.
Simple as that.
With this structured use of the Microsoft Suite, we ensure that all project members are always up-to-date, tasks are centrally managed, and communication remains efficient.
If you need help or have questions, e-mail me - I am happy to help.
Happy collaborating.
PS: How are you setting up your project organisation/toolkit to effectively and efficiently manage your tasks, documents and communication?
