The new Microsoft Planner: manage all your tasks and plans in a familiar interface and enhance your project outcomes

Did you hear the news? This week, Microsoft announced at Microsoft Ignite that they have created a new unified experience to bring together to-dos, tasks, plans and projects, all within the new Microsoft Planner.

According to the blog post linked above, “the average employee spends the bulk of their time – more than 57% – communicating, when they could be focused on driving outcomes.” Further, “59% of employees say their collaboration tools are not aligned with how their teams prefer to work.” 70% of survey respondents would love to offload as much work as they can to AI.

The new Microsoft Planner will enable you to manage all your tasks and plans in a familiar interface that provides an ease of use in managing tasks small and large, from individual task management to team initiatives to full-scale project management. Take advantage of the simplicity of Microsoft To Do, the collaboration of Microsoft Planner, the project management power of Microsoft Project for the web, and Microsoft’s AI solution, Copilot, all in an easily scalable modern tool that will empower all members of your team to manage their work in a single place and improve business outcomes.

The team at Innovative-e is incredibly excited about the new Microsoft Planner and feel it has the potential to enable our customers to significantly enhance their project outcomes. Besides being easy to use, which supports the democratization of project management and work in today’s business environment, the new Planner will afford its users the following:

1. Integration of Tools and AI Assistance: The promise of integrating Microsoft To Do, Planner, Microsoft Project, and AI with Copilot within a single platform aligns with the need for seamless, intelligent, and efficient work management. For project managers, including “casual project managers,” this consolidation means fewer fragmented tools and an AI-assisted environment that aids in keeping focus, streamlining tasks, and maximizing productivity.
2. Task Management Efficiency: Offering a simplified yet comprehensive view across Microsoft 365 applications will enable users to manage tasks effectively at both individual and team levels, with the ability to access Recent, Shared, and Personal plans within a unified interface, as well as the option to customize task views through boards, lists, timelines, and sprints.
3. Scalability and Adaptability: With configurable options and integrations with Power Platform tools like Power BI and Power Automate, the new Planner can adapt to diverse organizational needs. This adaptability enables custom reporting, workflows, and higher-level visibility across initiatives.
4. AI-Driven Insights and Assistance: The integration of AI with Microsoft’s Copilot, is a game-changer for project management and work. Natural language prompts and AI-driven support will aid in generating plans, setting goals, tracking progress, and more. This level of AI assistance can significantly reduce the time spent on routine tasks, allowing project managers to focus on strategic project elements that impace overall project outcomes.
5. Enhanced Integration with Microsoft 365 Experiences: Integration with various app experiences like Loop, Outlook, Viva Goals, Microsoft Teams and Teams4PM ensures that users remain in their workflow while accessing Planner features. This seamless integration allows for smoother collaboration, ensuring that information and tasks from different platforms are readily accessible within the Planner interface.

At our November 2023 webinar, “Optimize AI and Automation for Project Success Now” (which you can view on-demand here), we noted three critical truths about project management and work that can drastically affect project outcomes:

1. People will use different tools to manage projects and work.
2. Centering collaboration for people, applications and data will help you pull together the elements necessary for successful project outcomes.
3. We need to reduce the distance between the work being done and the tools governing it.

The new Microsoft Planner combines multiple tools to facilitate greater productivity and better team collaboration.

In Spring 2024, the new Planner app will be available in Microsoft Teams; later in the year, a web experience will be available. Sign up to learn when the new Planner is available as a preview.

To learn more:

• Watch the on-demand Microsoft Ignite session: The new Microsoft Planner: Bring together to-dos, plans and projects  
• Explore product demos 
• Download the new Microsoft Planner datasheet
• Meet the new Microsoft Planner 

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Start Your Work at a Higher Level with AI: What It Means for Your Work Life

If you’ve been on the internet at all in the last several months, you’ve heard more and more about AI and how it’s going to change everything – from how we search for the answers we’ve been asking Google the last couple of decades, to how we engage with popular media. Most of us are already using various forms of AI – predictive text when we’re messaging someone or writing an email, spell check, using ChatGPT to create the first draft of a blog post. But the most recent wave of AI improvements promises to change everything.

How? What does the advancement of AI mean to you – and most importantly, how will AI improve your work life?

This article promises that AI will deliver a whole new way of working, not merely overcoming work challenges, but expanding what’s possible to deliver and revolutionizing the way we work.

“Now, however, powerful new foundation models, together with accessible natural language interfaces, have ushered in a pivotal new phase of AI—one that moves us from “AI on autopilot” to “AI as copilot.” It’s a whole new interaction model between humans and computers, turning natural language into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.”

“AI: A Whole New Way of Working – Next-generation AI will transform work for everyone“

The following image is from that article and shows how leveraging the newest generation of AI capabilities enables you to start your work at a higher level than if you were starting off with the proverbial blank page without AI assistance. AI means you no longer have to start at square one.

It seems clear – and my anecdotal research supports this assertion – that you can really get a leg up when you have AI working for you. You spend less time at the front end of your work spinning things up because AI has already gotten things rolling for you. When you pick up where AI left off, you’re spending more of your time refining, polishing, and perfecting your work to deliver a better work product, and less time warming up as you noodle on the direction of your work and hammer out a workable draft to begin refining. AI does the noodling for you, and you can hit the ground running with a solid draft already in place, enabling you to spend more of your work time tightening everything up so that by the end of it, you’re delivering a superior product.

Of course, my experience is predominantly with generative AI – e.g., ChatGPT churning out the first draft of this blog post after I’ve given it a few prompts. Then I fill in what the robot left off. Overall, though, leveraging this type of AI has increased my productivity and improved the work product I develop and deliver.

There are other types of AI, too, that can help you level up your project management and work. One of these next-level technologies is sentiment analysis.

From the name, you can guess what sentiment analysis AI does: it “surveys the opinions or sentiments expressed on different features or aspects of entities,” according to Wikipedia.

But how can learning how folks feel be leveraged effectively in work?

The latest release of Teams4PM includes sentiment analysis, which is a BIG new feature for the software. Teams4PM already centralizes work and project management all within Microsoft Teams, empowering everyone on your team to manage project work, collaborate more effectively and easily, and access up-to-date project information to drive informed and impactful decision-making.

Because all project info is consolidated within Teams4PM, you’re able to input risks and issues and other project data into a unified system for maximum visibility, seamlessly updated projects, and greater context for all your projects or portfolio, from the scheduling to the reporting and everything in between.

The addition of the sentiment analysis feature enables AI to read the sentiment of chats between project team members to determine – sometimes before the humans even recognize it – the team’s feelings about the overall health of a project.

Teams4PM’s sentiment analysis AI then creates a report of this analysis, giving you and your team an overview of the health of your projects or portfolio according to everyone involved in the project, from the troops on the ground to the Program Managers. This enables your team to address potential project issues proactively when the AI shows indicators of potential problems.

Teams4PM’s AI component requires no additional human effort to measure how a project team feels about a particular project or a whole project portfolio, freeing up team members up to do other work, rather than manually chasing data to determine the status and health of the project.

This automation, through sentiment analysis, enables the project team to get ahead of issues without waiting for human reporting, supporting proactivity rather than reactivity.

Whether you’re using Planner, Project for the web, or Project Online, if you’re working within Teams4PM, the sentiment analysis looks the same to all users and uses a consistent information architecture to provide a clean, reliable, standardized experience for everyone using the app.

The addition of sentiment analysis improves project outcomes with less overhead and reduced need for human intervention to flag potential issues in a project or portfolio. The way we apply AI in Teams4PM for sentiment analysis automates reporting with zero additional effort from humans. It eliminates much of the repetitive and mundane work team members often spend too much of their time on, allowing them to be more productive and deliver better work results and overall project outcomes. Teams4PM’s sentiment analysis module gives team leaders and members the benefit of greater awareness of the health of a project or portfolio with zero additional overhead. We apply sentiment analysis in a fashion that actually removes work for your team.

Want to know more about the exciting capabilities of Teams4PM and how savvy PMOs are breaking down barriers that have sabotaged project outcomes before now? Learn on your own time how prioritizing collaboration, embracing the Microsoft modern platform, and placing the building blocks enabling limitless automation with AI will help you modernize your project management and work and tackle the challenges in successfully executing projects and work.

Still hungry for more info? Reach out to schedule a one-on-one discussion with our Teams4PM team.