Microsoft recently pushed out a selection of updates to Microsoft Project for O365. Unfortunately, if you are currently utilizing the perpetual license, you will not see this update at this time. One of these updates is the ability to link Microsoft Planner to the tasks within your project schedule. If your organization utilizes Microsoft Planner as well as Microsoft Project Online, this update could help you stay more organized and be more efficient. Who doesn’t want that!
If you noticed a link in the ‘Task’ ribbon on the upper right-hand side that shows the ‘Planner’ icon (Shown below) then you have received this update. This blog will introduce this new feature and explain how to link tasks in project schedules to Plans in Planner, as well as, a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish this.
Key Information
Some key information to know before attempting this:
- If you update a task in Project Professional that has a Planner Plan linked to it, the update will not have any effect on the Plan. The same applies when updating a Plan in Planner. If you update the Plan, it will not have an effect on the Project Schedule.
- The project schedule must be published before you are able to link the task the task to a Plan in Planner.
- A single Plan within Planner cannot be linked to more than one task within your project schedule.
How to:
1. Create an enterprise project, or utilize an existing project schedule and make sure that it is published. Once you have published your project, select the task you wish to link, click the ‘Planner’ button in the Task Ribbon. (to select a task, click on the ID number of the task to highlight the row) note: you can only select one task, if you select more than one, the Planner button will be greyed out.
2. You will then see ‘Link to Plan’ dialogue appear on the left-hand side. Click ‘Link to existing Planner Plan…’. If this link is greyed out, it is not selectable and probably means you have not published your project yet.
3. You will then see ‘Link to Plan’ dialogue appear on the left-hand side. Click ‘Link to existing Planner Plan…’. If this link is greyed out, it is not selectable and probably means you have not published your project yet.
4. Next, you will select the desired Plan. If there are multiple Plans associated to this group, you will have more than one option to select. Click ‘Create Link’.
Once you link the Planner Plan to the project schedule task, you will see the ‘Planner’ icon appear next to the Task in the indicators column. Clicking the icon will launch a new browser window and open the Plan.
We have been using Planner since it was first released to manage some high-level work that we manage internally. Often, there was some overlap between our internal projects and our Customer projects. Having this new ability to link has saved us a lot of time as we used to do this manually. Hopefully this information and these steps will help you to be more efficient, connected, and collaborative as you manage your projects, as it did for me.
Stay tuned for more updates and features. Happy Project Managing!
