Overview

There’s no shortage of project management software to suit teams, projects, and organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

It’s very likely your team is using at least one tool such as Excel, Microsoft Planner, or Microsoft Teams to manage their non-project and project work. With these varied choices, you might be asking questions like which Microsoft tool is best for your project, or what are the best practices for Microsoft project tools, or have companies succeeded with Microsoft tools, and more?

In this article, I’ll cover three common Microsoft tools – Excel, Planner, and Teams –  and two solutions from BrightWork: BrightWork 365 for Microsoft 365 and BrightWork for SharePoint Server.

You’ll also learn more about Project Central, a project management solution for teams using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Excel

Launched in 1985, Microsoft Excel has an estimated user base of 750 million users worldwide. It’s ubiquitous, accessible in any organization that uses Microsoft Office.

With multiple formulas, pivot tables, and charting, Excel is a powerful reporting and data analysis tool.

When it comes to project management, Excel is useful for lists, developing a work breakdown structure, calculating billing rates, and that’s about it.

I won’t dwell on the numerous reasons why you shouldn’t use Excel for project management. However, just in case you (or someone on your team) is wondering about this, here are some common pitfalls:

• Easy to override data and formulas.
• Hard to track tasks across multiple spreadsheets, increasing project risks.
• Does not work well on mobile devices.
• Cannot co-edit a spreadsheet.
• Difficult to find and update all information as the project changes.
• Cannot re-use the spreadsheet as a template for future projects.

Microsoft Planner

A simple task management system, Microsoft Planner was launched in 2016. Planner is free with almost all Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Government, and Education licenses.

The premise is simple: create your plan and use boards or ‘buckets’ to assign tasks, share files, and collaborate using chat. Planner is very intuitive and requires little end-user training.

Project teams can plan and manage tasks as Kanban Boards with information on:

1. Task owner (s)
2. The category of the task – using labels.
3. The ‘bucket’ for the task.
4. Progress (Not started; in progress; completed).
5. Urgent, low, medium, or high priority.
6. Start and due dates
7. The description of the task.
8.  A checklist to break the task into further parts
9. Relevant.
10. Comments and discussions.

Boards are grouped by bucket, for example, project phase, workstream, or status.

Once tasks are created, users can manage work in a few different ways:

• View tasks as boards or as a calendar (schedule).
• Drag and drop a task into different buckets as work progresses.
• Use the ‘filter’ option to view tasks by due date or label.
• Change the ‘group by’ view from ‘bucket’ to assigned to, progress, due date, or labels.
• Work in Microsoft Teams by adding Planner as a tab to the relevant channel.

Whilst there is no option to create recurring tasks in Microsoft planner templates, you can copy a repeated task and update as needed.

It’s also easy to view the plan in a calendar by clicking ‘schedule’ in the top menu or use charts to track the overall progress of work. This is useful for stakeholder reporting, allowing you to leverage one of the Microsoft planner best practices.

Planner is part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Each plan has an Outlook group, a specific OneNote; you can also embed planner in a SharePoint site or add the plan to Microsoft Teams as a tab (more on this below).

Microsoft planner templates are perfect for team collaboration, task management, and personal work management. I use Planner on a daily basis to manage tasks across various areas of responsibility. As one of the Microsoft planner best practices, I also use a plan to manage my month, with a bucket per week and a backlog bucket to capture new ideas.

Microsoft Planner is ideal for small, lightweight projects and teams that don’t need too much direction or structure.

However, having used Planner for a recent project, there are a few caveats worth noting:

• There is no option to create a project timeline or Gantt chart, making resource management a little tricky.
• Sub-tasks or checklists cannot be prioritized. Likewise, it’s hard to indicate or manage task dependencies. One solution is to number each item in the checklist, but this can get very confusing.
• Commenting via cards can get unruly as everyone in the group receives the message. What may have been intended for one person can escalate into a group discussion, distracting people from their tasks!
• Notifications for upcoming tasks were only sent 24 hours before the task was due, which led to missed deadlines.

Overall, Planner is a great way to manage personal work and simple projects but isn’t robust enough for large or complex projects.

Microsoft Teams

Released to the public in early 2017, Microsoft Teams is a Slack-like app within Microsoft 365 that provides a chat-based workspace for teams to talk and collaborate.

Teams will replace Skype for Business in July 2021 as a tool for calls, video conferences, and meetings for Microsoft 365 users.

How Can Microsoft Teams Enhance Project Management?

Microsoft Teams is ideal for:

• Real-time chat and messaging
• Video meetings for up to 250 people
• Live events for up to 10,000 people
• Cloud calling
• Document storage
• Real-time co-editing
• Integration with third-party apps and connectors
• Search
• Public or private channels
• Robust security and privacy capabilities
• Task Management
• Approvals.

Teams is built on the Office 365 Groups framework, bringing together various collaboration tools and options in one place.

Teams is made up of teams – a collection of people, conversations, files, and tools – and channels – a discussion within the team focused on a particular topic like a project. Each team has a SharePoint Team Site, Office 365 Group, and shared OneNote. If you are accessing Teams via Microsoft 365, you can use the web app or download the software to your desktop.

Creating a new team is straightforward – simply click ‘create team’ underneath the list of available teams and complete the relevant information.  A team can be private or public.

Microsoft Teams integrates with a wide range of Microsoft and third-party apps so your team can bring project information together in one place.

If you are using SharePoint or BrightWork to manage projects, you can easily add a link to a project site to the relevant team. Simply click the ‘Website’ icon above, fill in the short form, and add your link.

The link to your project site will appear as a tab in Teams. This way, you can easily combine the functionality of BrightWork with chat, video calls, and more in Teams.

Outlining the full functionality of Teams would take a few articles. Microsoft has created excellent training resources for Teams on their website and within the tool itself, including a bot, so do use these guides.

With a focus on collaboration and agility, Teams is a core part of how the BrightWork Marketing team works together.

Microsoft 365 has an overwhelming amount of collaboration options; Teams brings the best of these options into one place in an easy-to-use way.

However, Teams is not a stand-alone project management tool. Whilst you can add apps like Planner, there is no easy way to track tasks or report across projects.

Without dashboards or roll-up reports, managing key project elements like budget, resources, and timelines is impossible in Teams. Information is stored in silos – files, folders, team chats – making it difficult to spot risks on individual projects and across portfolios.

I like to use Teams as an aid to project management, a place to collaborate and share files or ideas quickly – which keeps my inbox clutter-free! It’s also ideal for day-to-day teamwork and collaboration.

Project and Portfolio Management for Microsoft 365: BrightWork 365

BrightWork 365 is a project and portfolio management solution, deployed on the Microsoft Power Platform in your Microsoft 365 cloud environment.

BrightWork 365 is a complete project and portfolio management app, allowing organizations to log requests, manage projects, and control programs and portfolios in one place. The app is ready to use or can be configured to match your processes.

BrightWork 365 combines the best elements of Microsoft 365, such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Power Automate, with our proven project management processes. This allows project teams to work with their preferred Microsoft 365 apps whilst giving senior executives instant visibility and access to project data.

With BrightWork 365, project teams can:

• Log, review, and approve new project requests.
• Leverage pre-planned templates for different project types.
• Plan and manage the schedule with an interactive Gantt chart.
• Collaborate with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and OneNote.
• Manage documents and deliverables with SharePoint Online.
• Track project and portfolio performance with key reports on Tasks, Risk,  and Issues, and Status.
• Understand the status of the timeline, resource allocation, and tasks with Power BI reports.
• Manage permissions in the Microsoft 365 admin center or Azure Active Directory and Groups.

Project and Portfolio Management for SharePoint Server: BrightWork

If you need to report across multiple projects and portfolios using SharePoint Server, the full BrightWork solution has everything you need!

Built to run on SharePoint Server (2013, 2016, 2019), BrightWork ships with a range of pre-configured project templates, reports, and portfolio dashboards.

Key capabilities of BrightWork include:

• Cross-project portfolio dashboards
• Project Request Management
• Agile Boards
• Interactive Gantt Charts
• Power BI Reporting Pack
• In-browser Task Scheduler
• Enhanced sync with Microsoft Project Professional
• Personalized Work Reports
• Template Design Sync.

Project Central

If you want to get projects under control and use Microsoft 365, Project Central could be what you need.

The latest offering from BrightWork, Project Central is a visual, simple, and dynamic way to manage projects with Microsoft 365.

With just a few clicks and no training, you can launch your first project on Project Central very quickly.

Built on Microsoft Azure with access based on Microsoft work accounts, Project Central is secure and easy to manage.

Which tool is best for project management?

You might want to ask several questions before you can finally reach the answer to choosing the best tool for your projects. Questions like – what platform are you already using or have invested in, which Microsoft tool is best for your project, can you use Excel for advanced project management, and so on.

The idea is to consider your both your short-term project needs and your long-term project management goals to finally choose the project management tools that will bring you the desired success!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2017 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.