Advanced capabilities with premium plans in Planner

Goals

Setting goals for your project is crucial for creating alignment within your team and among stakeholders to ensure that everyone knows how it is being prioritized. The Goals feature allows you to easily set and track goals for your project, and even link them to tasks within your project to ensure that the work you have defined aligns with your goals.

People view

Use People view to quickly understand the distribution of work among your team. This view can help project managers quickly assess where team members may be over- or under-allocated and see potential reassignment opportunities for better workload balancing.

Sprints

Use sprints to plan your project based on agile project management. You can create and prioritize a backlog of tasks and schedule tasks in sprints. You can also collaborate on planning, tracking, and completing tasks within, and across, timeboxed sprints.

Task chat

Discuss individual tasks with your team by using task chat. Whether it’s communicating updates, coordinating schedules, or asking for clarification, the ability to discuss tasks with your team is vital to a project’s success. With task chat, team members can have real-time, threaded conversations directly in tasks using @mentions, rich formatting, and emojis, helping to keep decisions tied to the specific task at hand.

Task history

The task history feature helps task owners stay on top of their tasks and quickly identify recent progress that has been made or changes that have impacted the schedule. Edits to tasks such as adding or removing labels, changing the duration, or changes to other tasks that affect the schedule of work all appear in the Changes pane in Task Details.

Advanced dependencies

Link tasks together by specifying dependencies between them. Using advanced dependencies, you can specify finish to start, start to start, start to finish, or finish to finish dependencies between any of your tasks, and the Planner scheduling engine will automatically update execution dates for your plan based on these dependencies.

Timeline view

View your tasks in a Gantt chart format using the Timeline view. Timeline visualizes all your tasks and dependencies so you can see how the project schedule is laid out.

Critical path

In the timeline view, you can also see the critical path for your plan, so you know which tasks are defining the project timeline and may need more oversight.

Milestones

Add milestones to your plan to mark specific points in your project's schedule, and track defining moments in your work.

Custom calendar

Create custom work week calendars for each plan.

Each plan is created using a default work template, which is based on the typical Monday through Friday work week. However, not all teams follow this traditional work week and need a way to schedule their tasks based on their own unique availability. With Custom Calendars, you can select which days are a part of your work week, and the Planner scheduling engine will automatically update the plan to only schedule work on those days.

Assignments view

When a project manager develops a resource-loaded work-back structure (WBS), the linear distribution of effort between resources is typically acceptable as a starting point to estimate effort and costs. However, there are scenarios where a PM will need to be more granular in effort within a given time span for each resource (day, week, month) to reflect how the work will be accurately executed.

This precision influences two key components of the project planning: resource requirements and financial estimates – which can be achieved with assignments tab. To access the contour editing grid, select Assignments from the ... menu in the view header.

Custom fields

Create up to ten new fields to help you keep track of important information specific to your plans and workflows using custom fields. Choose from five types:

1. Take short notes about status with Text fields. 

2. Track important deadlines with Date fields. 

3. Use Number fields to manage details such as quantities. 

4. Use Yes/No fields to flag tasks that need follow up.

5. Define a set of values with Choice. 

Conditional coloring

Create rules on various plan fields to visually highlight patterns in the plan data.

Summary and sub tasks

Create a hierarchy of tasks using summary and sub tasks. Using this you can track phases of your project, define large tasks in more detail, and organize your plan in a simple way.