Looking for best practices (NOT howtos) on Microsoft Planner and Teams

Post date: 2023-09-16 01:37:24

My organization is working to standardize on Microsoft Planner and the O365 ecosystem to manage work. My personal approach is a combination of Getting Things Done and kanban boards. I know what the tools can do from a technical perspective, and I need guidance on how to implement the tools to accomplish what I want. Lots of details inside!

Our current setup feels on the right track with Planner's board view replicating a kanban, and buckets labeled for various workstreams (in projects) or types of work (in our operational elements). The next step for us is getting the "work about work" into the system (eg, files relevant to tasks, or discussion comments on a work item) so people can find everything they need in one place instead of having to sort through a combination of emails, Teams posts, Planner comments, etc.

Whatever we end up doing needs to consolidate information and reduce extraneous notifications, and this is where we need guidance. Right now, we have a single planner working as a kanban board for our department. This board is great for seeing workload of all of our team members, but putting task comments or attachments into specific items creates unnecessary notifications for everyone who is in the department (and hence on the plan) but isn't invovled with that task. We also have what I'll mini-projects, where it's mostly the department and up to 4 other people involved in an initiative for 1-2 months. Those projects feel too small to get their own Teams team (and that may be an inaccurate assumption), but we haven't figured out how to get those external people visibility to the tasks that they need without getting involved with everything else. I know there's an option to create additional planner boards, but that runs into problems with being able to see workload across the team and being able to roll up progress across all the plans so we know where everything is.

Finally, as a GTD person I often think about my own tasks in terms of contexts. The planner tasks are great for project tracking, but for what I personally need to do I want to slice things in more ways than just seeing My Tasks in Todo. The perfect solution for me would be if I could sort (team) tasks assigned to me into my own Todo lists (that no one else has to see) so I can quickly prioritize my day without wading through everything assigned to me.

The kinds of answers I'm hoping to get are things like:
* Here's some decision criteria for when to create a new team vs add a new plan within a team
* The best way to store everything in one place is to (put it in the planner task/add to teams and put a link in the planner/update planner and post an update in the teams posts/etc)
* Here's some useful features that allow you to see progress or assignments across multiple plans
* Here's some ways to add private lists or other organization to your assigned tasks

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