Want to know how to assign a task on Microsoft Teams through Planner – Microsoft’s convenient task management tool? No problem – it’s actually a lot simpler than you might think. As of March 2024, Planner is fully integrated into Teams, giving users comprehensive access to all of their plans, tasks, to-do lists, and work management tools in one place.
All you really need to do to get started is make sure you have the Planner integration set up in Teams, then you can start assigning tasks (with deadlines and extra information). Plus, you’ll be able to create comprehensive “plans”, share them with your colleagues, and track progress too.
Here’s everything you need to know about assigning and managing tasks with Planner in Teams.
Understanding the Planner App for Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Planner is Microsoft’s all-in-one solution for task management. In 2023, at Microsoft’s Ignite conference, the company announced that it was combining multiple pre-existing solutions into the Planner experience – including Microsoft Project, and Microsoft To Do.
The Planner app for Microsoft Teams, brings all of the core capabilities of this solution into Microsoft’s world-leading collaboration tool. It offers a streamlined way for users to manage all of their tasks and plans in one place, including plans built with To Do, and Microsoft Loop.
Once you add the planner app to Teams, it’ll introduce new sections to the Teams interface, such as:
- My Day: A daily overview of all the tasks that are due on a specific day, alongside any tasks that users choose to add to the list themselves.
- My Tasks: The complete overview of all the tasks you need to complete. There’s also a dedicated “Private tasks” section here, where users can create tasks, flag emails, and monitor tasks assigned to you from Teams meeting notes, chat, or Loop components.
- My Plans: This section includes all of your To Do lists, as well as basic plans and premium plans created with Microsoft Planner.
- New Plan: This is the tool that allows you to create new shared or personal plans (consisting of multiple tasks) directly in the Microsoft Teams app.
Plus, you’ll also be able to see notifications about Microsoft Planner tasks and plans within your Microsoft Teams interface.
How to Assign a Task on Microsoft Teams Through Planner: Accessing the App
The first step in figuring out how to assign a task on Microsoft Teams through Planner is actually adding the Planner app to Teams. If you’ve used apps for Teams before (either those created by Microsoft, or a third-party), you’ll know it’s pretty straightforward.
As long as you have the right permissions to add apps on Teams, and an admin hasn’t restricted you from downloading anything, you should be able to access planner. Just log into Microsoft Teams, choose the Teams instance you want to add Planner too, then click on the three-dot button (under Bookings) to access the app library.
You can either search for Planner in the search bar, or click on Get More Apps and search from there. Click on the Planner app when you see it, and select Get Started. Then follow the instructions. Once its installed, you should see Planner alongside other tabs when you click on the “…” button.
Assign a Task on Microsoft Teams Through Planner
Now that you have Planner installed in Microsoft Teams, assigning a task is simple. Click on the Planner tab in your Teams channel to get started, then click on “+ Add New Task”.
From there, you’ll need to:
- Enter a name for the task (we recommend making it pretty descriptive, so users reviewing their tasks will instantly know what the task is for).
- Choose a plan: You can add a task to an existing workplace plan, create a new plan, or just add it to your “private tasks” list.
- Set a due date using Microsoft’s calendar.
- Set a priority level (you can choose to color code your tasks to identify whether they’re urgent, low priority, or mid-level in importance).
- Select Assign to choose the team member you want to assign the task to.
- Set a progress level: Here, you can note whether a task has already been started (in progress), or whether it hasn’t started yet.
Click the Add task button to save it, and the assigned team member (or members) will receive a notification. The task will also appear on their individual “Planner” dashboard within Teams.
Creating Tasks from Teams Meetings and Messages
Notably, rather than creating a task from scratch within the Planner app, you can also use chat messages and meeting summaries to create and assign tasks. If you want to turn a message you’ve sent, or a message from a colleague into a task, hover over the message, and click the “…” button.
Select More Actions then click on Create Planner task. If you want to create a task from your Teams meeting notes, all you need to do is go to the meeting notes for the conversation, and click on Task Apps in the follow-up tasks section. From there, you can open the meeting notes in Planner, and use them to assign your tasks.
How to Create a Plan with Planner on Teams
Learning how to assign a task on Microsoft Teams through Planner is great if you just want to give one or multiple team members a specific job. However, if you want to create a comprehensive workflow, with multiple tasks and deadlines, you’ll need to create a “Plan”.
Plans in planner make it easier to manage and distribute team work loads, track progress towards goals, and even organize work into sprints using agile planning. There’s even a timeline view so you can see if everyone is working according to schedule.
You can’t actually “create” a plan within Teams. Instead, you’ll need to log into Planner for the web, select the “+New Plan” button, and enter a plan name. Then you can create a plan for a new group, or an existing Microsoft 365 group.
Planner gives you a bunch of out-of-the-box templates to choose from (although some do require a Premium plan), or you can start from scratch. Once you’re done creating your plan, you can add it to Microsoft Teams by selecting the “+” button, and selecting Planner then select Create a New Plan or Use an Existing Plan from this Team within Teams.
Add your plan, then click Save, and you can assign it to specific team members.
Viewing Assigned Planner Tasks in Microsoft Teams
As mentioned above, adding Planner to Teams brings a bunch of new “tabs” into the app environment, where users can track and manage tasks and plans. There’s the My Day dashboard, where you’ll see “hand-picked” priority tasks. This dashboard also automatically populates tasks from My Tasks and personal plans due each day.
The My Day view automatically clears itself each night, so you can start the next day fresh. However, any unfinished tasks are still visible in the overall work plan.
The My Tasks view, on the other hand, comes with four distinct views:
- Private tasks: The place where users can jot down tasks and to-do items whenever they like, and create tasks that don’t belong to a specific plan.
- Assigned to me: The location that includes all the tasks that have been assigned to you from Teams meeting notes, basic plans, premium plans, Loop components, and shared lists.
- Flagged emails: This section includes all of your flagged emails from Outlook. You can also visit an email directly from the task by clicking on the attachment.
- All: Here, you’ll see all of the tasks you have to complete from your Private Tasks, flagged emails, “Assigned to me” section and more. You can then filter through them by priority, progress, labels, and other options. Plus, you can “group” tasks into buckets.
If you want to see all your Plans, head to the My Plans page in the Planner app. This will show you all your plans, regardless of where they were created. You can also filter through plans based on most recent, shared, personal, pinned, and Teams plans.
Managing Tasks in Microsoft Teams
Once you know how to assign a task on Microsoft Teams through Planner, and your own assigned tasks start accumulating, there are various ways to manage them. One of the easiest ways to organize plans is with “buckets”. Buckets are great for organizing tasks by phases in a project or their priority level. For instance, you could group all of your “high-priority” tasks into one bucket.
You can also add color-coded labels to each task to simplify organization (e.g., green labels for simple tasks or red labels for urgent items). Plus, you can monitor all of your tasks in the “calendar” view for a quick overview of project timelines and progress.
As people progress on tasks within Teams, they’ll be able to update their status with “In Progress” or “Completed” indicators. They can also upload attachments and leave comments on each task. So, if someone needs to ask a question about a specific task, they can do so within the task itself.
You can also set custom preferences for the notifications and reminders you get from Planner, through Teams. In your Notifications and Activity section within Microsoft Planner settings, you can adjust whether you get notifications when someone:
- Assigns a task or urgent tasks to you
- Marks a task assigned to you as urgent or not urgent
- Changes the progress of a task
- Removes you from a task’s assignees
How to Assign a Task on Microsoft Teams Through Planner
There you have it, everything you need to know about how to assign a task on Microsoft Teams through planner. As you can see, it’s a pretty simple process, provided you have access to the Planner app within Teams already. Once you’ve got your integration set up, you can start assigning tasks, commenting on them, and tracking progress in no time.
You could even take your task management strategy to the next level. Try leveraging the Power Automate integration to create workflows that automate task management and assignment processes. Or, you could combine Microsoft Planner and Teams with a range of third-party apps like Trello and Asana, to keep all of your projects aligned in the same place.
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