Canberra’s Mojo Up is sitting down with clients to demystify Microsoft’s Planner Premium rollout. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
A sweeping update rolling out across Microsoft’s suite is leaving many scratching their heads – but experts are urging users to give it a chance.
The new Planner Premium platform blends the original Planner tool with To Do and Project for the Web in a move designed to unify task management. For government users – where clarity, compliance and collaboration are mission critical – these changes affect how your teams plan, communicate and deliver.
Mojo Up director Daniel Buchanan has been working closely with clients to bring them up to speed with what’s new, what’s going away and – critically, he says – how to stay ahead of the curve.
“Microsoft has not retired Planner Basic, Project Online or To Do – people are still welcome to use these. But they’ve been quite clear that Premium Planner is where they’ll be investing going forward,” he says.
“In other words, Microsoft is mid-transition with all these products. Like the broader Microsoft 365 suite, there will be new changes, fixes, patches and security updates almost daily.
“Planner will evolve, so if it meets 80 per cent of your requirements today, don’t wait – make moves to get ahead of the game or at least keep pace.”
Mojo Up, a Canberra small business offering professional services primarily to the Australian Federal Government, Defence and Intelligence organisations, has created resources to help clear confusion and make the transition smoother.
The original Planner (Planner Basic) is a lightweight project management tool for individuals and small teams. While the word “planner” in both platforms contributes in part to the confusion in the rollout, the two are actually worlds apart.
Planner Premium supports business-grade project management and, unlike the original Planner, is capable of supporting team managers in government agencies looking to oversee projects.
“Planner allowed you to create plans, assign tasks, chat about them and track progress using a Kanban-style board interface, but most agencies wouldn’t have adopted it because it wasn’t fit for actual project management,” Daniel says.
“In a corporate sense it didn’t have the features and functionality required to properly manage projects in the workplace.”
Planner Premium offers most of the features we expect to see in agile corporate project delivery, including the creation of Kanban boards and waterfall Gantt charts, the ability to split projects into sprints, set goals, milestone management and right down to tagging items with labels.
Planner Premium is also very different (and completely separate) to Microsoft’s Project Online – a platform that has been around more than a decade and was the go-to experience before Planner – and Project for the Web, a more streamlined, web-based project management tool.
Mojo Up co-founder and director Daniel Buchanan advises agencies to have a play with Planner Premium to see its capabilities. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
Compounding the confusion, Microsoft includes Project Online and Planner Premium in the same licence and explains their features together instead of separately.
“Say I’m an end user and want to do a specific kind of financial management, it may exist in Projects Online but not Planner Premium. But you have to hunt around to find full descriptions,” Daniel says.
But he points out the evolution of Planner Premium presents a big opportunity for organisations to leverage their existing licensing to materially improve project governance.
“If you already own licensing for Projects Online, you can – and should – start to play with Planner Premium and get on the front foot from a technological advancement perspective,” he says.
“Changing to Planner Premium doesn’t just enable new features, its integration with Microsoft 365 suites – Teams and email etc – unlocks greater collaboration and productivity.
“For agencies that want to remain Microsoft-centric, it’s your next logical step.”
Why? Because everything Microsoft is doing with Planner Premium can be extended to meet broader agency governance requirements using the Microsoft Power Platform. The low-code platform empowers users to build custom business applications, automate workflows, analyse data and create websites, all without extensive coding knowledge.
Daniel says agencies nervous about upgrading to Planner Premium should “get back to the basics and start small”.
“We’re advising clients to start early and see what adoption looks like. Run a pilot where you onboard a small team to implement it in their actual production environment. Understand and measure the benefits and try to identify what challenges you might come across as you roll it out across an agency of thousands,” Daniel says.
“We had one agency that brought it in as a pilot and they didn’t want to let it go – having a simple standardised tool made life easier and reporting more consistent.
“It does do things differently and change can be hard. But once you adopt it, you won’t want to go back.”
For more information visit Mojo Up.
Original Article published by Dione David on Region Canberra.
