Elena Humeniuk
PPM Consultant
Have you heard about the new Microsoft Planner? At the Ignite Conference in November 2023, Microsoft announced its intention to roll out the New Planner in 2024. The company wants to assist businesses and teams in better managing and tracking work. To do this, Microsoft combines some of its established project management services—MS Planner, Microsoft To Do, and Project for the Web—to offer a single, unified work management experience.
Read on to uncover all the essential information about the new Planner.
What is the new Microsoft Planner 2024?
The new Planner integrated into Microsoft Teams delivers a unified experience that enables users to manage tasks, plans, to-do lists, and projects across MS 365 apps in a simplified way. Microsoft Planner 2024 harnesses the power of Project for the Web, the user-friendliness of Microsoft To-Do, the intelligence of Copilot, and the collaboration of Microsoft Planner to provide a single, easy solution. The new tool is intended to cover individual task management, professional project management, and enterprise project management.
Why did Microsoft create the New Planner?
Artificial intelligence is becoming an integral component of the modern work environment. Thus, organizations’ work and project management tools must be intelligent to assist teams with their focus and productivity. Even the most advanced solutions for accomplishing tasks can slow operations if they don’t work well together.
Moreover, the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating instead of focusing on driving outcomes. About 59% of employees have said that the tools they use for collaboration do not align well with their team’s work preferences.
Lastly, employees are also keen on delegating much of their workloads to AI, with 70% saying they want AI’s help to lift the weight of mundane tasks. These are some of the reasons why Microsoft built MS Planner 2024.
What are the features of the new Planner?
There is a lot you can do with the new Planner. Let’s explore how you can leverage its capabilities to better manage your project work all in one place.
User-Friendly Interface
You can now find all the tasks you need, exactly where and when you need them. The new Planner allows you to manage all your projects, plans, tasks, and to-Do lists in one simple experience across Microsoft 365 applications. In the new Planner, you can access recent, personal, and shared plans and tasks that you were assigned.
Flexibility
One new Microsoft Planner feature you can leverage is its extremely high flexibility. Now, you and your project team can work according to your preferences. No matter the task, whether it is large enterprise initiatives or individual project management, the new Planner has got you covered. You can select from different approaches, templates, and views, like lists, timelines, sprints, and boards, to customize and personalize your plans. Exciting features like agile sprint planning, goal alignments, team workloads, task history, and custom fields are being carried over so you can enjoy the new Planner today.
Versatile, automated, and customizable operations
The new Planner takes your business operations to the next level. It offers a big-picture view of all your enterprise initiatives. Whether you know how to code or not, you can configure, automate, and extend the new Planner easily to meet your organization’s ever-changing needs.
The new Planner is designed to function on the MS Power Platform. As a result, users can get configurable workflows via Power Automate and customized reporting via Power BI. Thanks to its integration with Microsoft Viva Goals, you can easily link your objectives and key results to achieve informed plans and high-level visibility. Users can quickly check task histories and update task dependencies in the new Microsoft Planner updates.
Copilot’s AI-assisted features
The new Microsoft Planner in Teams is highly intelligent. Its AI functionality, called Copilot, helps project managers accelerate desired outcomes. It does this through simple, natural language that enables users to:
- Generate new project plans: Instruct Copilot on what you need, sit back and watch it draft a plan outlining all the necessary tasks and timelines.
- Set goals: Outline your project’s desired outcomes, and Copilot will create a customized to-do list to help you achieve them.
- Track status: Copilot offers in-depth analysis and insights regarding the progress of your projects.
- Adapt to changes: As your project needs to evolve, it enables you to adjust your plans efficiently.
Get regular and prompt support from Copilot for your project team. This will make project management and work easier and faster than you imagine.
Experience seamless integrations with Microsoft 365
Use the new Planner to manage your workflow. It integrates with multiple Microsoft 365 applications, including Teams, Outlook, Loop, and Viva Goals. You can effortlessly incorporate the current Planner plans into your Loop workspace, allowing you to monitor your team’s strategy with other project materials. Action tasks assigned during team meetings or emails you flag and consider important are visible in Planner.
Centralize collaboration hub for enterprise teams
In today’s fast-paced work environment, collaboration is crucial to achieving success. The central collaboration hub is the new Planner’s streamlined experience and seamless integrations. It connects teams and tasks and fosters productivity, making it easier for people to work together. Organizations using Microsoft Planner Premium can leverage this to improve communication, minimize the disconnect that regularly characterizes work management, and achieve a more efficient and cohesive workflow.
Enhanced Enterprise Work Management (EWM) features
The new Planner offers all the features now accessible in Project for the Web, including goals, sophisticated scheduling with dependencies, sprints, and people view. Lead-lag capabilities, baselines, and portfolios are some of the new EWM features in the upcoming Planner Premium Microsoft.
Release date for the new Planner
The new Planner application is currently available in Teams and is widely accessible to users. Although users can still access the current To-Do application in Teams and Tasks by Planner, the new Planner app has combined and centralized the functionalities of these two apps for a single operation in one place.
The new Planner’s web experience will be widely accessible later in 2024. The Planner online app and the new Planner application in Teams will come with the familiar and beloved features of MS Project for the Web.
Consistent support for customers
Microsoft will continue to support existing and prospective customers using Project Online, Project Desktop, and Project Server. The New Microsoft Planner 2024 will not deny users access to these tools. Moreover, Microsoft has not announced a termination date for Project Online.
How much will the new Planner cost?
Project for the Web’s present features and pricing structure will remain unchanged for current users when they transition to Planner. Copilot in Planner will be available in a few months, and Microsoft intends to make a specific announcement regarding the pricing for Copilot. Stay tuned.
The New Microsoft Planner has been rolling out in stages throughout 2024. In April 2024, the New Planner began its general availability rollout within Microsoft Teams. In October 2024, the New Planner for the web became available for Targeted Release tenants, allowing early adopters to experience and provide feedback on the updated features.
You can access New Planner via Microsoft Teams apps or web browser. If you don’t have access yet, it may still be in the deployment phase for your organization. Your IT administrator can enroll your organization in the Targeted Release program for early access. This allows users to experience new features before general availability.
To create a New Planner in Microsoft Teams, follow these steps:
- Log in to Microsoft Teams with your Microsoft 365 account.
- Select the team where you want to create the Planner.
- Add a Planner tab in the chosen team channel.
- Create a new plan and start adding tasks.
Following these steps, you can create and use a New Planner directly within Microsoft Teams for your team’s projects and task management needs.
The New Microsoft Planner offers an enhanced, user-friendly interface for efficient task and project management. You can create new plans, organize tasks with buckets, add new tasks, assign them to team members, monitor progress within Board, Charts, or Schedule View, use AI-powered assistant Microsoft Copilot, and more.
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