The Microsoft 365 tools can make you a power horse of task management. However, it can turn into the Wild West if you don’t have an intentional plan for rolling out these apps to your teams.

We really love the planning apps of Outlook, To Do, and Planner (“The Planning Apps”) because too often people misuse their email. We tell our clients all the time, “Email is not an effective delegation tool or a planning tool.” It’s just not reasonable to expect people to keep up with managing their work through email communication alone. The Planning Apps help close the loop of those poor email expectations.

They have four significant benefits:

1. They simplify task management by bringing in tasks from Outlook, To Do and Planner into one location: the To Do app
2. To Do is accessible from any device. With a few setting adjustments you can even make To Do the default on your iPhone so you can say, “Siri, add TASK to my To Do list.”
3. All the tasks can be synchronized across your team
4. They provide great potential to improve collaboration

However, be careful on how you rollout The Planning Apps. Though they are intuitive to use it’s much more complex than many people think because of all the apps’ integration. People can create a mess if they’re not careful because every time you create a Team, you create a SharePoint site for the team, a OneNote notebook for the team, and a Plan for the team.

Before integrating The Planning Apps or any Teams tools we suggest controlled exploration:

1. Start with a pilot
2. Think long-term on how you want to use these tools
3. Set guidelines and best practices
4. Train everyone

The goal is to intentionally figure out how you want to configure these tools and then train your employees on the best use of their Teams environment so you don’t have the Wild West chaos that you have to go back and fix later.

If you need more support, we pride ourselves in being 365 experts so reach out with any questions! We also offer monthly webinars on Microsoft 365 topics and have recordings of past webinars on our website.