Microsoft365’s effective project process: Plan — Realize — Evaluate

Leave a Comment / timeghost / By Tim Lauenroth

The diversity of the Microsoft365 environment with all its programs creates new opportunities for all Microsoft users to work more effectively in the future. Especially the possibility of collaboration is one key factors, why working with theses apps is so efficient.

Microsoft Teams is not an isolated solution but serves as a platform on which Microsoft programs can be linked together via many different interfaces. Especially in the case of projects, Teams is a program that supports all participants in the implementation. The individual functions of Microsoft365 programs, such as Azure DevOps, OneDrive, SharePoint or the Planner can be used in other Microsoft applications.

We want to introduce you to three applications that you can use to cover your project from planning to implementation to evaluation. In doing so, we will show you the connection of these three programs and once again illustrate the possibilities and advantages that exist through the extensibility within Teams.

Plan

Microsoft Planner can be used optimally as an initiator for the planning as well as for the execution of a project. The Planner provides you and your team with a great and comprehensive summary of all tasks that still need to be done or are already done.

Tasks can be created quickly, assigned to people and sorted by priority. In addition to pre-planning, Planner also gives you a good overview during the project. Later in this blog article, we’ll show you how to integrate your Planner tasks into teams. With the Planner you take the first steps to successfully run your projects. Through the integration in Teams, you can jump right into realizing your tasks you wrote down.

Realize

Microsoft Teams supports you during the realization of your project by allowing you to communicate with your colleagues via voice or video call or simply share documents with them.

In addition, Teams offers you possibilities as a collaborative platform.

This means that you can use various Microsoft365 programs, such as Planner, but also external applications from the Microsoft Teams Store in Teams. Third party apps extend your Microsoft Teams environment which makes it easy for you to customize and extend your Microsoft environment in the ways you and your team want.

The connection with timeghost is one way to extend your Teams environment. Especially when you want to get a simple but significant tool to manage your projects.

Evaluate

Once you have completed tasks in your project, you can document them by entering them into the timeghost Teams app. You can assign the task to individual projects and specify the corresponding time interval.

By documenting your tasks and working hours, you not only keep track of the work you have done, but you also have the option of evaluating your work, for example with the “billable function”, where you can store hourly rates for each employee to inform your customer transparently about the costs.

You can also carry out optimizations yourself and each team member keeps track of their work.

At this point, be sure to check out the blog entry about the functions of the timeghost Dashboard.

How to integrate Planner and timeghost in Microsoft Teams?

Adding a Planner tab:

To use the possibilities of Planner integration in Teams, it is necessary to add a Planner tab.

This is easy:

To do this, click on the plus sign in Teams. Here you can add a tab

Type “Tasks by Planner and To Do” in the search box and select the icon that appears

Inside the diablog box you can choose between the following options:

• You can create a new task list to create a new plan and add it as a tab to this channel.
• You can use an existing task list, if your team has already worked with the Planner Tasks

• You can now choose if you want to post the tab to the channel
• Then click on „Save” and you and your team can use the Planner Tasks in the corresponding channel

You can now work on your plan from Teams or in Planner for Web, remove or delete your plan, and get notified in Teams when a task is assigned to you in Planner. A super handy because user-friendly feature from Microsoft that adds a lot of value to its users.

Adding the timeghost Teams App

You can easily download the timeghost Teams app from the Teams Store and display it in your side bar. Here you will be taken to the Teams Store to download our software.

If you want to know step by step, how to install the timeghost App in Teams, simply follow this guide here.

Then log in with your Microsoft365 account and create your own workspace, add team members, create projects and enter your first tasks and times. The following picture will give a view of how the timeghost Dashboard looks like.

Conclusion

Through the interaction of these three programs, you cover your project process — planning, realizing, and evaluating. With the Planner you create the tasks, which are stored with a deadline and assigned to the corresponding responsible persons.

Teams serves both as a platform for defining tasks in Planner and as a basis for using other programs that are necessary for project implementation.

timeghost offers project members a way to clearly display their tasks and times and to store them with the relevant information.

The unique thing about it is that everything is possible within one platform — Microsoft Teams. We work with it ourselves and can say from our own experience that we have enormous time savings and increased productivity in project execution through this connection.

This interaction creates an optimal playground for the execution of your projects. Go play with it. 😉

Get the timeghost App

Interested in a time tracking app that can be integrated with Microsoft Teams? Try the timeghost Teams app in our 14-day free trial.

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We really appreciate all the feedback we can get, so please feel free to contact us and tell us what needs improvement or what you are missing in the software.

If you need any help in setting up the software, please don’t hesitate to visit our Support Center or send us an email to support@timeghost.io.