Planner combines levels of work

Microsoft made the new Planner app available in public preview in Teams on 11 March. It combined personal tasks, shared plans and more advanced project plans, with views from My Day to sprint and timeline depending on licence. Existing Tasks by Planner and To Do users were due to receive the new app through a gradual update. The web version and some Copilot functions remained on the roadmap.

For project managers, the preview meant a task portfolio could be assessed in one work surface, but migration and licence differences required testing. Select an active project and verify assignee, due date, dependencies and status before and after the app becomes available. The same view should not be assumed to provide the same capability for every user.

Analytics follows project decisions

Power BI published its March update on 26 March. It continued the visual-calculations preview and delivered reporting and modelling improvements. The management task is to connect project status to defined measures. A Planner field marked “complete” offers little insight if the Power BI report uses another boundary for delivered work.

Microsoft's one-year review of Copilot in Power Platform on the same day described natural language in app and flow development and extensions through Copilot Studio. It was a vendor retrospective and direction rather than an independent impact study. For automation, teams should select one process and log where a suggestion is created, approved and executed.

Shared ownership improves collaboration

Build one chain from a Teams decision to a Planner task, automated notification and Power BI measure. Give each transition an owner and control point. Test with a basic-licence user, a project manager and a report reader. Record missing access and conflicting interpretations of status.

The March changes can reduce searching and manual status copying. They do not automatically improve project management. Results should appear as fewer unowned tasks, less time from exception to decision and a report traceable to work records. AI and automation then support collaboration while preserving project accountability.

Before rollout, the project office should compare task counts, duplicates and status differences in the old and new Planner views. The analytics owner verifies that reports still point to the same plans after the update. If automation creates tasks, the team checks assignee, due date and the link back to the decision. This makes migration measurable and reveals whether the combined work surface actually reduces duplicate effort.

Sources

Microsoft Planner Blog, “The new Planner in Teams is now in public preview,” 11 March 2024

Microsoft Fabric Community, “Power BI March 2024 Feature Summary,” 26 March 2024

Microsoft Power Platform Blog, “A year of Microsoft Copilot,” 26 March 2024

Join the discussion

Where do misunderstandings most often occur between planning and delivery in your team? Share an example from an assignment.