I was asked recently what tool is best to help manage projects. Being a consultant, I felt compelled to say, “it depends”, before quickly expanding on this a little more. In my experience, this question was far less about the tool we use and much more about how we work together.

Poor communication often causes project delivery problems. The tools you use won’t matter if your team’s project delivery maturity is low. If team members don’t communicate often or roles are unclear, implementing a comprehensive process won’t help. Focus on fixing the basics first.

This is why I like to start with Microsoft Teams and Planner. This gives you a place to collaborate on content, visualise tasks and communicate together. You can also invite people from outside the organisation to participate.

Start by setting up a new Team for the project and adding a Planner board. Don’t share with another one, because it makes managing the project lifecycle and members difficult. One Team per project.

In Teams I like to do a few simple things in the General channel:

• Either pin the key project documents to a Tab so they are quick and easy to find.
• Add the Planner board as a tab so it is easy to find.
• Optionally add a Private Channel for commercial documents and invite the Project Manager and Sponsor to that channel only. This keeps those documents private.
• Invite the project team members to join.

Planner is where a lot of the operational things happen. Here we want everyone involved to have visibility of all tasks and can filter by the assigned person. The Planner board becomes the focus for project standups and planning sessions.

A few rules for Planner boards:

• Break the project into tasks that are small enough to be delivered in a short timeframe. If the task is too big, split out into smaller achievable tasks.
• Only assign 1 owner to the task. They can work with others, but this person is responsible for making sure it happens.
• Create buckets so you can separate tasks that are planned vs ready to do and block.
• Consider using labels to group sets of tasks together e.g. by a topic

Now we have our tools setup to run the project we can agree our processes. This is the key to how we will work together as a team. Here are a few suggestions to help you get off on the right foot:

• Agree where to save documents and how they will be named.
• Agree how to communicate using Teams posts and chat (remember chat is private)
• Schedule planning meetings. I usually make this fortnightly.
• Schedule your standups. These are short and sharp meetings. The frequency may vary depending on the project stage. I usually start with 2 a week for 15 minutes each.
• Agree on project reporting requirements and frequency.
• Assign formal roles, don’t assume someone else will pick something up.

In all project meetings, use the Team. Record the meeting so people can catch up later and if you have Copilot, capture actions automatically. Make sure the Planner board is kept up to date and post updates to the channel if you cannot attend, to keep everyone informed.

Sometimes I hear people say, but what about <insert your project board of choice here>, it is much better at <insert requirement here>. This is true, there are tools that have many more features, and I agree, sometimes they are better. The thing is, for many of us, we are better off keeping things simple because we just aren’t that good at managing projects and our team don’t have the skills or time to learn.

If your organisation does have mature project management practices, then your tool set will already be well known and your processes document. Don’t rush off and try to create a new way of working, just follow the well-worn path!

To answer that initial question, “which tool is best for managing projects?” then my answer is the one that everyone can access and allows you to have one place to find all the information you need to collaborate. Just pick one and make sure everyone has access and the knowledge they need to succeed.

Microsoft Project for the Web is the project management suite for managing projects of all sizes Microsoft are rebranding it as Planner & Project with a range of features for projects with more advanced requirements. It starts with Planner in Microsoft 365 (the one I discuss above) and extends to more capable tools with additional subscriptions required.

Learn more about Microsoft Planner including the advanced versions.