Simple Project Management and Personal Organization with Visual Management tools
A couple of years ago I was introduced to project management methodologies such as Kanban and Agile. These methodologies rely on the use of visual management techniques for planning projects and communicating status.
A visual management board can help see the big picture, structure project activities, monitor and improve a team’s performance. Having a project board showing all the project tasks, their stage in the project life at any given moment can help significantly improve communication between team members. These boards can also help teams identify roadblocks and opportunities for improvement and to stay focused on the overall project goal.
Physical vs. Online boards
I’ve used two types of visual management boards: physical (offline) and online boards and both offer pros and cons.
Physical boards
A physical board usually relies on the use of stickies to represent tasks. This type of board can be drawn anywhere, usually on a whiteboard.
Physical boards encourage face-to-face communication between local team members, as reviews of the project status usually occur right next to the physical board and, used well, these boards can be an excellent tool for daily discussions and reviews for the team to identify bottlenecks and resolve any issue(s) that each team member may be facing at any given point in time.
While there are many benefits in using physical boards, there are some drawbacks: for teams with remote team members it becomes challenging to share and capture project status; and, if one wants to create project metrics and produce executive reports, physical cards and associated data needs to be transcribed into a spreadsheet or presentation for reporting purposes, which adds additional overhead.
Online boards
On the other hand, online boards allow teams to collaborate in real-time. These boards are accessible anytime, anywhere, on a browser or smartphone and they can provide information-rich cards, easy and fast customization and automatically generated metrics.
Online boards are the preferred solution for large or distributed teams. I’ve personally found that combining the best of both worlds enables a good balance of the benefits of both types of boards. I use mostly online boards, but if I want to leverage the benefits of having a physical board I’ll have daily reviews in front of a TV showing the board in front of the team. This still promotes daily reviews and, for remote team members, I can always rely on screen sharing collaboration tools so everyone is looking at the same board during a review meeting.
Online board tools
I have looked at a number of different tools and applications in the past to help me implement an electronic board to keep track of tasks and projects I need to work on. I’ve tried Trello, Asana, Todoist, Microsoft Project (gasp!) and so many others.
Trello is a very popular tool. It starts with a blank canvas where you can create several columns to either represent buckets of work, or different stages or status of a task for instance.
However, I’ve found that in Trello — or even on a physical board for that matter — I need to commit to the structure of a board. I.e., I either need to structure the columns so they represent a phase of a project (think “Backlog”, “In Work” or “Completed” as an example), or a bucket of work (each bucket can actually be a project on it’s own, if you’re tracking multiple projects in a single board). If I started with a board structured with phases of a project it wasn’t always easy to then group those tasks by bucket, for instance (some electronic boards offer filtering capabilities, but the base structure of the board stays the same).
Microsoft Planner to the rescue
Recently I came across Microsoft Planner. Planner is an online board with similar functionality to Trello, but it has a fundamental difference, and advantage, in my perspective that other tools don’t offer: it doesn’t force you into a static board structure. This for me was enough to switch my planning from Trello to Planner. Let me walk you through a sample project board to showcase that flexibility in Planner
Setting up a board and adding tasks in Planner
I usually start a planning activity with a brain dump of what I think needs to be accomplished. Instead of creating a Kanban board with the traditional “Backlog”, “Todo” and “Done” sections I create a column for either a project or buckets of work I need to focus on. I then add a card under each bucket for each major task that needs to be accomplished. I also create a bucket called “Uncategorized Backlog” for anything that I know needs to be done but that I haven’t looked into yet in more detail.
The screenshot below shows a sample board with a couple of tasks associated with two sample projects.
Adding detail to tasks
Once I have all the tasks on the board, I’ll start adding detail to each task:
- What is the progress on this task (there are several options to choose from)
- When is it supposed to start
- What’s the due date
- What is this task about (I use the description field for that)
- Are there any sub-tasks I need to capture (I typically use the checklist functionality to capture this)
- Labels — labels can be used anyway you want. I usually leverage labels, and the ability to assign a color to a label, to categorize a task priority (given two tasks that have similar due dates, which one is the one I need to accomplish first if I need to prioritize workload).
NOTE: You can also do this when you create the task. I prefer to do it after because I’ll know more about the overall volume of work I have ahead and thus will have more information to properly assess when I can start a task, when it’s due, etc.
Adding this detail to each card is key to being able to leverage Planner’s flexibility, once these details are set you can then ask planner to display information from different angles and perspectives.
Looking at tasks from multiple perspectives
Being able to re-arrange the board depending on the perspective you want to analyse is one of Planner’s main advantages.
You do this by selecting how you want to group the board, using the “Group By” option the top right corner of the screen.
The available options are:
- Group By “Assigned To” — this will show a column for each team member and the cards in that column will be the tasks assigned to that team member;
- Group By “Progress” — using this option each column will represent a a simple Kanban board (with “backlog/not started”, “in progress”, “completed” columns)
- Group By “Due Date” — this will group the board by tasks that are “Late”, “Due Tomorrow”, “Due Next Week”, “Due sometime later in the future” and by tasks that don’t have a due date yet. This is a great view because you can quickly see what you need to focus on. It’s my preferred view to start the week or each day as I can very quickly identify what I need to focus on.
- Group By “Label” — tasks sorted by the color label you assign to a task.
In a nutshell, I find this flexibility invaluable as I can flip back and forth between multiple views of my tasks without having to manually re-arrange the board, setup reports of install add-ons like I would have to do in other tools I’ve used before.
In addition to these views, you can also see tasks in a more traditional calendar / timeline view using the “Schedule” menu.
Expanding Planner’s Capabilities with Workflow (Microsoft Flow)
Once I started using Planner on an ongoing basis I quickly realized I needed a way to quickly capture tasks I need to look into later that may result from reading an email. A really interesting way to streamline capturing tasks from Outlook emails is to leverage workflow to trigger the creation of tasks in a Microsoft Planner board based on an email message.
To accomplish this I discovered Microsoft Flow and used a workflow template that creates a new task in my “Uncategorized Backlog” bucket each time I flag an email message in Outlook. This allows me to keep track of important messages related to a project that I need to follow-up on and add as a task to a project board.
Setting up a workflow in Microsoft Flow is fairly easy:
a) Choose an existing template from the templates catalog. I filtered this list by “planner” and picked the first option available “Create planner tasks for flagged emails in Office 365”.
b) I edited the last step of the basic template to create a task in the bucket “Uncategorized Backlog”.
c) That’s it. Once you save the script, the next time you flag a task in Outlook a new task is created in Microsoft Planner using the subject of the email as the title of the task. Note: it may take a few seconds for the task to show up in Planner.
Project Tracking and Reporting capabilities
Last but not least, I find that Microsoft Planner provides simple built-in reporting capabilities that can show you the volume of work by status, by bucket and by team member.
The reporting view also shows what tasks are due today, this week and next week and which ones have already been completed, all in the same screen.
Wrap-up and benefits
I find that out of all the tools I’ve used before to visually manage projects, Microsoft Planner seems to offer the best balance between simplicity of use, flexibility to represent and visualize tasks in multiple perspectives and basic reporting capabilities.
Let me know if you found this post useful and I’d love to hear how you’re managing projects using tools like this.
Until the next one, consider reading my previous post: “How to remember more of what you read”.