Goals are good, now track them in Microsoft Planner
Ready to set your first goal in Microsoft Planner? This post walks you through the steps and shares some handy tips. Enjoy!
Happy Saturday! I hope you had a great week or at least that you got through it ok. Welcome back to my adventure learning about Microsoft Planner ("Planner") in public.
No new subscribers again so we're holding at 11 which is cool for two reasons: it's a prime number and it's a palindrome.
So far not a week goes by when I don't learn something new about Planner. I also keep making mistakes and the learning continues. This week's post was created by a real person, that's me. Claude: sorry buddy, I didn't need you!
In a plan that we're collaborating on at work we created 6 key top-level tech tasks and then added our subtasks. Our sister group working in the same plan created 6 functional areas for the major business functions. We ended up with overlap having similar tasks in both places so decided to merge some of our tasks into their sections of the plan so they're together and then we used ... labels! My learning? We could've used Goals instead of top-level tasks in the first place.
OK, now that I've told you about my week, let's learn about Goals in Microsoft Planner in premium plans!
Creating your first goal
In case you can't find it, this is where you click to get to the Goals feature once you have a premium plan open.
When you click "Goals" the first time this is what you'll see.
Once you've added your first goal, the tab shows this table view where you can add more goals:
Seeing goals in Grid view
To see your goals in the Grid view, scroll to the right and click +Add column then Goal as shown here:
Once the column is added you can drag and drop it to another spot:
Unfortunately, if you hide the column and then add it back, it puts it on the far right, so you'd have to repeat the process to move it again. I wish Microsoft would allow us to save a collection of views with different columns because the Grid can become quite wide.
Adding goals in Grid view
If you double-click on a goal in the "Goal" column, a menu will appear where you can change the goal that the task is associated with, assign to a different goal, or create a new goal.
Clicking "See all goals" in that menu takes you to the Goals view.
Filtering by goals
The usability folks at Microsoft did a great job to ensure that Goals are integrated across all of the Planner views. Just use the "Filters (0)" button on the top right and towards the bottom of the filter options you'll see "Goals (0)", click on it to open it up.
Goals view
Once you've added some goals to tasks in the Grid view, go back to the Goals view to see the magic: a great overview of which tasks lead to your project's goals!
Change a task within the Goals view
Another usability win is the consistency of how you can modify a task. In the Goal tab, click the "i" icon and the task details pane appears on the right. You can easily make a change here and then close it with the "x" button.
Lots of colors
One thing I love and hate about Planner is that almost everything can have a color assigned to it. I love it because it let's me do that. I hate it because the user interface becomes hard for me to focus on since my eyes go all over. Yeah, that's a me problem and you may love it.
I stumbled on the goal coloring feature this morning, here's where you can find it:
Within limits
There are a couple of limitations with this feature. One that I should've mentioned off the top is that you need a Microsoft Planner Plan 1 or higher license to create, view, and update goals in a plan. People who do not have one of these licenses will be unable to see the goals or use this feature. The other limitation is you can only create 10 goals, so choose them wisely.
The best for last
Now, to see my favorite feature in the Goals view, click the tasks link here:
That displays the following pane:
From there you can do the following:
- Search the entire plan for a task
- See which tasks are assigned to other goals (grey selected checkbox) – oddly a task can only be assigned to a single goal
- See which tasks are assigned to this goal (green selected checkbox)
- Assign a task to this goal (unchecked checkbox)
My goal of describing goals in Microsoft Planner has been reached, check!
It's a wrap
Using goals in Microsoft Planner premium plans is a great way of organizing your work beyond using labels and buckets. You can set goals in the Goals tab and then filter by them and add tasks to them in any view. Then you can enjoy watching the progression towards completion. This is easily one of the best features of Microsoft Planner and it justifies part of the increased cost of a Planner Plan 3 license over a lower tier license.
Have a great week ahead and I hope that it goes as you planned it or better.
Otto.
p.s. sharing is caring so please forward this post to a colleague or a link to otto-ms.bsky.social or r/plannerpremium so this blog can get to 101 followers. That sounds like a good goal and not just because it's a prime number and a palindrome.
