View All Tasks Assigned To a Single Person
Currently tasks can be viewed by Assigned To only within a particular Project. It would be helpful to search globally in Planner by Assigned To rather than having to review assignments Plan by Plan. This change would make evaluation of workloads much easier.
Anonymous
shared this idea
Thanks for sharing your feedback.
We would like to hear more about how you would utilize this view. If you have a particular scenario or set of teammates for which you’d like to view tasks for, please share below!
Cheers,
The Planner Team
302 comments
-
Thomas Bak
commented
We are a team in a global corporation and we need to be able to view tasks per assigned user for an easy overview.
I would expect to be able to see all tasks of other users as long as I have permissions to see them, i.e. where we share plans.
I'd like to have this filter option by plan and overall.Also, I'd really appreciate an update from the Planner team on this. As others have noted it seems like you should have enough data and votes to start planning for this.
-
Anonymous
commented
I am the manager of a small team of developers. We have multiple projects. I would use for strategic planning and tactical execution.
-
Melonie
commented
Also, this is a critical need, as exemplified by the over 2,725 people who have voted on this. The only current workaround is to create one plan for the entire office and make each project a bucket and within each bucket are the 30 tasks to get it complete. This takes away from the robust flow of Planner by having individual plans.
-
Melonie
commented
We have a small office with personnel who work on many different projects at the same time. In order to plan our project (i.e. make adjustment to project schedule, pursuit of new work, etc.), we need to be able to global view of our resources work volume and status (on schedule, late, etc) and number of assignments. In addition, this would allow us to re-assign tasks to other team members with a small workload when view across all plans/projects.
-
Anonymous
commented
Part of project planning and execution is reporting the status to leadership. If I cant see what we completed during a given period of time so that I can report it, Planner is useless because I will need to track this elsewhere.
-
Stacey I
commented
Planner team, please implement this ASAP. This is a critical project management feature for checking progress of individuals across multiple projects.
-
skeptical
commented
11 months and nothing?
Cross team view are important.
Big need to different members work-load across projects.
Most of our members are working on multiple projects at the same time, and planner has bad support for this currently. -
boris
commented
a few final thoughts to finish my last comment:
A few options for how to implement this:
- give the ability to show the entire Team's workload, groupable by channel, for example, but shown universally in the Planner interface.
- Even better would be if it was the ability to view by any of the following:
o All channels, by user
o By channel, by user (two levels of grouping, or perhaps the Filter function could be a lever for both the timing AND the person…two sections of selection: a) the dates that are options, and then b) ‘all users’, ‘me’, ‘a particular user’…or a checkbox approach to the users so that you could do any subset of users that are desirable…perhaps you need two resources on something, and you want to quickly see what both of them are on and how critical those things are before you put something on the backburner)
Really a way to handle this is the way that Zoho Projects has enabled their filtering. They have columns of checkboxes atop the project view, and the columns are a) status (open, closed), b) owner of task, c) time (sections for both the due date, as well as when it was modified), d) completion and creation date (in case that is needed), e) created by person. Perhaps not all are easy or relevant for Planner, but if you took some/all of those, and added Channel and Bucket, you’d be enabling about as much granularity for the user as possible. Then what’s shown is just a matter of what qualifies for the selected criteria.
Again, I can see the challenge with showing tasks across groups, as you'd potentially be opening up security issues where a mngr may be part of two teams, but certain members of the teams aren't in both. In that case, you can't give user A (who should only see Team 1's tasks) access to Team 2, where user B's assignments may lie. It'd be nice for the mgr that straddles both to see both of those in one view, but you're getting into permissioning and security roles that don't seem like they are part of the Planner setup (nor will they be, and I'd argue nor should they be...there are more sophisticated approaches to project mgmt that someone should graduate to if they want to see global view of multiple project teams). But WITHIN a team, seeing across Team channels seems pretty basic, and a sort of subset of the My Tasks functionality that is already in Planner. Whereas My Tasks will hop across projects (and teams), you can’t do that for another member of your team. Even if you consider the scenario where a team member (NOT necessarily the lead) needs to ask for help from a colleague, being able to quickly view “who’s got a little less on their plates than others” would be useful. If as that team member you have to click back and forth between the various plans you have for the team (again, going on the logic that you’ve created plans that are relevant to channels, which are supposed to be thematic, topical conversations), then you’re not really getting the efficiency a unified system should be able to give you. -
boris
commented
I’ll apologize in advance that when I write my thoughts on technical solutions, I like to be pretty robust in my logic. I find it helps someone understand use cases a little better than just saying “it’d be great to have this”, and hopefully it helps the development teams reading this, to understand the nuances of the practical realities of users, versus just the desire to have a feature.
I’ll echo much of what other have said, and maybe add some underlying assumptions that drive the thoughts:
- certainly it's the case that any manager needs view of multiple projects that an individual worker of theirs is on. Without this, it's cumbersome, at best, to have to jump through projects. However this has to be balanced against (different subsets of workers that are on two projects, over which a particular mgr may be the oversight function). It also has to be balanced against the intended use of Planner, which seems like a ‘light’ version of MS Project (in that you can do lists of things, but not sequence with dependencies, truly project manage like a mngr in Project would, see global project views, etc).
(Since MS is focusing so much on the Teams concept, and that effectively defines the security/viewability parameters of the apps visible within Teams) the in-between solution for more breadth of visibility, but maintaining security of what should be viewable, is to stick with the cross-viewing ability that seems to be the underpinning of a Team. Namely, that which is within a Team (which has permissioned users) should be viewable by that Team.
In our case, for example, we are a small team growing a company (a reality for many of the users of s.t. like Planner, who maybe aren't on a larger system of project mgmt). We are wearing many hats. We’re following the Teams best practice of using Groups (the people belonging to a Team), and Channels (the topical areas that are covered within a named channel). We define who needs to be in discussions in Team, and then we use Channels to differentiate topical themes to organize thought flows. Then further we use conversation threads to talk about individual items, but that’s below the level of Planner, so will stay at Channels level.
What we’re left with now is the choice of:
- Set a Plan for a channel (which would be the ideal way of differentiating the tasks to coincide with the point of the channel). But then when we get to the Planner view, we are challenged with what all are describing here…there’s a manager for the team, they have differentiated their topics along Channels, but they cannot get a holistic view in Planner of all that each Team members is assigned, making it difficult to decide who to assign the next thing to (you can’t tell who’s overloaded). That, OR
- Set up ONE plan, and then make each channel go into that plan, perhaps using “buckets” to differentiate the topics (e.g., a bucket per channel). It seems like this takes away one of the uses of buckets, which is further specificity (within a channel, if not for the lack of visibility of all described in bullet above). This accomplishes the ability to see all the tasks for the group, grouped by bucket, but it takes away one layer of ‘bucketing’
With all the above said, I think users of Planner have to come to terms with the fact that Planner is NOT (in its current incarnation, unless the Planner dev team says otherwise) intended to be a closer relative of Project. As such, scenarios like managers that have global viewership rights, ability to load-balance across projects, etc, are likely not meant to be included in Planner.
BUT, if the point of Planner IS to be the light version of proj mgmt, and aimed at smaller sized orgs, where many people do many things, then allowing Teams to serve the purpose of organizing those efforts (for a Team, which by virtue of the way a team forms has agreed that they are effectively all sharing all information amongst themselves), it seems like having Planner (which is MS the task mgmt option offered in Teams) should account for the fact that the team will typically have some lead, and that lead is responsible for assigning things out, in a responsible way (meaning not overloading people). Since that’s the case, and the Channels and buckets are available for some level of differentiation in workflows, then Planner should mirror that, by allowing for Plans to be created for a channel, and the viewing of those plans be consolidated for purposes of seeing who is doing what. -
Anonymous
commented
When managing multiple people it is essential that I can see an individuals total workload before assigning additional tasks, plus looking for areas I may need to provide them with support if they are overloaded.
-
SV
commented
Today Planner can not replace Trello (or Wunderlist) for Manager use.
We must have visibility on the transverse spots of each person. -
SV
commented
290 comments. But this votes still needs "tell us more". What could we add ?
-
Il Rez
commented
Here's my case:
1) Program manager manages multiple plans with tasks assigned to multiple employees
2) PgM needs to review task load and recent progress for each employee on the team.
3) In order to do so, PgM must be able to view all tasks for a single individual, across multiple plansCurrently you can only view your own tasks across multiple plans, and view by individual within a single plan. Need to create a view similar to 'my tasks' but allow the user to specify other employees.
-
Jeff Livesay
commented
Here's my use case: Same as Anonymous below
1) Program manager manages multiple plans with tasks assigned to multiple employees
2) PgM needs to review task load and recent progress for each employee on the team.
3) In order to do so, PgM must be able to view all tasks for a single individual, across multiple plansCurrently you can only view your own tasks across multiple plans, and view by individual within a single plan. Need to create a view similar to 'my tasks' but allow the user to specify other employees.
-
Anonymous
commented
Here's my use case:
1) Program manager manages multiple plans with tasks assigned to multiple employees
2) PgM needs to review task load and recent progress for each employee on the team.
3) In order to do so, PgM must be able to view all tasks for a single individual, across multiple plansCurrently you can only view your own tasks across multiple plans, and view by individual within a single plan. Need to create a view similar to 'my tasks' but allow the user to specify other employees.
-
Anonymous
commented
Please add this feature. We're migrating everything to Teams and Planner (instead of Trello and other apps), and now we're wondering why this is not possible? Overall my experience of Teams and Planner so far is that of tools not quite addressing the tasks they're created to aid in. It should be an easy fix, no?
-
Alexander
commented
When deciding which tasks to delegate I need to easily be able to ***** my teams current work load and determine who has the most bandwidth. I don't want to delegate a task to an individual when they already have a task due on that date, especially when I can easily have someone else complete it.
-
Anonymous
commented
Managers need the ability to view tasks for individuals across plans. Surprised this is not in the product. Essential. Absence of this functionality really diminishes the product.
-
Anonymous
commented
Everyone should vote up the Power BI integration ideas -- if there was a PowerBI connector, then this would be easily solved! Any number of dashboards could then be created for managers to see tasks across all plans.
-
Anonymous
commented
Managers need the ability to view tasks for individuals across plans.