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Introducing new ways to work in Microsoft Project

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Today’s project teams need to collaborate successfully to deliver value. Project managers and teams want to work in ways that make sense for their projects. Program and portfolio managers want transparency and governance across the entire project portfolio.

How can your company or department support different work styles without losing the power of a centralized project management system? With agile in Project, project managers and teams can choose the methodology that makes sense for the project at hand, including: agile, waterfall, hybrid, or task-oriented. The integration of Project with Microsoft Planner lets you connect Project tasks to a Planner plan and track detailed work in Planner.

Use agility in your Project portfolio

With agile in Project, you can use agile methods to track your projects in Project Online Desktop Client. You can create new agile projects or apply agile views to your existing waterfall projects. You can track your projects using Scrum and Kanban methodologies, including viewing task boards, creating backlogs, and tracking sprints, as well as viewing reports on agile statistics.

Image of a project displayed in the agile in Project dashboard.

For more details, see “Use agile in Microsoft Project.”

Manage Project task work in Planner

With the new integration between the Project Online Desktop Client and Planner, task owners can track granular task details in a lightweight tool. Project managers retain control over the project’s work breakdown structure and can easily view the detailed work being done against a task.

This capability may also be used to reduce complexity of project plans in Project, enabling the project manager to control a smaller number of tasks while task owners can further break down the tasks in Planner. Teams that manage their work in Project Online can better streamline work with teams that use Planner.

Image of the Planner dashboard set to the Charts view, with an Excel pop-up window displayed showing detailed task data.

For more details, see “Streamline cross-team work with the newly integrated Project Online Desktop Client and Microsoft Planner.”

We are excited to be adding agile functionality to Project and integration with Planner. Both are available now through Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. We look forward to your comments and feedback—feel free to submit feedback through our Project UserVoice and Planner UserVoice sites!

 

Frequently asked questions

Q. How do I get the features included in agile in Project?

A. Agile in Project is available for Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. The feature works with Project standalone .mpp files and with Project Online. It does not work with Project Server 2016—if you open Project connected to Project Server 2016, the agile in Project feature won’t show up. If you open an .mpp file with agile data in a previous version of Project, you won’t see the agile fields, but the agile data won’t be lost.

Q. How do I get Project and Planner integration capability?

A. To get the integration capability, you need to subscribe to either Project Online Professional or Project Online Premium. For Planner, you need to subscribe to Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1-E5, or an Education plan.