Using Planner to Manage Microsoft 365 Change

Integrating Microsoft 365 Message Center with Microsoft Planner is one way of managing and tracking tasks related to updates and changes in your Microsoft 365 environment. 

As mentioned in some of our other blogs, a large proportion of change communication occurs in the M365 Message Center and much of this communication prompts necessary action to avoid disruption for your users and IT service desk. However, with the constant flow of information, it can be hard to keep track of which changes require action, by whom, by when. 

One way of tracking and managing this is by syncing your messages from the Microsoft 365 Message Center to Microsoft Planner.

You can do this by following the steps outlined below: 

Preparing your Team and Planner Board 

1 – Set up a Team for Managing Change in Microsoft Teams 

It is a good idea to create a Team to manage Message Center items and to create channels within the Team for individual workloads e.g. by product. 

Once you have created your Team, add a Planner Board to a tab in one of your channels. This is where the changes will appear once you have synced your Message Center to Planner in the admin center.  

2 - Customise your Planner Board

When the Message Center items sync with Planner, they become ‘tasks’. You can then create ‘buckets’ in Planner to organise your tasks.  

This is often done by either a) service or b) workflow. 

1. Organising Message Center tasks by service can be useful for assigning responsibility to individual product owners.
   
   To do this, you first create a bucket called ‘Message Center Posts’ for messages to sync into and then create a bucket for each service e.g. ‘Teams’, ‘SharePoint and OneDrive’, ‘M365 Copilot’, ‘Dynamics 365’.  
   
   
2. Organising Message Center tasks by workflow can be useful for triaging tasks, helping to determine which tasks are a priority.
   
   To do this, you first create a bucket called ‘un-triaged’ for messages to sync into and become tasks. You then create buckets for each step in the workflow e.g. ‘In Review’, ‘To Discuss’, ‘Closed’   
   

You can also add labels to tasks in your Planner board. It is recommended to update the default names of the labels to names which will be useful for those in your Team looking at the Planner board e.g. green = ‘New feature’, red = ‘Retirement’, blue = ‘user impact’. 

Although not the only source of information about Microsoft 365 change, it is fair to say that the Microsoft 365 Message Center is the main hub for change communication. Despite this, it is not always considered to be a very user-friendly tool, and as a result makes managing Microsoft 365 change quite difficult for IT teams and M365 product owners.

How to sync Planner with M365 Message Center 

Now that you have prepared and customised your Planner board in Teams, you need to configure the Message Center sync to Planner. 

To do this: 

1. Login to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center  
   
   
2. Navigate to the Message Center using the left-hand tool bar: Show all > Health > Message Center.  
   
   
3. Then at the top of the list of messages, select ‘Planner syncing’ and select ‘Set up syncing’ 
   
   
4. ‘Select your plan’ - you will see a couple of options: search for a plan or create a new plan in Planner. If you have followed the above steps, you will be able to search for a plan and find the name of the plan you created earlier. 
   
   
5. ‘Select a bucket’ - you can either create a new bucket or select an existing one. If you have followed the above steps, you will be able to select the bucket you created earlier (either ‘Message Center posts’ or ‘Untriaged’ depending on whether you are organising your messages by service or workflow).  
   
   
6. ‘Choose which messages to sync’ - select either ‘all updates’ or ‘only major updates’. You can also exclude updates from specific categories, products and services. 
   
   
7. ‘Choose which ‘current messages to import’ - you can choose to not import current messages or select from the last 7, 14, 21 or 28 days. 
   
   
8. Review and finish – double check you are happy with the options you have selected and then click ‘Finish’. 
   
   
9. Define Flow frequency – the last step involves choosing how often you want to automatically sync to Planner. This is done by creating a flow with Power Automate.  
   
   
10. You can now view your plan in Planner and will see the Message Center messages syncing to the plan in your Team. 

Using Planner to Manage Changes 

Now that you have synced the Message Center with Planner and have set up your plan in Teams, you will be able to use the Planner Board to better manage the influx of Message Center items.  

With Planner, you can: 

• Assign tasks to users in your Team 

• Set due dates 

• Add labels (see above recommendation about customising labels) 

• Categorise tasks into buckets e.g. by service or stage in the workflow 

• Add notes about each task 
  

Syncing M365 Message Center to Planner – is it worth it? 

Integrating the Microsoft 365 Message Center with Microsoft Planner certainly has many benefits... 

1. Simple Set Up
   It is quick and easy to set-up, with lots of detailed documentation available from Microsoft Learn on how to do it. 
   
   
2. Automatic Updates
   You can set up scheduled syncing at regular intervals, so that you can choose how often you want to sync changes. 
   
   
3. Accountability for Change Management
   Tasks can be assigned to Team members and deadlines can be set, ensuring it is clear who is responsible for actioning which change and by when.  
   
   
4. Customisable
   Tasks in Planner can be organised into buckets, which you can tailor to your team’s specific needs. As mentioned above, some common preferences are organising tasks into buckets by service or by stage in the workflow. You can also customise coloured labels which can be added to tasks, making it easier to categorise items. 
   
   
5. Progressing Tracking Charts
   You can track progress using the Charts view in Planner, to give your team an understanding of how well they are keeping on top of the Message Center items, which buckets are bigger than others and how many items require discussion. 

However, there are also some limitations to using Planner to manage Microsoft 365 evergreen change... 

1. Single Planner Board Restriction
   You can only sync your Message Center to one Planner plan, which can cause difficulties in big organisations where different views may be desired by different teams. For example, you cannot sync Teams changes in one plan and have Copilot changes in another. 
   
   
2. Unclear Information and Format
   The information which you see in Planner is no different to what you can already see in the Message Center, it is just organised differently.  The description provided by Microsoft is still long and often complicated, meaning the task cannot be easily understood at a quick glance. Also, any images provided by Microsoft in the Message Center cannot be included in the Planner tasks; they have to be downloaded separately.
   
   
3. No ability to update existing tasks
   If Microsoft updates a Message Center item (which happens frequently), a task which you have already ‘closed’ will not be updated. Rather, closed items will reappear if there is an update.
   
   
4. Manual Task Management
   Although the Message Center can automatically sync to Planner and is customisable, the actual categorisation, assignment of tasks and labelling can only be done manually. This is a very time-consuming process, especially when many new Message Center items flow through everyday, making it a difficult to stay on top of if there is no role dedicated to this process in an organisation. 

Some of these limitations can be addressed by customising Planner tasks using Power Automate. Details on how to do this can be found in MVP Nikki Chapple’s blog, where she explains several ways in which Planner can be customised for managing M365 change. 

As you can see, Planner certainly gives organisations a good start in the M365 change optimisation process as it enables responsibility and accountability for actions required by upcoming changes, updates and retirements. It also helps product owners to gain a better understanding of how well their team is managing the pace and scale of change through the Charts view.  

However, the process of customising Planner is incredibly manual making it a time-consuming process, which in an organisation lacking the resources for such role, is unlikely to get done. Although the customisation can be automated using Power Automate, this is not a simple process and requires knowledge of coding and is therefore, not necessarily the most efficient method of managing change. 

Microsoft themselves state that Level 400 of the Maturity Model when applied to Service Change Management can be achieved by integrating the Microsoft 365 Message Center with Planner. However, they state that to reach Level 500 an ‘organisation has invested in a change management solution that goes beyond what Planner can offer’, demonstrating that to truly manage Microsoft 365 change in an optimised, proactive manner, further investment is required.