Meet Alex, a Senior Program Manager at Contoso Grocery, an enterprise food and beverage company. Alex is using Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Copilot to orchestrate a cross-team product launch for a new line of ready-to-eat meal kits. From optimizing team collaboration to tracking every deadline, Planner helps keep Alex informed and the launch on course.
Download PDF versionAlex starts his morning by checking My Day in Planner for a single view into what he needs to accomplish today. He sees a task assignment tied to the Meal Kit Launch Plan he’s leading: “Prep status report for cross-org Quarterly Business Review (QBR) next week.”
At the beginning of the launch project, Alex established a project baseline and received stakeholder approval. Timelines are running one week behind, so Alex will explore options to get back on track.
To begin his QBR status update, Alex clicks Go to premium
plan right from the task for an overview of the full plan.
No need to comb through individual task details. Instead, he
asks Copilot in Planner: “Summarize Meal Kit Launch Plan
progress. Which tasks are behind?” Copilot identifies five late
tasks, but one stands out: an at-risk task assigned to Babek
in finance—”Approve vendor budget.”
Planner shows that another team is leading the Sprint Planning and it’s already in progress. He’s been added as a key contributor.
Diego selects the plan in his My Plans view, where he reviews details such as goals, timeline, and status. By selecting Timeline view,* Diego can see the tasks and timeline displayed visually.
To learn how his contributions fit into Sprint Planning, Diego checks Task Dependencies.* He wants to ensure he’s not blocking anyone from completing their work.
Diego asks Copilot in Planner* to help him break down an assigned tasks into smaller, easy-toaction steps.
While reviewing the Copilot-suggested subtasks, Diego notices that one relies on work from a team spread across time zones. He selects the People view to see the other tasks assigned across the team. Diego notices that his coworker from a previous initiative, Adele, has a related task on the project and she’s only an hour ahead. He messages her using the task’s Teams channel chat to ask his question.
After chatting with Adele, Diego realizes he needs to dedicate two hours of his day tomorrow to the project. He blocks time on his calendar to focus on the deliverable without distractions.
Diego’s team is also in the process of retiring an existing product from market. From My Plans, he selects the "Product Deprecation Plan," and then selects Board view to see all the tasks his team is responsible for.
To visually track tasks, Diego previously created buckets for each phase of the product deprecation process. He adds a task to the “Executing” bucket, so he’ll remember to conduct a team orientation.
Diego completes the market research he started this morning, so he finalizes the analysis report for his manager.
Before heading home, Diego selects the My Tasks view one last time to confirm he has accomplished everything he needed to. Diego signs off, feeling great about his progress today.
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