Navigating Project Management with M365

Emma (00:06):

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make Others Successful, our podcast where we share stories, insights, and strategies on how to build a better workplace. We're right there alongside of you. We're trying to build a better workplace here at Bulb Digital. So today we're going to discuss why project management is so difficult as well as individual task management and why the Microsoft 365 tools feel like they're not intuitively helpful with these problems. Easy.

Mitch (00:32):

This is an easy question to answer. We've got it.

Emma (00:34):

No problem. And kind of part two to the whole thing is I want us to share what steps we each individually take so that we can still leverage these tools and make them work for us. So I hope by the end of this we get to a good place where we give you some hacks on how to still make these tools work for project management and task management. So let's do a quick introduction. I've got here with me, Matt Dressel and chairman. Hello. And I'm all for of us touch project management in a way, but I'm really curious to get you guys' take from a project lead standpoint on how you utilize these tools.

Mitch (01:07):

Oh yeah.

Emma (01:09):

So let's start with the big question of what do you feel like are some of the major challenges with Microsoft Tools when it comes to project management?

Mitch (01:19):

Yeah, I feel like the thing that comes to mind first is if someone uses Microsoft Tools most often that means they have a Microsoft 365 subscription and with that comes a couple project management tools like Planner to do and teams can facilitate some project management and a lot of that is built with a very simple thin approach to project management. It is not enterprise level project management and a lot of people run into trying to do enterprise, very complex project management, and they keep hitting walls and get frustrated and come up against licensing issues and stuff like that. That creates a lot of friction for people and they're constantly hoping to figure out a way to do it without having to navigate those array of tools.

Emma (02:18):

So when I hear you say that, I think on the flip side then it must work super well for small or medium sized businesses that aren't necessarily trying to use it at the enterprise level.

Mitch (02:29):

Yeah, that's an easy assumption to make sure it's not entirely true. They're trying to fix some of the issues. There's a lot of tools I mentioned that there's the planner and to do and stuff like that, that they feel like unique tools that someone has to figure out when do I use which they're trying to bring all those together into the new planner in order to prevent that, but they're not doing much outside of bringing them together. Frankly. We've talked about it at length on some of our other videos, but I wish it was a little more fully baked from a feature perspective. Matt probably has some thoughts on maybe why things are that way just based on some product history.

Matt (03:16):

Yeah, it's not just product history, but it's like fundamentally project management as a profession or as a role in organizations is not well understood by a lot of people and what different tools are trying to accomplish are very different in how they're supposed to work and what master they're serving. For example, some people want project management because as a leader I need insights into how things are going. Some people want project management because I don't know what I'm supposed to do every day and it's frustrating for me. Some people want project management because their projects are always delayed and are never on time. Some people want project management because they are overwhelmed themselves in managing tasks and they think adding another person that's going to have a role for project management is going to solve this problem for them. There's so many reasons that people think about print and how they think about project management.

(04:10):

Building a software package that will be able to manage all of those effectively is a challenge in its own right. People and organizations have spent lots of money on bespoke solutions to these problems and at their core, all of these solutions have challenges. Microsoft's in particular, I would say their core problem is the standard 80%, 80 20 problem that Microsoft has with a lot of their products. It works pretty well for 80% of the scenarios and for the 10% it's absolutely horrid. It's 20 or 20%. Yeah, it's absolutely horrible. So that's one piece of it. And then the other piece is unlike many traditional project management tools that try to only address when you have a project, you create a project and has a project charter and it has a Gantt chart and it has tasks and it has these things and then you as a person, you log into that system and you see some things, but it's not really going to cover everything and it's really not my job to give you a task.

(05:14):

This Microsoft has a bunch of other tools that are all about my personal tasks and my personal management of my personal time, and that creates an additional layer of complexity and expectation. When you tell someone, well Planner, you could use Planner, it's so great. It's integrated with all the other tools. There's a perception that that immediately creates that says, well, you also have a to-do app, which is where I keep all my tasks, or you have an Outlook app that has all my emails, and so obviously all this stuff is integrated just the way that I perceive that it should be integrated in my mind. No, it's integrated in whatever way they decided to do it when they first started. And so there's a huge expectation gap between the expectation and the reality of what it is that's created by many of these things. So again, world issues about project management and what that profession does, product perspective like how Microsoft approaches products, and then integral to the way that Microsoft's 360 fives products work and this disparity between team slash enterprise work and individual work.

Mitch (06:20):

I'll give you all that. I think you're right, but I do want to point out, if you go buy any project management tool off the shelf, subscribe to some other software as a service, they need to survive on that service. They're going to build into it, and so that often leads to something that maybe covers more bases than what planner can. And so when a lot of people look at Planner, they say, are you serious? The notifications work this way, or I can't add a field here, or I can't track X, Y or Z on a task. It feels very, it's not even diversion 1.0 yet and they've been sitting on it for years.

Matt (06:59):

Yeah, I mean it is all a matter of whether or not you're trying to fulfill a true project management solution, which Microsoft has a completely different product that has been for years, for 20 years, one of the premium solutions for that type of work in large enterprises, right, Microsoft project. So yeah, I mean you're not wrong at all. When they released Planner as a starting point, we're trying to fit in between today, it's a little bit different story. They're trying to talk about it differently, but they have a real problem because they have a completely different product set that's focused on this enterprise bigger project management functionality, and that creates this tension between the two of them, which I'm not here to make an excuse for it. The thing that I would say is they're creating their own problem in that because they don't provide a solution, people are using third party solutions which don't integrate very well with what the rest of the tools are, and it just creates a bigger problem for organizations.

Mitch (08:06):

Do you ever see that changing? I know people are listening being like, I just want it to be better. Please. If it just had these things, it would feel so much better. I want them to invest in it a little bit so that finally I can get by with it and not go buy another tool because that Microsoft project exists. Do you ever see that?

Matt (08:24):

I mean we're getting by with it. Do I see them making it better? I can't tell you. I have no idea. Look at

Mitch (08:32):

Your crystal

Matt (08:33):

Ball. That is a, that's the million dollar question. Yeah. My understanding is that there was a lot of turf wars between planner and project stuff. That's my understanding of it. There was going to release something more with planner and then they didn't with even today that some of the stuff they released, they have some things that are out there that are really half done because they have this challenge between these different things. So I have no idea. They're a huge organization. I don't know. I can tell you that I would love for them to solve that problem, either get rid of planner and turn project for the project for the web into whatever they want. This the future thing to be turn the stuff in, loop into something. I don't know what their solution is, but having this thing that's half there isn't super great and it would be a lot better if they would solve the problem. So I'm all for them fixing the problem. I have no idea whether or not they will do it.

Emma (09:26):

So all of that is really focused on the huge animal of project management. But you started to talk about it a little bit in your response, Matt, on top of project management, everyone has individual task management. So we all have our to-do lists. We all know we get assigned things if we're on projects or if you're not even on specific organized projects, but you're just on multiple initiatives, you have to manage that to-do list somewhere somehow. And it sounds like in a perfect world, you were kind of alluding that this would be integrated with what the project management solution would have, but where do you feel like even not on the project management side, just on task management to do is kind of what I'm talking about. Where does that fall a bit short? Why is that so difficult to use to manage your own tasks?

Mitch (10:08):

Well, task management, you're kind of getting to it is very personal. Someone they want control over their stuff and they're going to be particular and everyone's going to work a little bit differently. And that creates another one of these complex challenges from a software perspective of how do we build one thing that does everything for everyone. Instead, they built something that kind of does

Emma (10:33):

A lot of things.

Mitch (10:35):

Instead they build something that kind of does things for some people. I don't know. I run into things where I have my own, I have a notion task list where I pull my stuff out and I have more control over it in my notion board and it feels like sacrilegious, but I can't reorder things we're talking about. This is in this moment in time, they're coming out with a new planner which pulls to do into planner, which then makes it rely even more on one central tool. So that means that has to be really good. When we tried it out, I loaded a personal task in there and I couldn't reorder them. I know it's in beta and they're trying to slowly roll this thing out, but it felt like there's little things that personalization needs to be able to happen really well, and the thing needs to be really flexible and it just isn't. They kind of prescribe a specific way that I don't know if that's how they work internally, but I don't know anyone that works the way that they kind of prescribe it's

Emma (11:38):

Set up. Sure. Yeah. I love that you're touching on control. So that being a major just variable of being able to organize and manage your own tasks, I definitely relate to that of each of us have a different way of, do you delete when you finish them, do you check them off? Do you move them to a done spot? I mean everyone's going to manage these in a different way. So does the tool allow you to have that control those options and decide? So I want to get your thoughts on this map, but if you can kind of bring us into the second part of the conversation of how do we then continue to leverage Microsoft 365 tools to do our own task management? Mitch has already admitted he just doesn't use Microsoft 365

Mitch (12:18):

For that specific part. Yeah, he

Emma (12:20):

Uses Notion, but I'm curious to get your take on why you think it's difficult and then do you have a hack that you use personally?

Matt (12:27):

Yeah. Task management is a very personal thing for people who are operating on lots of things, which is oftentimes what we're doing. It is less a personal preference and more of a, I give you something to do, you need to do these things for a large number of people. And that area is the area that project managers are often involved in and their focus is on bringing project related tasks into your personal world so that you can figure out how to accomplish them. And I think that is the area that they need to get working related to personal task management. Weaving in the ability to have additional customization makes a lot of sense, but the way that works today, I don't work out of it. I don't work out of anything. So I have way too many things and way too many places to utilize a tool for that purpose, for

Emma (13:29):

A common source of to-do list, you have yours

Matt (13:32):

In different, I have a DevOps board for one project. I have a DevOps board for another project I have you manage several planner boards and loops loop tasks related to projects that I work on. I've got reminders in Outlook and reminders in a secondary outlook and reminders in Slack channels, and I have lots of things everywhere, so I'm not a very good example of what their target market is.

Mitch (13:57):

I was just going to say, I feel like we should preface that with we're a consulting company, so that means working on lots of projects at the same time, lots of different contexts switching.

Matt (14:06):

It's not only complicated by the fact that we're working with lots of different people, so we have lots of stuff going on, but we also break the contextual barrier between one organization's information, another organization's information, our information, and they're all, it's a very complex arrangement. With that said, for our internal processes, the things that I'm doing are getting directed by people's, what people are putting into different boards and we're having meetings about. I also think that people have a challenge about back to the broader thing about what they're trying to get out of it. I think people who are trying to understand the overall tasks and what's available or what needs to be done in a particular project, I think Planner can do some of those things. I think Loop provides another alternative for that. I think where lots of things fall down is I want reporting on it. I want notifications on it. I want

Emma (15:05):

History.

Matt (15:06):

History. I want want to be able to track hours. I want to be able to have estimates for what the cost of this thing is going to be or show me when I make a change here, do resource planning across multiple things. I would tell you that that's not going to be anything that you're going to get at Office 365 as a free product. It's just not for those later things.

Mitch (15:30):

It's not free.

Matt (15:31):

It's free as part of your main subscription. It is free.

Mitch (15:34):

That is nuanced language,

Matt (15:37):

But it's the way it is. People are

Mitch (15:38):

Paying for this tool

Matt (15:39):

With the subscription. They're not.

Mitch (15:41):

Yes, they are.

Matt (15:42):

The reason they purchased it is to get an email account

Mitch (15:45):

That doesn't change the fact that they're paying for a tool

Matt (15:48):

Either way.

Emma (15:49):

It's the lowest level of buy-in. So I think some of the things we're really getting at here though, which is helpful to sort of think through. If you're looking for a tool to manage the complexity of your project at an enterprise level that's going to integrate with individual tasks really seamlessly. It's not going to necessarily do any of those things. So in that sense, you were saying it might make sense to buy a outside project management

Mitch (16:15):

Tool. I mean a lot of people default to that. I think there are maybe some guidelines that we can put up for people of like, if you can work within these walls, you can do this thing. But yeah, frankly, a lot of people just say, yeah, I talked to a lead a while back where they're like, Hey, I saw your video about the new planner. We switched from Asana not too long ago and I'm wondering, is the new planner going to do X, Y, and Z? And they had this laundry list of stuff and I was like, no, you should switch back if you love that. If you loved Asana and it worked well for you and you're just trying to save 20 bucks a person per month or whatever, and it's actually working for you, you should go back to that. It's worth your money then trying to wrestle a subpar tool to do that. But

Matt (17:06):

That conversation is I think the most relevant and interesting conversation, which is to say, why did that person want to switch back

Mitch (17:14):

To

Matt (17:14):

What to planner?

Mitch (17:16):

Switch to planner was to save money,

Matt (17:18):

But no, not just to save money, only if it

Emma (17:21):

Was able to

Matt (17:23):

Do some sort of minimum thing.

Mitch (17:25):

Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say that. That was not part of the sentence that came out of their mouth when I asked why you switch. That's the reality, but that's

Matt (17:33):

The

Mitch (17:33):

Reality. That's the underlying desire for sure.

Matt (17:38):

There's an expectation that I shouldn't have to pay 20 more dollars to someone to do this type of thing. And I think Microsoft has been, and there probably still are in some sort of interesting state to try to figure that out in my opinion. They either need to cut it and say, we don't offer a free tool as part of an included tool. I won't call it free, an included tool as part of our subscription, or they need to make it valuable, make it useful, make it reasonable to use, make it so that these tools that are 20 bucks a month, 10 bucks a month, that the core features that they have, they at least can do that.

Emma (18:19):

So we can't talk about project management and task management within Microsoft 365 without mentioning copilot because Copilots coming on the scene and I definitely think a lot of voices out there are saying it's completely changing the game with how people manage their time, their tasks, their action items, all of these things. You

Mitch (18:35):

Sound like a Microsoft employee.

Emma (18:36):

I know. What are you doing?

Mitch (18:37):

I think are they paying you for this?

Emma (18:39):

I think it's completely, well, you think it is. People say that I probably am one of those people. I'm definitely a fan of copilot so far. But outside of just copilot, because there's a lot of AI tools now on the scene who schedule your tasks, for example, into your calendar. I think that one's called motion. I mean, if you're on any type of social media you're getting ads on, have AI, a personal assistant make your day smoother. This is more to the individual task management side, but do you think any unlocking that will actually really change?

Matt (19:12):

I mean it's very interesting though. I would love to hear your feedback on how you think copilot is affecting this. I would say AI is currently helping in two ways that are all tangentially related to this. One is what you talked about a little bit, which is time management, not task management, but time management and project management. Most people when they think about project manager, it's scheduling a meeting, taking notes in the meeting, doing action items in the meeting. Those are the bulk of their work. Most of those things, if not all of those things can be done by AI at this point if you allow it to. Those pieces I think are huge and I think they also have a huge impact on the tools that you might be able to use, right? Meaning now when I have a task management thing and I got to go create something on a board, I can go, Hey, take the action items, make tasks and assign 'em to the people and I'm done, right? Those types of things for sure. day-to-day task and task management, I think it transforms how people accomplish the tasks. But our day-to-day managing tasks and managing how humans work in the world, I don't see that copilots or any AI tool is going to transform that in the very near future. And by very near, I mean six months a year kind of thing. I think with AI in particular looking more than a year out is looking into the deep ocean. You can't really figure out what's down there.

Emma (20:51):

Can you expand a little bit more on what you mean by AI is helping with time management versus task

Matt (20:56):

Management? You mentioned motion. Motion is going to allow you to schedule time to do those things and help you ensure that you have time to do the tasks that you want, which will help with task completion, which will also try to help you organize what you're doing, but it's not really going to do the other things related task management that I believe are, if you have someone who's being effective in their job as it is, they're managing their time, they're managing their tasks, they're managing, they're getting their work done. Where it isn't helping is when I'm overloaded going, Hey, I'm going to have critical thinking about what we should do about that and help resolve that. And some people may say, well, that's not my job, that's the project manager's job or that's the business owner. So all my job is to tell 'em what that thing is.

(21:40):

But I still think there's a bigger piece of that that is on the individual and isn't today the way that we currently have the data structured can't be managed by AI future state. Maybe you could be in a world where all projects and all resources and everything is all in a commonplace, but now you get into enterprise level project management and resource management. Now you're looking at, well, I know what these people's skills are and I know what these people's skills are and I know what they're working on and I know what they're working on. This person can't get these things done, so what can we move around to have these things done? Which also makes an assumption that every person is a cog in a wheel that you can just reorganize to get the thing working, which also I think does not reflect the reality in many organizations

Emma (22:26):

Of how actual humans work. Do you want to give your comment before I leave mine?

Mitch (22:30):

I was just going to, no, I was going to direct it to you, but no, I think all of that is, it's tricky. All of the extra copilot fanciness for the Microsoft tools is under another license, so it's another cost tier for you to experience some of that. So it's not as much, it doesn't feel like a friend quite yet. I wish it felt more like a friend that instead of something you need to buy in order to benefit from, which I know there's a business logical reason behind it, but yeah, it just feels like it's not coming alongside quite yet.

Emma (23:14):

I really liked your differentiation map between time management and task management because I think the biggest benefit I've seen as a project manager using copilot is the time I get back from being able to employ the tool to do things like you're talking about scheduling notes, action items follow up to be able to streamline those tasks, not necessarily do the task for me, but make the task much quicker or doing some of it for me. And so then I can actually get that time back to then work on other things and just take on a lot more work. So that would be, I think my take on it, my hot take is, yeah, it's not necessarily managing my tasks. I still control my to-do list, but it definitely helps manage my time.

Matt (23:58):

So the other thing I was going to say is we've been talking a lot about cost and where things are. It's one of the primary differences between the value proposition for something like planner versus something like copilot. In the case of planner, people are very much looking at it as, when I call it an included free thing, they go, well, what can it replace? And if you say, oh, if Microsoft says, oh, it can replace the $20 subscription to Asana, but it can't, so then you're like, well, what can it replace? Well, can it replace a $5 subscription to one of the basic Kanban systems? Maybe? I don't know. But it's truly a, what can it replace situation copilot? The value proposition is largely about I can be five times more effective, I can get 10% more done, I can get 50% more done. Not only can I get more done, I can do more things that aren't in my primary wheelhouse because I know how to use copilot to use the knowledge that's already built into our platform to do the next thing.

(25:00):

And so it's interesting, I'm talking about that not I want to talk about copilot, but because I think that it's a key differentiation about the value proposition and it's one of the problems that Microsoft has when they talk about to do and planner and project for the web and project. Those things are directly comparable to other services in the marketplace that someone can easily replace it with. It is more difficult. We had this conversation last week about copilot to say, well, copilot, I'm just going to replace it with chat. GPT chat, GPT only has access to the public information. Copilot has access to all that private information. And so then you have this, there is nothing else in the marketplace that you're really comparing it truly directly to it. Interesting.

Mitch (25:41):

Just apples, I feel like I want to steer it. Emma's the one interviewing us, but I do feel like we need to get to her. I feel like a lot of this is focused around this feeling. I think we feel pressure to alleviate people's hurdles that they're feeling with these tools because we're saying, Hey, you can use Microsoft subscription better. You can use all these tools to build a better workplace. And naturally the project management, task management is an element to that. And so it feels like we need to give a glimpse into how someone can get over those hurdles. I think the picture we're trying to paint is it is not a beautiful green pasture. There's some gotchas, but we do, while we may not use it completely a hundred percent of the time because of the nature of our business, we do use them still, particularly like planner. Do we want to talk about maybe some of the tricks or anything that you have figured out as if I were telling someone to go use planner? Here's what I would say.

Emma (26:52):

Yeah. Well, I think number one planner from a visual standpoint is a wonderful tool if you're trying to collaborate with another team or even within your team on just status updates. So if you're going to use it in a weekly meeting, I kind of think of it as a light version of DevOps where you can still use labels to your advantage. From a Scrum standpoint, we use Storypoints as labels, which that's kind of a hack. So you can kind of see what's different sizes because you

Mitch (27:22):

Can't do effort otherwise. So we find a different way to indicate

Emma (27:26):

That. So yeah, we use labels with a number on them. And

Matt (27:29):

Which I want to point out, this is one of the challenges Microsoft has, I believe this is my guess, Microsoft holds that feature back from planner because they don't want to allow more people to not pay for one of their other services that do it. And that piece, that would

Mitch (27:44):

Surprise me way so dumb

Matt (27:45):

Because

Emma (27:47):

We are having to hack our

Matt (27:48):

Way. People actually, people who actually do need the other features of plan of project for the web, they need it and they will be willing to sacrifice the challenges of using project for the web. But that as an example feature, it's very frustrating to me that I'm sure that there's a business reason for it, but it's a stupid business reason. Right, right. Go ahead, sorry. Amen.

Mitch (28:08):

Yeah,

Emma (28:10):

No, that makes sense. But I think the point I want to drive forward is oftentimes you can kind of figure out work around a hack, we'll work around the hack, but it's frustrating that we have to do that in the first place. So that would be an example. One of our relationships with a client who we're consultants, we use that on our weekly meeting. We show then between different columns within planner, move things from Dev to test to prod. And then I do enjoy the fact that you can click everything off a little dopamine head of everything we got done, but you do still have the history there of everything. What's not great is you don't have the iterations necessarily sprints and that kind of thing that you have in DevOps, but like I said, we've worked around how to still use the tool and you can use it with external users. So that's been really nice as well.

Mitch (28:57):

Yeah. Well that gives me another thought. Now that project for the web is coming together with a planner. I'm interested to see if we ever revisit the idea of using it instead of DevOps for certain non code based projects.

Emma (29:12):

I'd be open to it. Absolutely. I think the timeline features and different things like that are super valuable. And the dependencies,

Mitch (29:20):

The thing that I just thought of when you were talking through that is we were literally just this morning all working as a team to write our blogs and we sort of have figured out this batch way to do it together. And we used Planner as part of that process, maybe not in the most visible way, but what we do is we have a list of ideas and we have a flow that we can kick off an automation that says, Hey, go create these tasks for someone in Planner. And so it creates an actual task in Microsoft respect in their terms, how they would define it. And then we assign that to a person and then within that we link to a Loop page. So it's like we can't quite use Planner to do all of it. We use Planner to be the source of truth of like, is this thing done? But then we work within the context of other tools and maybe link to them in order to get back and forth between things to get this stuff done.

Emma (30:25):

And I got an email today of reminder, this task is due. This is your blog topic and this is when it's due. And so that's obviously all automated, so you're using the power of that, but then we're actually doing the work in Loop and that

Mitch (30:38):

Kind of thing. Which Loop opens another door to project management? Well,

Emma (30:42):

We haven't talked about Loop yet, and I feel like we can't leave it out from the project management and task management conversation because it is a super powerful tool. You hit it on the head, Matt, when you said these tools like copilot make you five times more effective. So when we're thinking about collaboration and communication when it comes to Project Management Loop as a tool really helps the effectiveness of collaboration and communication, therefore it makes project management a lot easier. So it's sort of like these things that are kind of on the outskirts of project management, but they do help with managing a project. We set up workspaces, so you have one workspace and loop per project that's working really well for us. As Loop evolves, that structure may change, but I think that as a single source of truth on a project, it's not necessarily a task management tool, but it is helping us keep all of our content, our readouts, our presentations, everything in one place. And in effect, it helps the project.

Mitch (31:43):

My blog is actually, the blog that we were writing this morning is about project management. Now we use Planner in Loop for that. Oh, wow. Yeah, imagine that. The thing that I sort of realized is how we have talked about intranets in the past of being the one place for someone to go to get whatever they need as an employee. I sort of look at what we stand up in Loop in the same light for project management purposes,

Emma (32:09):

Which is actually different from what maybe we've said in the past of teams before Loop existed. I know we have the video about teams really being that single source of truth or that place you go on the project and while we still do structure our projects that way, loop is kind of coming out on top, wouldn't you say? Yeah,

Mitch (32:26):

Yeah, yeah. Just the ability to set up some standard things like here's the project overview and you have a page which is all that information formatted nicely. You can have a page that integrates and pulls in your task boards and you can have pages that are built to deliver readouts or the current status of things or keep track of meeting notes and things like that. And it feels more and more, all these things that are coming from different places can be pulled together into Loop in a decently nice way.

Emma (32:58):

So I think a question that's still outstanding, but we did have a lead come to us at one point and he said, I set up my team and I set up all the tabs at the top and I've got my files and I've got my links out to different things. And he felt like he was doing it the right way, but it also just felt like it was too many things. So now I think we're switching to, or at least I am, as my project on my projects Loop has all of those things. I'm realizing I don't really need Word documents anymore. I don't really need PowerPoints anymore because I can do all the collaboration. I need to in Loop and I could in theory export to PDF and that can be the leave behind. I could even do the presentation in Loop if I just leave some space and scroll. We talked about that. So because now I'm not even needing to use these other tools, will teams become something that I just link out to from Loop instead of the other way? This is an open question. I

Matt (33:50):

I think we're unique. I think if we were in a different world where we didn't have Slack, you would be linking from teams into Loop

Emma (33:57):

Because all the conversation would be happening in Teams, right?

Mitch (34:00):

Yeah. I think the concept of Teams being the place that has all the helpful links is still a valid concept. I think they disabled or removed the ability to render a webpage in teams. As far as I know for security concerns, instead of making teams a pseudo web browser, they just made it so when you click the tab, it goes to that in a browser, which totally kills the stay within the same context of the same tool, which is unfortunate, but I get why they did it. I think the gap is 100% still right now. We have to create a workspace for Loop and we need to create a team for a project. And those two things still feel a little bit disparate.

Matt (34:46):

We have been disjointed, been communicating that to everyone we can for a while now because definitely a problem. Microsoft is creating a bigger problem with this particular scenario. And the thing that I would tell any of our customers is you're going to need both. If you want to start using Loop, you're going to need both, and you're going to need to figure out your own way to make them work together and link together whether or not you want it to be Loop links to teams or teams link to Loop. I would never recommend someone not have one without the other because it just doesn't make any sense. Otherwise, you're breaking one of our core tenants, which is topic-based communication, and you're going to have your communication in email or in chat messages, which breaks the whole point.

Mitch (35:26):

Let's maybe draw lines around that. So Loop would serve as the knowledge base or the scratch pad for stuff. The place where you can build something together and teams would be the place where you talk about those things. Is that close?

Matt (35:43):

So if Microsoft's listening, this is what I've been trying, been thinking about, trying to explain to them when they came out with a loop, they should have chosen to create teams and loop in an integrated way. And you could either choose to back teams, teams shared workspaces with Loop, or you could choose to back it with SharePoint and the experience with Loop Files, all of those conversations that everything would be tightly integrated with Loop and that would be your backend and you wouldn't have access to lists and you wouldn't have access to the other features that are in SharePoint. If you don't choose that, then you would still have SharePoint as your backend. It's your standard basic experience because I believe that that more accurately reflects how the end user would want to have those two things to work together. Does that make sense? No, I think it's the first time you've heard it. You

Mitch (36:31):

Say it Well, like I said, I've been having conversations with the team about this. I said something similar to them. When you create a team today, so much infrastructure gets built underneath that. Why can't it just create a loop workspace too that

Matt (36:47):

Well, I know why.

Mitch (36:49):

Yeah, there's maybe technical, but from a user perspective, that would be the most intuitive, right? But I think it leaves a little bit to be desired. I think your concept of pick a SharePoint site versus a Loop, I would hope that they would be able to articulate that in a more user-friendly way and where they don't have to understand the tech.

Matt (37:13):

I think most people who've never used teams before, if I'm a person just out of school that's just starting in the workforce, if it just made it in loop, I wouldn't care.

Mitch (37:22):

You wouldn't know any different. For people

Matt (37:23):

Who have business processes that are built around, oh, I need a list and I need these other

Mitch (37:29):

Things, heavy document version management

Matt (37:31):

Controls, I need PDFs, I need Word documents, I need whatever. I think there are cases for both. I think I struggle, just like what you were saying, I struggle to see a world where I can make them work well at the same time together because you so often want to be referenced. I want them to be so tightly integrated. And if they're tightly integrated, what's the point of having the other one?

Mitch (37:54):

Yeah. This makes me think of the whole toolbox analogy where it's like I want to be able to locate each tool as its own unique tool that serves a particular purpose, but it serves secondary purposes too. Like a hammer is to nail something down, but you can also pry something up. You can also demolish something with it. There's other tools that can do all of those same things, but they might be better or worse at it. Microsoft, their approach is very much like that, where it's like, here's your toolbox of stuff. In this case in particular, there is such a specific workflow or a specific standard that they're trying to set with you create a team for these purposes that it feels like Loop is just a small add-on to that. It would integrate so well. It shouldn't feel like a separate tool in the toolbox. It feels like it should be one of those Swiss Army knife.

Emma (38:52):

Right now it feels like it's a tool in a different toolbox almost. It doesn't even feel like there's a spot for it,

Matt (38:59):

But it's very interesting back on the project management piece of it and Planner in particular, that's one of the things people don't like about Planner is that they didn't make it as its own thing. It could only get created as part of a group and a team M can't win. They can't win. And I say this flippantly a little bit is like they can't win for either way. They choose, but the reason they can't win is because they didn't go all the way. If they had gone all the way, and either way, it would've probably worked out. But they also struggled doing that because they're getting one price for all of these tools. And when you think about everything between bookings and stream

Mitch (39:37):

And they're enough

Matt (39:38):

Money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You go, well, how can they afford to make all of those things

Mitch (39:42):

Let pull up their suite financial report. Really?

Emma (39:45):

Yeah, right. All right. So I want to say, I'm not

Matt (39:47):

Saying they

Emma (39:47):

Can't do it. I want us to leave our listeners with just each of our kind of hot takes on what we think Microsoft 365 tools can do for people with project management or task management. Take it whichever way you want, but I think I do want to leave this on an optimistic note. I know we all use these tools and whether or not we talk for hours about their shortcomings, but yeah, what's each of our hot take on where you would tell someone to start using these

Mitch (40:16):

When you can understand maybe some of the enterprise level desire that you have is not going to be met and you can work with the ability to accept some gotchas and very much have that this is good enough. We can still accomplish things within these walls. If you come to the table with that perspective, you'll be totally fine. Run with planner, run with to do, try it out. It's fine. And so don't feel like everything needs to be perfect, and particularly in the project management world, you compliance people love to have everything just so

Emma (40:56):

He's looking at Matt and I.

Mitch (40:57):

Yeah, yeah. Which it's a good influence to have on the team, but a lot can get done with a little, yeah.

Emma (41:06):

Yeah. What about you, Matt?

Matt (41:08):

So I would just add a piece that we haven't really talked about but I think is a critical piece of this, which is to say if you are trying to manage tasks for a hundred people in a way that's in a process that's core to your business, and that has to happen the same way every single time, you don't need a project management tool at all. You need a business process automation tool. I think lot of times people take something that they think, well, I just need something to manage my tasks. But what they really need is we do this a hundred times a year or a day or whatever, and we just need to happen all the time. And when somebody leaves and we hire somebody else, they need to come in day one and be able to start doing this thing and just execute the thing.

(41:52):

And they think somehow that project management tools are going to solve that problem. Project management tools can help solve that problem. But your bigger problem is a process problem, an automation problem, a strategic organizational problem. These tools are meant for ad hoc projects. They're meant for, I get up in the morning, I go to work, we have a new thing that we're trying to do. I need to organize my tasks on those things. I need to plan out what we're going to do over the next month. We're going to go execute these things. I'm going to fit those in with my other tasks. It's going to get complete and it's going to get closed down. It's going to go away. It's not meant for enterprise solutions, which is primarily what you were talking about. And when you say enterprise, they leap. A lot of people leave what I'm talking about out. They go, well, I don't need all of this other, not huge company, but if you're trying to make the core of your business better, and that core is something that's repeated over and over and over again, and like I said, you want to be able to just drop somebody in and make it happen.

(42:55):

This isn't going to solve your problem.

Emma (42:56):

It's a process problem, not a tool problem.

Mitch (42:59):

I think that's really insightful. That goes to a lot of people I talk to. They're like, yeah, we have this thing that we do. I just need it recurring. I need to be able to put people in that process. And then I want to see where everything is in the process and be able to, that's not, and

Matt (43:16):

That's monday.com is focused on that. Other tools out there are focused on that. This is not that. And when I talk about that, I don't think monday.com is a project management tool. It helps

Emma (43:32):

You build a process. Is that what you're build? And definitely something that I've noticed that's kind of actually at the intersection. What you're both saying is if you're trying to build the process, well, learning or using a new tool where you don't understand the limitations is a hard thing to do because all the limitations are going to come up and you're going to be like, oh, I can't do that. Frustration can't do that. That gets frustrating, but then it limits the way you actually can think through the process. So

Matt (43:58):

You can't be creative with the process.

Emma (43:59):

So you almost have to do those things a bit separately and then bring your process into the tool, understand the limitations, be flexible about it. You said don't let good, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Mitch (44:12):

Yeah. That's literally one of the projects we had recently is someone came to us and said, Hey, I think I can use all these tools this way. Can you double check me? And so we did a mini discovery type project where we got to double check all those things and say, you're going to hit a wall there. Don't do this where, so we can sort of from a bird's eye look and see how all the pieces fit together. We understand the gotchas, but

Emma (44:39):

They weren't necessarily building their process while applying the tools. They knew their process

Mitch (44:44):

Already, right? They had something that was on repeat.

Emma (44:48):

So to recap us, and this was a big topic, obviously we talk about this for a long time, but project management, task management, why is it so difficult in the Microsoft 365 space? And then what hacks do we use in our business to actually make these tools work for us? I think we've shared a lot about really making sure that you're clear with the outcome that you're trying to have with both project management and task management and how you can then meet the tool where it's at or have the tool meet you where you are at. So just understanding the limitations are there. And a few of the tools that we talked about, just to recap, planner teams to do loop project for the web, which is an add-on and copilot, which is an add-on. And I just want to highlight, like you mentioned, Matt, all of these tools that we've been talking about in theory help your effectiveness, which helps manage projects and helps task management, but doesn't necessarily do the tasks for you or manage the project for you. So you just got to figure out what's going to work for your business and what gaps these things can help come in and fill. So thanks for listening today. If you have any comments or opinions on anything we talked about, definitely comment below the video or on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you and let us know if we should revisit this topic in a future podcast.

Mitch (46:06):

Awesome. Thanks Emma.

(46:08):

Thanks everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already subscribed to our show on your favorite podcasting app, so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulb Digital and special thanks to Eric Veneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to make others successful.com and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

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