Every PMO leader in the UK right now is being asked some version of the same question: what are we doing about the Microsoft Project Online retirement?
And for many organisations, the answer being proposed is - just move to Planner. It's already in your Microsoft 365 tenant, it's included in your licence, and it's what Microsoft themselves are pointing people towards.
We're not here to tell you Planner is a bad product. It isn't. But if you're currently running a PMO on Project Online, there are specific things your team does today that Planner simply cannot do. Before you migrate, you deserve to know exactly what those are.
1. Cross-portfolio visibility
In Project Online, a portfolio manager could open a single view and see every active project, its status, health, resourcing, dependencies. That portfolio-level lens is fundamental to how PMOs make prioritisation decisions, spot risks early, and report upward with confidence.
Planner works at the plan level. You can create lots of plans. But there is no native, meaningful portfolio view that gives you a real-time consolidated picture of your entire delivery landscape. At scale, this isn't a minor inconvenience, it's a governance gap.
2. Resource management and capacity planning
Ask any PMO leader what their biggest operational headache is, and resource management will be near the top of the list. Who is doing what? Where are people overloaded? What does the pipeline look like against current resource commitments?
Project Online had a proper resource management module. Planner has none of that. You can assign tasks to people. That's it. There is no view of resource utilisation, no capacity modelling, no forward-looking demand vs supply analysis.
3. Programme management
A programme is not a big project. It's a collection of related projects, coordinated to deliver an outcome that none of the individual projects could deliver alone. Managing a programme requires cross-project dependency management, benefits tracking, shared risk registers, and the ability to roll up status across multiple workstreams.
Planner can manage tasks within a single plan. It has no native concept of a programme, no way to model the relationships between projects, track shared dependencies at scale, or view benefits realisation across related delivery activity.
4. Financial management and cost tracking
Project-level budgeting, cost tracking, and financial forecasting are core PPM capabilities. Most organisations running a project portfolio need to know, at any given point, how much money has been spent, how much is committed, and how that compares to the approved budget.
Planner has no financial management features. None. You cannot track budget, actual spend, or forecast to completion. If cost management is part of your PMO's remit, and it is in most organisations, you will need to solve this somewhere else.
5. Governance workflows and stage gates
Most mature PMOs operate a project lifecycle with formal stage gates, checkpoints where projects are reviewed, assessed, and either approved to proceed or paused. Project Online supported governance workflows natively. Planner does not have a concept of stage gates, project lifecycle management, or configurable approval workflows.
6. Compliance-grade audit trails
In the public sector especially, the ability to demonstrate what decisions were made, when, and by whom is not optional. Project Online provided that kind of audit trail. Planner, as a team task tool, was not designed with audit compliance in mind. The version history and change tracking available in Planner is not comparable to what a compliance-conscious PMO needs.
7. Executive and board-level reporting
One of the PMO's primary functions is to produce information that helps senior leaders make decisions. That means clear, consistent, timely reporting on portfolio health, project status, risks, costs, and delivery confidence. Planner's reporting capabilities are limited. You get basic charts and board views, useful for team coordination, but not what an executive or a board needs to make portfolio investment decisions.
The pattern here is important
Every item on this list represents a capability that your PMO may be taking for granted because Project Online quietly provided it. When the tool goes away in September 2026, those capabilities don't move to Planner automatically. They disappear, unless you've consciously chosen a platform that provides them.
