There's a question that should be at the centre of every conversation about replacing Microsoft Project Online and it's not being asked nearly enough.
The question is this: what level of delivery are you actually managing?
Are you managing individual projects? A programme of related work? A full portfolio of investment across the organisation? All three? The answer to that question should determine which tool you choose. But in the rush to migrate before the Project Online retirement deadline, many organisations are skipping it entirely and heading straight to "we'll use Planner" without stopping to ask whether Planner is appropriate for the level of complexity they're managing.
The three levels (and why they're genuinely different)
Portfolio, programme and project management are not just different words for the same thing at different scales. They represent fundamentally different management challenges, and they need different tools and approaches.
Project management
A project is a temporary endeavour with a defined beginning, end, scope, and outcome. Project management is about planning and controlling that individual piece of work — the schedule, the risks, the issues, the resources, the costs. Most task management tools, including Planner, can support project management at a basic level. If your organisation runs relatively simple, standalone projects with small teams, a task tool may be sufficient.
Programme management
A programme is a set of related projects managed in a coordinated way to deliver benefits and outcomes that couldn't be achieved by running those projects independently.
This means programme managers need to see across all the projects in their programme simultaneously. They need to manage shared resources and dependencies. They need to track how the projects collectively are progressing towards the programme's intended benefits. No task tool does this. Planner does not do this.
Portfolio management
Portfolio management is about making the right investment decisions across the whole organisation's change agenda. Which projects should we be doing? Which should we stop? How are we balancing risk, benefit, and capacity? What's the health of delivery across everything we're running?
Portfolio management requires consolidated reporting across all projects and programmes, resource and capacity analysis at an organisational level, financial management of the whole investment portfolio, and the data to support strategic prioritisation decisions. This is even further removed from task management.
Where MS Planner sits
Planner is a team task management tool. It sits at the bottom of the delivery management stack. For personal organisation and team collaboration within a single project or work area, it's perfectly good. But as you move up the stack, from project to programme to portfolio, the gap between what Planner provides and what you need grows rapidly.
The moment you need to see across multiple projects, manage shared resources, or produce portfolio-level reporting, you have left the territory that Planner was designed for.
The question to ask your PMO team
Ask these questions in your next team session:
- When a board member asks "how is our portfolio progressing?" how do you answer that today, and what data do you use?
- When a programme manager raises a resource conflict, how does it get escalated and resolved?
- When a project runs into financial difficulty, how does that get spotted and reported?
- When a new project is proposed, how does it get assessed against existing capacity and strategic priorities?
If those questions are currently being answered using Project Online, or a combination of Project Online and manual reports, then you need a platform that can replace that infrastructure.
The right approach to tool selection
Before you evaluate any product, define your requirements at each level of delivery. Document what your PMO needs to do, what your programme teams need to see, and what your portfolio managers need to report on. Then evaluate tools against those requirements, not against cost, convenience, or the fact that a tool already lives in your Microsoft tenant.
A tool that's already there but can't meet your needs is not a good deal. It's a governance risk dressed up as a cost saving → Download the PPM Decision Framework free at vertocloud.co.uk/ppm-decision-framework
