Task and Project Management Darwin Scores

• Organizations that want to upgrade project management systems based on Microsoft technology might have to migrate to new product lines.
• The most strategic project and task management options from Microsoft are also the least mature.

Task and project management capabilities at Microsoft are spread across a large set of competing product lines, and the landscape is currently in flux. The accompanying chart shows Microsoft product lines for project and task management with a “Darwin score” (rightmost column), a Directions on Microsoft estimate of likely future development effort from Microsoft. The strongest competitors are those with a large installed base or large recent investment from Microsoft, and that support Microsoft’s long-term goal of bringing customers into online services and subscription licensing.

Planner is a Microsoft-hosted online service for team or departmental project management, in which projects commonly have part-time or distributed project managers. It is designed for small and simple projects, without complex resource requirements or task dependencies that benefit from automated scheduling. Planner offers Web and mobile clients for defining tasks and plans, updating status, and viewing reports, and it is being integrated with Microsoft’s Teams communications service and its clients. Microsoft intends to integrate Planner into Roadmap, a hosted dashboard for management reporting and portfolio management that is currently in preview and which will also integrate with several other project management offerings listed here. Introduced in 2017, Planner has had little time to build a deployed base, but its bundling in Office 365 subscription plans means it is available to a very large potential audience.