Last week, our senior manager called us to convey that our team has to plan out an amazing office party for Christmas and New Year. This was told to us on the afternoon of Dec 22nd. With practically no free time due to all the year-end workload, we were clueless because it was something that we had never done before.
Ideas were floating around but we needed to be innovative, fun and time-bound. The team had to have maximum collaboration as neither we wanted to miss out any good thing from getting included in this party nor we wanted our work to suffer. Although, there was WhatsApp but how could we have checked it in timely manner without getting distracted with other conversations. Additionally, it was a challenge to keep a track of assigned tasks and their status. Then, Pradeep, my team member, came up with a brilliant idea which was to use Microsoft Planner.
Using Microsoft Planner, everyone gave suggestions for the party by using plan’s group and notebook feature. After that, we finalised the agenda, assigned responsibilities to each member, tracked tasks’ status and collaborated for resolving any issues for task completion. We could do all this on Microsoft Planner, from the luxury of our desks itself thus, maintaining the party’s secrecy which was of utmost priority!
As we all had to complete our daily tasks as well as plan a party, we could do everything successfully using Microsoft Planner. It helped us to work on details like party theme, sessions, fun activities, decoration material and snacks. We easily aligned every team member with a responsibility and, as an admin, I could easily track if every task was on the right track without any office work disruption.
Finally, the party was amazing and everybody enjoyed. Our managers appreciated team effort and we became die-hard fans of Microsoft Planner. 🙂