We're back with Part 2 of our Microsoft deep dive with Rebecca Cianco from Maxsum Consulting. This time, we're zeroing in on productivity and workflow. In this episode, we explore how businesses can streamline operations and work smarter using some of the most powerful (yet often overlooked) tools within the Microsoft ecosystem. From automating tasks with Power Automate to building custom business apps with Power Apps and improving team collaboration through Microsoft Teams and Planner, there's a lot under the hood that can transform the way your team works. Rebecca shares practical insights and real-world examples of how organisations are boosting efficiency, reducing manual work, and creating smarter workflows. Best of all, these improvements often come from tools many businesses already have access to. If you're ready to go beyond email and spreadsheets and start using Microsoft to its full potential, this episode is packed with ideas to help you get started. Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can lead to better business outcomes, every time. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. For more details contact [email protected] or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au  Full Episode Transcript: [Intro Music] Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10 Minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor from Taylor Made Sales. And today, we have part two of our Microsoft podcast. Welcome Rebecca back to the studio. Rebecca: Thanks for having me again, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: Today we are talking about productivity and workflow within Microsoft. So, explain what this is and what applications are involved and how me and my customers can be using this more effectively. Rebecca: For sure. So, everybody wants to be more productive. There's a lot of recent statistics that are coming out of Australian productivity reviews and studies saying that we're already lagging behind some of our other global competitors in the productivity state. I'm sure that improving productivity and efficiency, whether it be for profitability purposes or to just claw back a little bit more work-life balance, I think it's a pretty important topic for all organisations to look at. And heaps of options within the 365 suite that I'd love to touch on today, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: So, what are these applications? Rebecca: So if we think about productivity and workflow in 365, I guess there's a couple of sub-groups within that as well. So there's tools like Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft To Do that Microsoft 365 subscribers have access to within their existing licence levels. And alongside that as well, there are some other apps that can contribute to moving work through those services to provide even higher level visibility and insights. So, Power Automate, Power Apps, for example, are some additional services within 365 that add even more grunt to Planner, Project, and To Do. Leanne Taylor: Now, I absolutely love using the Microsoft To Do app. I have multiple little folders in there for brain dumps, ideas, thoughts, etc. I know I'm not using it to its full capacity. How should I best be using that? How do customers integrate that To Do app into their wider business? Rebecca: So, there's a couple of things in Microsoft To Do that people probably, you know, haven't thought about. To your point, Leanne, about the brain dumps, absolutely perfect. The Microsoft To Do app for phone, for mobiles, is actually surprisingly effective as well. So I always have that enabled on my phone so that if I do think of something out on the fly, I can immediately pop it into one of my to-do lists. People don't realise that they can share to-do lists as well with others in their organisation. So if you're wanting to, you know, consolidate some ideas in one place, that's that's a really simple, quick win that lots of people can, you know, have a crack at in Microsoft To Do. But also, a lot of people don't realise that whatever you put on your to-do list is accessible through various other parts of 365. So, in Microsoft Teams, for example, if you're a Microsoft Teams user, you'll be familiar with the left-hand menu where all the apps show up. If you click on the more apps or the the three dots button and add Microsoft Planner as one of the apps in your Teams menu there, you'll automatically get a view within Microsoft Teams of all your to-do lists and you can expand out all the items on there. So it just gives you that ability to be able to look at it in the context of the work you're currently doing. Two other areas where that's really powerful is in Microsoft Outlook and Calendar as well. In those particular instances, it's along the top banner of the app and it's often overlooked by most people. If you hover over the little white icons at the top of Outlook or Calendar, you'll find one there that has a, it's like a little document with a tick on it that says 'My Day'. If you click that on, a sidebar will open up and it will also surface your main to-do list and you can filter through and choose other to-do lists you might be looking at ticking off the list that day. That's really fantastic to have it alongside the email to remind yourself, you know, of any notes or any ideas that you might have plunked into to do right alongside the email that you're drafting. And with Calendar, having it open in the side pane, you can even just drag and drop any of your to-dos over to a spot in your calendar and it will place it in your calendar, letting you know that you you want to do it at that particular time slot. So, being able to leverage some of those inbuilt integrations in 365 really give Microsoft To Do even more grunt. Leanne Taylor: So talk to me about Planner. I'm sure there's lots of customers out there that have, you know, a calendar of events and things that they need to sort of plan for through the year. I know I spend a lot of time planning my, you know, the podcast and my customer events. We do tech talks and webinars. So explain how I could be using Planner a bit better because I'm actually not using it at the moment. So... Rebecca: Yeah, right. Okay. So Planner is a really powerful tool and it can be used pretty much as simply or as sophisticatedly, if that's such a word, as you like. So we often recommend people start simply. A lot of people use it as an event planner, like you do or you're thinking of, Leanne, but also to just, you know, manage workflow for a particular team even, through, you know, in progress, completed, kind of, you know, timelines. So it's a drag and drop tool as well. So you create various columns with items that you might want to achieve. So in your case, you know, could be tech talks or in-person events. And they're little modules that you create within that. And within each little module in Planner, there's so much information you can pack into that. You can put a a due date on it, you can assign somebody by using an @ mention to that particular work item, anybody in your team. And you can add notes, you can add links, you can upload files into it, you can put images in there, you can put checklists in there. In each individual module, once you expand it out, there's so much there that you can see. The beauty of putting a timeline on it and assigning it to a person is that once you've assigned somebody a task or one of those little blocks/modules in Planner, then that will automatically show up in their Planner list that we talked about docking into Microsoft Teams before. And it will also ping them a notification in their email that they've been assigned a new task. So that in and of itself is a functionality that is really underutilised by lots of organisations, even at a simple level. But the beauty of having it in Planner is that the owner of the plan can also go in at any time and switch the view from the little modules over to a calendar view. So you can get a calendar of, you know, who's assigned to do what at what point in time. And also get some really simple, high-level metrics about, you know, how many things are on track, how many things are late, how many things were completed on time. So they are all some really powerful tools and insights that you can get without any extra coding, playing around, Power BI building. They're all native to Planner built in. So no reason really not to to jump in and have a go at it. Leanne Taylor: So explain to me with this, you were just saying you can see, you know, tasks and who's done what and timelines, how does that connect into Project? Rebecca: So Microsoft Project is probably the next iteration up of Planner. It is a slightly more big-scale, bigger project kind of offering. To my mind, the majority of organisations can get all that they need out of Planner, but Project is really powerful when you have a very complex project, for example, that you want to drive from start to finish. And it it works in a similar way as Planner does, but there's even more reportability and ability to get insights out of projects. So, you know, creating Gantt charts and connecting it into Power BI feeds and getting, you know, a lot of real-time data on the status of your project. You can add in, you know, some budget overlays and things like that. So there's a lot more grunt in Microsoft Project, which is really around project management as opposed to in Planner, you're really going to be using it for workflow tracking and uh assigning tasks to people and keeping that moving, if that makes sense. Leanne Taylor: It sure does. So, is there anything else in the suite that people need to know about for productivity and workflow? Rebecca: Oh, look, there's heaps of stuff and, you know, the Power Platform part of Microsoft 365 really plays into this space quite heavily as well. So even the Power Automate inclusion in Microsoft 365 licensing levels, people might shy away from that because they think that, you know, it requires a lot of coding. That's not actually the case. Power Automate comes with a fantastic set of templates that, you know, you can try out even for some really basic things. So Planner, for example, will have some automatic triggers built in, but if you want things more advanced, then, you know, Power Automate can give you some extra grunt to what you'd like to do with productivity and and workflow tracking. So a common use case might be, for example, somebody assigns a task in Planner and you want to ask the employee to acknowledge it and to that they've received the task and for that completion or acknowledgement to be tracked in a Microsoft list or an Excel report, or you might want to trigger a notification in Teams to their manager to say they've commenced it, check in with them again in two days. So all of those little additional workflows, notification tools, data collection and collation, all of that operates through Power Automate. Some of them are very quick and easy to stand up by yourself, some of them you'll need some oversight from an IT partner with. But considering that that functionality is already there in 365, that's a big boost to workplace productivity and driving workflows, whereas a lot of organisations might look elsewhere through Zapier and other APIs and connectors to try and achieve the same thing. Leanne Taylor: So that really lends itself into Power BI, like Microsoft Dynamics space. So you're jumping into a probably a more dynamic use case there and the world obviously continues to expand with Microsoft Dynamics. Rebecca: Yeah, I think though, Microsoft Dynamics is its own, its own beast in and of itself. But I think people underestimate the power that Power Automate has just in your regular Microsoft 365 ecosystem anyway. So we use it extensively every day just for run-rate admin tasks, and it really is a big part of empowering the productivity apps that are already in 365 to do that little bit more. Leanne Taylor: Fantastic. So, for customers on the call that would like to know more, tell us about your review sessions and how you can engage with the team at Maxsum. Rebecca: If you're interested in finding out more about what you can do and how you can better run projects and worklists through your organisation, what we normally do is sit down with you and listen to some typical examples of what a day looks like, what a project looks like, or the way a particular team works. And what we try to do is identify a couple of key scenarios that we can work with you on as a pilot because, you know, learning firsthand is the best way to get up to speed quickly with a new app, solution, or service. And we hold your hand through that kind of pilot project, for want of a better word, help you set it up, keep it working properly, show you the reporting, and also help to drive some of the education and adoption with your team so that once you feel a bit more confident around using the app to its greater potential, you can then move forward and implement it proactively in more areas of your organisation. So, from something very simple to something more complex, depending on whatever your organisation needs are, there's a whole team ready to support interested parties on that journey. Leanne Taylor: So definitely reach out if you're interested. I know the guys at Maxsum Consulting are definitely your friend in the business to call on anytime with any questions around Microsoft. So, thank you Rebecca, it's been a pleasure as always, and looking forward to our next Tech Talk, which will be focusing on collaboration and meeting applications. So stay tuned and we'll see you soon. (Outro music) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up to date, informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time.  

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