Successful teams and tasks are the bedrock of successful projects, and making sure both are balanced is simpler following the launch of several new software tools.

There is usually a group of people working on one campaign and within the greater objective there is likely to be a series of smaller tasks. You may be in charge of managing a group of workers in order to successfully conclude your latest initiative. Usually, team members have more than one responsibility and this has the potential to cause confusion and communication breakdowns.

Employees tend to have different schedules and workloads, so their responsibilities are adapted to their current circumstances. This combined with fellow colleagues being given numerous tasks could lead to clashing schedules, with some resources under more pressure than others. Calendars are good tools to use when planning and establishing who does what, and when.

However, the tools may not have the capability to highlight potential problems, meaning you may miss important details and risk resource problems rearing. Outlook calendars are handy for keeping an eye on the weeks ahead regarding your assignment, but for added detail Microsoft Project has developed the Team Planner. This can be described as a merging of Gantt charts with a calendar, as it contains a significant amount of data that may be relevant when it comes to allocating your resources to tasks.

This tool allows you to pull in details regarding the development of your campaign, such as the hours and days that fellow workers are able to commit to the job at hand. The Team Planner is a great way to draw attention to clashes and assists you in re-organising workers if necessary. Once opened, it clearly reveals who is available and who may have problems completing work as they are overstretched.

In this instance, you are able to drag the assignment concerned and allocate to an employee who has more time. This means you get a realistic impression of tasks that are unassigned and have yet to be scheduled. If you prefer, you are free to use the automatic allocation function that assists you in getting initiatives moved to another worker, so your time is freed from doing this.

Because of these functions, the Team Planner is ideal for keeping you and those you are managing up-to-date with the tasks they have to fulfil. A host of other functions are included with this tool that aids you in leading your workers to success. For example, there is the option to edit lots of different types of data included in the planner, and for the purposes of customising you can add in filters and different colours to really get your message across.

Another handy tool that works well alongside the Team Planner is the Task Inspector. Both of these integrated functions are a good way to spot and prevent problems. While the calendar highlights drawbacks, the Task Inspector does a similar job with your resources as a whole. In the past, when using this software, you may have found that you were unable to manually schedule tasks; instead Project would intuitively calculate dates for you.

However, this has changed in the latest edition of the software and you have more freedom in regard to entering the running time of projects and the resources needed. This has the potential to create clashes and problems, risking under- and over-allocation of precious resources. To counteract this, you can access the Task Inspector, which is designed to highlight these kinds of problems based on the data you input.