Project management software often becomes the unofficial record of decisions, deadlines, and ownership. An annual review checks whether that record remains trustworthy and portable without turning the review into a disruptive reorganization. Work from an inventory, preserve evidence, and separate proposed changes from approved changes.
1. Identify the authoritative workspaces
List every active workspace, project, portfolio, or team board. Record its business purpose, owner, billing owner, primary administrators, and expected end date. Mark archived or experimental spaces separately. A familiar workspace name is not proof that it is still authoritative; confirm with the person responsible for the work.
2. Review active work and stale items
Sample current projects and check whether owners, dates, statuses, dependencies, and descriptions match reality. Look for tasks assigned to departed users, overdue items with no next action, duplicate projects, and milestones that were completed outside the tool. Do not mass-close stale tasks. Produce a bounded exception list with links and an owner for each decision.
3. Check roles and sharing
Inventory administrators, members, guests, public links, and external collaborators. Confirm that access still matches current responsibility. Record proposed removals, but do not revoke access during a read-only audit unless an authorized security procedure requires it. Make sure at least two appropriate people understand recovery and administration so the workspace is not dependent on one person.
4. Test export and portability
Choose a representative, non-sensitive project and export it using the provider's documented method. Open the result and verify task titles, descriptions, status, dates, assignments, and stable identifiers. Microsoft documents that a Planner export to Excel provides a point-in-time structured copy containing task details such as plan and task IDs, descriptions, buckets, status, dates, assignments, priorities, and labels. An export is evidence only after the resulting file has been opened and inspected.
5. Review automation and integrations
List every rule, webhook, calendar connection, email bridge, source-control connection, and reporting integration. For each one, record its owner, purpose, credential owner, last observed success, and failure destination. Avoid rotating credentials merely because the annual review found them; credential changes need a planned cutover and rollback. Disable nothing until downstream effects are known.
6. Reconcile cost and plan limits
Compare licensed seats with active users and document add-ons, storage limits, automation quotas, guest restrictions, and renewal dates. Treat vendor pricing pages as current evidence, not a permanent promise. Flag unused licenses or unexpected add-ons for the billing owner rather than changing the subscription during the review.
7. Test the recovery route
Verify the provider's documented recovery process, administrative contacts, and the location of recent exports. Use a harmless test project if restore or import testing is supported. Stop before overwriting active data. The test should prove that an authorized person can locate records and understand the recovery steps.
8. Leave an audit trail
Record the date, reviewer, workspaces checked, user counts, export path, sample result, integrations, costs, exceptions, owners, and next review date. Label findings as observed, proposed, or completed. The review is finished when another administrator can trace every conclusion to a current workspace view, provider record, or opened export.
Sources
- Export a plan to Excel — Microsoft Support
- See Planner tasks in Microsoft To Do — Microsoft Support