Instead of 1 to 1, allow Groups to have many Plans
Right now, groups have a 1 to 1 relationship (1 Group = 1 Plan), would be nice for a single group to have multiple plans

!! You can now create a new plan within an existing group!!
Once you open the “New Plan” dialog just select the link to add to an existing group. Your new plan will then be added to that group, leveraging the existing group infrastructure.
For more info, checkout the support documentation: https://support.office.com/en-US/article/create-a-plan-in-microsoft-planner-93e65b03-6fac-4661-a502-e3161475ab93
120 comments
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Anonymous commented
This is not complete, this is partially complete.
Copying Plans should have the option to select existing group. As this is going to cause mahem for IT admins in couple of years where there will be multiple sites, folders, groups and plans with the same name.
Please mark this as incomplete and re-open the case.
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Anonymous commented
We NEED to be able to copy a plan to an existing group. We have a recurring digital marketing schedule that we duplicate, and it requires a new group every time.
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Nathan commented
We NEED to be able to copy a plan to an existing group. We have a recurring digital marketing schedule that we duplicate, and it requires a new group every time.
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Flo commented
It would be very helpful to have the same feature to copy a plan to an existing group. At the moment there must be a new group for every copied plan. That's a huge disadvantage of the copy function.
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Hélène Dryden commented
Does anyone know if you can delete the additional plans w/o deleting the associated group? I know that previously if you delete the plan you also deleted the O365 group but now that you can have more than one plan per group is deleting possible w/o affecting the group?
Planner needs better warning messaging/confirmation when leaving or deleting plans that provide more info on the impacts of the change being requested.
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AGR commented
This is very nice but it is needed to be able to change the group on a plan in planner - this wourl help a lot also in Teams
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MW commented
Now the plans within a group all have the same icon and I can't seem to change this separately. This is a visual nightmare.
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Sandra commented
but each group can only have one plan correct? This is my opinion the problem.
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NL commented
The current logic makes no sense - only users with permission to create new Groups can create new Plans, even though you don't need to create a Group to create a Plan.
Please vote here - https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/38631502-allow-plan-creation-without-requiring-group-creati
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Dan commented
There is an issue that users cannot create new Plans linked to existing Office 365 Group if users are prevented from creating new groups in Office 365. This significantly reduces the functionality of this feature.
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NL commented
Hi Planner Team, any news on fixing the issue with users not being able to create new Plans linked to existing Groups if they aren't allowed to create new Groups?
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Sam Aleksanyan commented
Please allow to create from a template, but keep within the same group.
Here is a process description:
We have a Planner / Teams group called Onboarding.
For each new employee, it would be great to have a channel and a Planner tab, which would have their specific onboarding checklist.
The idea would be to have the template at the group level, and allow that to be copied to a specific channel, so that we don't have to recreate everything, and avoid having many unnecessary groups. -
James Ward commented
This needs more thought. The intuitive way to use this is with one level of project managers contributing to a higher level programme. As a result this should integrate to Project properly (another topic, I realise) but critically we need to be able to report by dashboard that collates all plans in the group to a single overview.
This would give you a much better understanding of workloads as they will be in context of other sub-projects rather than in isolation.
Consider my situation.
I have an Engineer, Market lead and Ops lead. They all have their own plan to cover the work they're coordinating, however:
- They are also resources on each others' plans (Ops lead will be working on an Engineer's task and vice versa)
- Each PM also shares cross-stream resource across the business, so will need to understand how individuals are loaded across all 3 sub-plans.Currently there's no way to do this aside from having 1 plan that's used by all 3 leads, however with the volume of tasks that's not practical. I also need ownership of the plan by each lead, they shouldn't have to share a single board.
There is another suggestion that would also cover this by having multiple boards across a plan:
https://planner.uservoice.com/forums/330525-microsoft-planner-feedback-forum/suggestions/13490136-multiple-boards-per-planGiven the progress on this (multiple plans per group) I don't anticipate the multiple board idea to be implemented any time soon.
I'm desperate to get people on board with this to offer a consolidated approach to project/task management across the business, but when these obvious omissions are here, the idea gets picked apart instantly and people revert back to Excel, Basecamp, Asana etc.
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Anonymous commented
We also have the Group creation restriction so this feature doesn't provide value unless this issue is addressed. And we have no plans to allow users to create Groups on their own.
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Erin Scupham commented
I echo the anonymous comment a few posts down. Unfortunately this doesn't work for our users as we have group creation restricted. Could this functionality be offered in another manner for organizations who restrict group creation?
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Roberto commented
Great news!
In the support article it says “Remember that when you make a plan public or private, you also make the Office 365 Group public or private.”
Does it mean that if I have ten private plans in the same group and then I create a public plan then all the group becomes public? Thank you -
Anonymous commented
This is great for new projects. Is there a way to move existing projects into other groups?
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Timmy Tandian commented
Thank you for realizing this feature!!
By the way, does anybody know if there is any easy way to see the list of plans that a group has? -
Anonymous commented
Bit of inconsistent behaviour I noticed. We have restricted the creation of new Office 365 Groups via an Azure AD setting, so only a specific group is allowed to created new Unified Groups (as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/create-groups/manage-creation-of-groups?view=o365-worldwide).
Where the ability to create new UG's is surfaced across the office apps, for example in Outlook ('New Group'), in Teams ('Join or Create a Team'), or in Planner ('New Plan'), users not in said group receive an error message "Your organization's global admin has turned off the ability to create new Plans and Office 365 Groups" which is as documented.
Therefore users wo are prevented from creating new UG's by this Azure AD setting cannot create new plans within an existing group, since that requires first clicking on the 'New Plan' button (which immediately throws the mentioned error) followed by clicking on 'Add to an existing Office 365 Group'. They can however still add plans to existing groups via the Teams UI (new tab in any channel > Planner app> create a new plan).
On a separate but related note, I noticed that when UG's are created via the admin portal, or by New-UnifiedGroup (as we routinely do in order to enforce our internal management standards upon them), the user who creates them is added as a group owner, but not as a group member. I thought the latter would be implied by the former (as the Teams UI suggests when managing Team membership - each user is listed as one or the other; never both), but it seems not. If you are not a member in addition to being an owner, you will be unable to see the group under 'All plans' in the Planner UI, and you will be unable to add new plans to the group via the Teams UI as above. -
Anonymous commented
I'm a manager. My group has 24 projects right now. Yeah, that's a lot, which is why I need electronic help! In addition to having multiple plans per group, it would be nice to be able to sort them the way I can sort tasks (Kanban-style). I'd like labels I can use for priority and buckets I can use for stage in the pipeline.