Provisioning a Planner Plan with Buckets and Tasks

Microsoft’s Planner in the Office365 suite is a great tool for managing tasks in a project. But how can we create a Planner plan from a pre-defined template? The answer is simple, ProvisionPoint has it covered.

This article walks through a number of scenarios for a Planner template from simple to complex as follows:

1. A simple Planner plan without any buckets or tasks
2. A Planner plan with pre-defined buckets
3. A Planner plan with buckets and some initial tasks

A simple Planner plan template

For this example, I’m simply creating a new service definition in ProvisionPoint of type Planner. The service definition will control the Planner plan creation for me so I don’t need to apply any further configuration.
I will however, configure some governance feature for my Planner plan to ensure the naming follows our corporate naming policies. All my Planner plan titles will be prefixed with the Project Unit and an identifier. In this example, I’m requesting a new Planner plan from within the Teams App.

Provisioning a simple Planner plan

A Planner plan with pre-defined buckets

The simple Planner plan scenario was fine for some simple provisioning scenarios. This scenario however will create some pre-defined buckets and remove the default ‘To do’ bucket.

We could define some bucket names in our Planner plan template, e.g. Startup, Design, Implementation, Rollout, etc. Then, every time a new External Project is requested, the Planner plan would be created with those buckets.

But what if each of our Project Units had different requirements for the bucket names? That’s fine, we simply use a mapping from the selected Project Unit to the bucket names. The following mappings are defined:

1. For the HR unit: ‘Initial’ and ‘Due Diligence’
2. For the Legal unit: ‘Initialisation’ and ‘Investigation’

In addition to buckets for the Project Unit, we have another mapping defined for the Project Type. There is a new field on the request form in ProvisionPoint. The project type bucket will be created using the value selected in the Project Type drop down field.

The following figure shows how the Planner plan created for the HR unit is different to the Legal unit and each of the Planner plans has a bucket based on the Project Type, in this case ‘Internal’ and ‘Private’.

Provisioning a Planner plan with buckets

A Planner plan with pre-defined buckets and tasks

It may be the case that all of our projects have a set structure as configured in the previous scenario and for provisioning, that’s all that is required. After requesting the new Planner plan, the project lead adds the relevant tasks. But what if there is a common set of tasks for every project and maybe they vary based on Project Unit or Project Type. That’s covered too. This scenario is going to create an initial set of tasks in each of the buckets, each with a slightly different configuration as follows:

The tasks will use the Planner plan labels and these will be different based on our selected Project Unit and Project Type. We’ll be setting three labels based on the selected Project Unit, two based on the Project Type and a ‘General’ label that will be the same for all our Planner plans created from this template.

The first task will be in the ‘start up’ bucket and will be for scheduling the startup meeting. The task will be configured as follows:

1. The ‘Category 1’ aka ‘Pink’ label will be applied. In our case it will have a Project Unit specific name.
2. The Project Lead will be assigned to the task.
3. The due date will be set to the Project Start Date as set on the request form.

The second task will be in the ‘second’ bucket. This task will be for running through the project preparations checklist and configured as follows:

1. The task will be called ‘Prep for’ and then the name of the requested Project. However, the name of the Project will not be the full name of the Planner plan, we just want the requested project name.
2. The label for the Project Type will be applied.
3. The task will be given an urgent priority.
4. A set of standard checklist items will be created and shown on the preview card.
5. The task will be assigned to a pre-defined administrator for the Project Unit. So each Project Unit has a different administrator and they will be assigned this task for every project created for their unit.
6. The IT unit are the only unit that need the ‘Collect coffee orders’ item so this will be marked as completed for the other units as their orders are already placed.

The third and fourth tasks will be in the Project Type specific bucket. These will include external references and configured as follows:

1. They will both be assigned to the Business Owner from the request form.
2. The General label will be applied.
3. The Run presentation task references a PowerPoint presentation in a common ‘company assets’ site collection.
4. The Resource allocation task references the shared documents library in the underlying SharePoint site collection. It could also be the case that our service definition provisions a number of documents in the SharePoint site using a PnP Template and we could then reference those documents in the task too.

Provisioning a Planner plan with buckets and tasks

Interested in knowing more about how ProvisionPoint can help with provisioning Planner plans from pre-defined flexible templates? Get in touch with us for a chat or to schedule a demo.