Copy a Plan Finally Arrives for Planner!

This feature is what everyone has been waiting for! I would argue that Planner was not ready to roll out to your enterprise until this feature shipped. Taking time to meticulously create a plan without the ability to use it as a template and copy it made Planner almost impossible to use. If you are a productivity geek like I am and you have used any other productivity tool such as Trello or Asana you know how important it is to be able to easily copy a plan.

Having the ability to copy a plan means you can easily create custom templates to work from.

Microsoft launched Copy for Planner just recently and it is a game changer!

A great example of a template you might want to create for your organization that would have a huge impact on productivity is on-boarding tasks. Usually on-boarding crosses multiple departments within the company. Most of the time these departments use different tools to manage their tasks related to on-boarding. This means that once the employee has been hired and HR completes the required paperwork it is up to the IT department to set up the email accounts and order the equipment. Often this is done via email, which can get missed in someone's inbox leading to the last minute scramble to find equipment for a new hire. Now you can easily assign a task in Planner to someone in another department and everyone can track the status of the project throughout the lifecycle.

Creating inter-department visibility to projects within Planner is one of the ways Planner can boost your organization's productivity. By using the copy function you can now create templates for all of your projects and easily copy the projects/tasks associated with the project.

It is super easy to do inside of Planner- here is a quick demo:

Currently the Copy Plan feature is only in Planner but Microsoft has it on their roadmap to add to the Teams experience very soon. I will keep you posted!