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Hello, it's Matt, and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
In this video we're going to look at how to create a plan with Microsoft Planner the right way,
and talk about the options you have and what they mean
and if you stick around to the end, I'll show you how I've created my plans to manage my business
and the content for this YouTube channel.
To create a new plan, log in to Office 365 in the browser.
Go to the app launcher and choose Planner.
From the Planner home page choose the "new plan" button and give your plan a name.
Now, it's not obvious but at this point you have to make a decision
- do you create a new group or use an existing group for your plan?
First let's discuss what I mean when I say "group".
A group, also known as a Microsoft 365 group...
...and formally known as an Office 365 group
is a way of giving access to apps like Planner.
A Microsoft 365 group is created to allow a group of people to work together in Office 365.
It allows the group to share files and email, a calendar and a notebook,
and give them access to Office 365 apps like Planner, Teams and Yammer.
When you create a group, you also create a SharePoint site to store the files,
a mailbox for email and calendar, and a OneNote notebook.
In our example here, if we type in the name of my plan and choose "create plan",
the plan will be created along with the new group, a SharePoint site, an inbox and a notebook,
and you will be the owner of the group.
So for that reason I would recommend that you don't create a new group.
If you can, I'd choose an existing group.
You do that by choosing the "add to an existing Office 365 group" link here.
When you choose that link, you'll see a list of the groups that you're already a member of.
For example, if your plan is going to organise tasks for teamwork
then choose the group for that team.
Each group can have more than one plan,
so it doesn't affect existing plans or have any impact on anyone else
so it's the safest and easiest approach.
When you've given your plan a name, choose your existing group - in my case I'll choose "retail",
and then choose "create plan" and the plan is ready to use.
You can see if I go to the members list at the top here, everyone in the group has access to it,
and if I go to the Planner hub now,
you can see that I have the new product plan, the store upgrade and the marketing collaboration plan,
all attached to the retail group.
Everyone in retail has access to all of those plans.
Now what if you want to create a new group for your plan?
If that's the case you have another decision to make at creation time.
Will your group be public or private?
A public group is one that anybody can join and become a member without approval.
That means anyone in your organisation can join your group and view and make changes to your plan.
A private group requires approval to join.
Anyone in your organisation can ask to join
but only owners of the group can approve the request.
Once the request has been approved by the owner,
that person becomes a member and can then view and change the plan.
I should also note here that there's no way to control what a member can do in the plan
so once they have access they can do everything that an owner can,
except delete it or change who is a member of the group attached to the plan.
For this reason I recommend that you choose "private",
then you can control who sees the plan and who's making changes
and you can always change the group to public later on if you need to.
Once you've chosen your privacy setting, you can choose "create plan",
and the group, the plan, the SharePoint site, mailbox, a notebook will all be created too.
At Collaboration Coach we have two main groups - Business and Content.
Content is where we manage all the video we create for YouTube and our online school.
You can see I have four plans for content here - one's for YouTube,
and then one for Teams Champion and SharePoint Champion which are our existing courses,
and then there's another one that we're working on.
In these plans we create a task for each video,
and every time we create a new course we create a new plan
and we attach it to the content group.
You could also see here that we have a business plan which is attached to the business group,
and that's completely separate from content and has a different purpose,
so that's for the business type tasks.
Okay, so that's your guide to creating a plan the right way.
I hope this helps and thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you next time.
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