Forum Discussion
Crews in Planner in Planner/Project accelerator
Planner currently does not natively support this. You either do it manually or possibly create a flow that is triggered when the crew resource is assigned then multiples the effort. I don't know if the flow option actually works and would probably be problematic. Another option would be to handle this in Power BI reporting by multiple the crew resource effort by X.
Planner itself doesn’t support assigning a single task to a “crew” and automatically multiplying effort based on the number of people. You basically have two practical approaches:
Manual method:
Assign the task to each individual in the crew separately and track effort for each person.
This ensures Planner calculates work correctly per resource.
Workarounds with automation:
You could create a Power Automate flow that triggers when a “crew” is assigned and distributes or multiplies effort across members, but this can get complicated and isn’t officially supported.
Alternatively, for reporting purposes, you can export Planner data to Power BI and calculate total effort by multiplying the task’s baseline effort by the crew size.
If managing crews and auto-calculating effort is critical, the best long-term solution is to use Microsoft Project desktop, which fully supports crew resources, effort-driven tasks, and automatic calculations.
Planner works best for lightweight task tracking, but it has limitations for complex resource management.