Creating a "Personal" Plan to store tasks not associated with any Team or Project

[Jill McDevitt]

If I was to use Planner as my full "To Do" tool then I would also have tasks that are just associated with me, being an employee that have nothing to do with a project or team.  It allows you to create a "Plan" and I could call it "MyTasks" - but it creates a whole O365 Group- email acct, and TEam site and everything - which is completely unnecessary, and would immediately get completely out of hand as system admin.  Can you imagine 2000 employees all creating a "My Tasks" - the O365 Groups administration would be a nightmare overnight.

Anyone hear anything about trying to solve for this?

[#2]

The reality is that your scenario is totally possible so what I see here is the following:
(1) Educate your people about what tool to use in regards of task management: Wunderlist for individual tasks vs Planerr for Team tasks
(2) Disable Planner creation for the mayority of your users...currently you can onlin disable groups creation via Azure AD policy, but it should be enough

[#3]

@Jill McDevitt 

I saw the same issue as we started to look at Planner as a simple task management tool.

Really, the issue is much bigger (you got to the same conclusions I did) in that without controls put in place, any employee can create a Group (that in turn creates a Site, Planner, Teams and eventually a Yammer Channel).

We run a report on a weekly basis to look for these objects that have only 1 member. We created a policy for the business that these tools are not for individual use and IT will actively remove them (yes, we have an exception process).

It comes down to one of two philosophies:

1. IT is not involved in the creation or maintenence of Groups, this is a business tool owned by the business and used within the policies and guidance set for (with IT there as a consultant).

2. IT is the owner of the Group creation process and the Business subits requests for Creation and Change. IT can limit who can create Groups (using Powershell), so this "burden" could be shared with a limited few.

I highly recommend that you understand how your business operates first, work with stakeholders and then generate a guidance document on how you will proceed. Without doing this, you will either have a mess to manage or will upset the business as a blocker to "improvement".

[#4]

Hi Juan,

I've heard mention of this Wunderlist a few times and I've seen Microsoft material positioning it as the individual task management tool.

Do you know if Microsoft ever plan to make it part of the 365 offerings?

[#5]

Does anyone got answer?

i just need to have own planner and not via groups

[#6]

@Theebhan Theebhan Not sure if this helps, but a possible policy pattern could be as follows:

• Create groups for each team in the business
• Allow users to create new plans, but force them to select an existing group (team)

For example, I have a group named Development. We also have a plan called Development for any shared tasks. Each individual developer has a Plan named after them that is part of the Development group. This allows individual developers to have their own plan without creating a group per developer. The added benefit is that the developers can still share their personal tasks or move them to another plan if they escalate to others.

Alternatively, if you have Exchange Online, your users can now utilize Microsoft To Do for their personal tasks (todo.microsoft.com).

[#7]

@Jill McDevitt Agreed. I have tasks I need to complete which I either don't want or can't allow to be visible to all team members. Two, scratch that, three options would be ideal for me.

1. the ability to hide some of my tasks or possibly the details of the tasks from some team members
2. the ability to create a personal planner not attached to a group. This one I thing would be widely appreciated as it is ideal to be able to filter all of your tasks by project/application tag. 
3. Just thought of this now. It would be ideal if I had a cenral view of all of my planner items for all of the teams I am in. Then I would have a list of all of my project tasks and ideally (perfect world thinking here) I could add my own tasks which are not associated with any project. One filterable view of everything on my plate!

The idea of having to use a different tool for personal task management vs. team task management seems odd when I have a perfectly good tool already.

[#8]

@Shane_HillTotally agree - why should I NOT be using a useful and reasonably functional tool for my personal tasks just because someone linked it to the Outlook groups and now it's an administrational mess? Yes, I do understand that its focus is on team tasks, but -as you said - there are always tasks that are not relevant to any of my teams and I don't appreciate being told that I have to use the VERY basic ToDo list. That's kind of "Back to the 90s" in terms of task management. So, back to Trello, I guess ...

[#9]

Have you found a solution to this yet?
I'm looking for the same thing.
In my case I can't create a new team or group myself as that is disabled by our IT team. I could create a new plan associated with an existing project and 'piggy back' on that - but that would be cheating and when I do that its visible to everyone already in that same team. And of course I don't want everyone in that project based team to see all my personal tasks.
I'm wondering if To-Do is the solution to this an if there is a way to merge the to-do tasks into Planner so I can see my personal tasks next to my assigned project level tasks.

[#10]

I am looking exactly for the same. I would like that each user could be able to use a planner for himself. 

[#11 · Accepted solution]

I am currently running through the same process, as I would like to keep my tasks in one ecosystem, and not use another - possibly paid - third party application. I was thinking about trello before I discovered that there is planner. I am starting with planner next week, but I am quite shook that it might be so uninviting to use it as an individual.
Microsoft Todo is actually very basic - why not make planner the standard level of task management for everything?

[#12]

I have the same requirement, following the thread

[#13]

@avulkanovski there is this post talking about Roster Container MC242586 - Planner’s New Roster Containers - The Unofficial M365 Changelog (m365log.com) But, when searching for the message center for MC242586 there is nothing. Same for the roadmap.

Kind of weird because the timing is now (completed by mid may) 

[#14]

I am looking for this as well. I understand I can use another to-do tool for my personal tasks but I would like to see my personal tasks as a part of the My Tasks tab in Planner and even see the progress of my personal work in the Planner hub.

[#15]

@fschober 

Precisely. Echoingdesire to use Planner without creating a group, etc. I have a project that spans people outside the organization, some of which who have personal accounts as opposed to work accounts, etc. Sure, make it linked to OneDrive, but not Teams/Groups. I get data has to be housed somewhere, but it doesn't have to be to tied to specific group of people, only an administrator.