Removing Users from a Plan

[JohnnyGman]

We have an Office 365 Group that has about 60 members and has Planner enabled.  For the people that are members of the group, we have small teams of 7-10 users as well.  For each team, we have created their own plan within Planner for them to use.  We wanted to customize the users for each plan so that only the members of those teams would show up on them when assigning members to tasks and for metrics (and hopefully only they would have access to them).  According to this article we should be able to do so in the Planner site...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/add-people-to-your-plan-2043b926-3bbb-4767-a7db-d3321f4ac76...

However, what we have found is that when we remove users from a plan via that site, it actually removes them from their membership completely from the Office 365 group as well.  Obviously this is complete unacceptable.  I assume this is a bug.  Is anyone aware of it, or a workaround to limit access to a plan within Planner?  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Indeed! This is by design! Members of the plan corresponds to members of the Office 365 group! You can add and remove members to a plan but all it does is basically add/removes this members from the office 365 group!
There’s no way currently to add or remove members of any group plans without also add/remove from group

[#3]

@adam deltinger  Thanks.  I hope that they change this behavior at some point.  Or at least allow the ability to add multiple Planner apps in a single group.  Especially when they allow subsites but you can't separate different Planners out per subsite (or at least customize the plans for each subsite).

Regardless, thanks again.

[#4]

You can have multiple plans for one Group, but its not obvious. To do this, go the SPO site that is associated with the Group, click New, Plan. This provides the ability to have multiple Plans for the Group, it does not provide any security, and everyone in the group can see every plan, but a least you can organize your activities by Plans.

[#5]

@Dean_Gross 

Sorry for the late reply.  Yes, I am aware of that.  If you look at my original message, I mentioned that we had created individual plans for each of the smaller groups.  What we wanted to do was trim down who were the members of those plans, but had found that when we went to do so that it removed those people from not just the plans, but the Office 365 group completely.

Regardless, thanks for your response.

[#6]

@JohnnyGman 

Agreed. I just experienced this.

I have a few "Plans" under one "Team". 2 of them needed to be deleted. I removed members, because I'd rather have it not show up as useless plans vs. deleting. But it ended up removing them from the group. This is absurd to me. The fact you can have multiple plans under 1 Team, but if you remove a member of a specific "Plan" it removes them from the "Team". 

Not only that, but if you read this article (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delete-a-task-or-plan-39e10e78-13f0-446d-94cd-9e562648497) it says:

"Every plan is also an Office 365 Group. When you delete a plan, you also permanently delete the group. This removes all group conversations, email, files, calendar events, and related information. You must be a group administrator to delete a plan."

I looked at the "Groups" in the Admin Center and no groups were named the same as my plans. So I assumed, because when I removed people from a "Plan" it removed them from the Team/Group, that if I deleted the the "Plan" it would also delete the Group. This is absurd.... The lack of clarity on something that can dramatically change/permanently delete a companies data with incredibly poor and conflicting documentation is not acceptable at an enterprise level. If this is by design @adam deltinger then WOW. 

[#7]

@JohnnyGman I just experienced this.

I have a few "Plans" under one "Team". 2 of them needed to be deleted. I removed members, because I'd rather have it not show up as useless plans vs. deleting. But it ended up removing them from the group. This is absurd to me. The fact you can have multiple plans under 1 Team, but if you remove a member of a specific "Plan" it removes them from the "Team". 

Not only that, but if you read this article (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delete-a-task-or-plan-39e10e78-13f0-446d-94cd-9e562648497) it says:

"Every plan is also an Office 365 Group. When you delete a plan, you also permanently delete the group. This removes all group conversations, email, files, calendar events, and related information. You must be a group administrator to delete a plan."

I looked at the "Groups" in the Admin Center and no groups were named the same as my plans. So I assumed, because when I removed people from a "Plan" it removed them from the Team/Group, that if I deleted the the "Plan" it would also delete the Group. This is absurd.... The lack of clarity on something that can dramatically change/permanently delete a companies data with incredibly poor and conflicting documentation is not acceptable at an enterprise level. If this is by design @adam deltinger then WOW. 

[#8]

@vivekdipole Unfortunately, the documentation is poorly worded, every Plan is not a Group, these are two very separate objects, however they are connected to another.

Every Plan uses a Group, multiple Plans can use the same Group, The Group contains the accounts, 

Plans don't have members, the Group the Plan is connected to contains the members, so that if you remove someone from a Plan, then they are removed from the Group.

You currently cannot have sub-groups of people assigned to different Plans. 

If you want to plan different things, with different groups of people, then you need different Groups. 

How did you originally create the Plan, if you added it to an existing SharePoint site or Team, then they  could have been renamed since they were created which could cause the connected Group to have a different name than what you expected.

[#9]

@JohnnyGman yes, I just did that and am trying to find solution to recover this. There should at least be a notice when you are trying to remove people from it.

[#10]

@David_Yan_AZ I could see this thread is still active. Are there any updates on this issue - removing people from plan removes them from the group? 

[#11]

@Sukar27 I am afraid there is no sign from MS to solve this, as there were not enough votes, or complaint.

[#12]

We need to remove a few people that no longer in the team. They might be still in the company but switching to other organizations. And there are new members joining. If there is no way to remove people from the plan, the assignee list (filter) will become endlessly long, no?

[#13]

Yes, unless the user is member of the Group, they are member of the Plan as well. To overcome this problem, MSFT introduces roster plans.

[#14]

Pongo un ejemplo de uso, porque no acabo de entender como usar planner de una manera que sea útil.
Un grupo tiene 20 usuarios, se crean 4 planners para diferentes partes del proyecto. Por lo general los usuarios utilizarán solo 2 de los planners, ya que no participan en todas las partes del proyecto.
Sin embargo, cada vez que alguien hace un comentario a una tarea se envía un mensaje a todos los miembros del grupo. Incluso si no participan o si no tienen tareas en ese planner.
Según la pantalla de configuración de planner, esto solo se puede evitar si el usuario desactiva recibir mensajes del GRUPO, con lo que o recibe comentarios de cosas que no le interesan o no recibe ningún comentario. ¿esto es así? Porque yo no lo veo ningún sentido.

[#15]

This is frustrating . I was no longer part of a project plan and now removed from 5 teams They should not have them linked or give you a warning besides if you remove from plan you will also be removed from the TEAM group as well.

[#16]

@adam deltinger  Agree. The ability to manage users for a specific plan would be great. I do not need the whole team to be involved.  I did not see the ability to add a plan to a private channel either. 

[#17]

I totally agree.
I had same issue today. I created a plan in private channel.
I removed all users from the plan that don't need access, but ...these users were also removed from Teams.
This is absurd, where is the logic ...

[#18]

One more here complaining about this...

1. If there is no intention on separating Plan members from Group members management, it should be not possible to manage and remove a member from the Plan itself (or at lest to display a warning message). This is totally confusing.
2. As a design improvement, it would be really useful to have specific Plan members (or visibility) inside a Group. Something similar to what can be done in Teams with Channels (private channels within the Team).

Thank you,

Kind regards

[#19]

@adam deltinger it's so terrible, I've spent hours to understand why memebers was missing after that I removed them from a plan 

[#20]

I got around that by creating the sub channel that the plan would be based off of@albertoianiro . So if they are on the channel they would be in whatever planner I made. It kept it easier to manage then having say the general channel with 60 people and trying to manage who doesnt need to see the plan.