Creating a plan

- [Narrator] A good plan will not only help you achieve your goals, but also track all the moving pieces along the way. Microsoft Planner is a powerful tool that helps you keep track of work, so you can focus on the work itself. In this lesson, I'll show you how to create your first plan, organize tasks in the buckets, and assign them to teammates to better document your process. In this example, I'll be creating a plan for a client for my wedding planning business. I'll start from office.com. Select the app launcher in the top left corner, then open Planner. I'll select New plan in the upper left corner. The New Plan dialogue is where you can enter the properties of your plan and customize the name and details. I'll name my new plan Lake Wedding. I'll set the privacy to public, so everyone on my team can track it. That looks good. So I'll select Create plan. Now I have a brand new plan that's ready to go. How you organize the plan is important so everyone can easily see when the tasks are due. For wedding planning, you might organize by category, like venue and catering. For organization, Planner uses buckets, which are a way of putting related tasks in one place. I'll add a Catering bucket and a Venue bucket. Select Add new bucket and enter Catering. Let's do the same for venue. Select Add new bucket and enter Venue. How granular the buckets will be depends on each project's needs. For the Catering bucket, I'll add the tasks that need to be done first, identify a caterer, have a tasting and select first course. Select Add task under Catering. The new task card appears and you can enter the name, due date, and assign it to a person. For now, I'll keep it simple and only add the task name. Identify a caterer, then select Add task. Then I'll do the same for the other tasks. For the Venue bucket, I'll include tasks like touring potential venues, finalizing a venue and placing a deposit. Select Add task under Venue to add these tasks. Now this is starting to look like a plan. Now that I have tasks, I can assign members of my team to complete these tasks. Each one of my team members has an area of expertise and I'll assign the tasks accordingly. Isaiah knows all the wedding spots in the area, so I'll assign Isaiah the venue task. To do this, I'll select finalizing potential venues, and Planner displays the task properties. I'll select assign and assign this task to Isaiah by typing in their name and choosing it from the dropdown menu. The Assign task and add user to plan dialogue appears. I'll select Assign and add. By assigning and adding, Isaiah is first added to the plan and the task is assigned to them. I can also go through and set the due dates of each task. For this example, I'll set the due date for the end of the month. I'll select Due date and select March 31st. You can use Priority to signify how urgent each task is. Finalizing the venue is high priority. So under the Priority dropdown, I'll set the priority to Important. Close the Task Properties dialogue by selecting the X in the upper right corner. I now see Isaiah is assigned to assist the client in finalizing the venue and the task is due at the end of the month. Isaiah will receive an email with the task assignment, and that's it. I've created a plan, organized it by using buckets and created tasks assigned to my team. Next time you start a project, try using Microsoft Planner to create your own plan and let it help you track your work.