Portfolio Management for Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner answers the cross-plan question twice, and neither answer works for a portfolio. My Tasks rolls up everything assigned to you personally across every plan you're on — useful for you, useless for a manager reading the state of ten projects. Portfolios groups related plans on a Roadmap, one row per plan, which gets closer to a portfolio view but stops at plan-level progress: you can't open a task from it, and it requires a higher-tier Planner and Project licence not every organisation has purchased. A team split between standard and premium licences loses the basic plans from the roll-up entirely, and a leader still ends up assembling the real status by opening each plan in turn.

Placker treats a set of imported Planner plans as one scope. Choose the plans that make up the portfolio and they render together — as a board, a Gantt, a track view or a report — without moving a single task out of the plan that owns it. No licence upgrade is needed: a board group is a Placker-side selection, not a Planner feature, so a plan on a standard licence sits in the same group as one on premium. Board Split: Combine folds buckets that share a name into a single column across the whole group, which is what turns four plans' worth of "In progress" columns into one. The capability behind it is board groups for Microsoft Planner.

Import each plan the portfolio needs — the board overview's Add board control accepts a Planner connector the same way it accepts a Trello board. Once every plan is in, build the group: either Add group from the board overview, or open one plan and use Change scope, then Save as new group. From there, give the portfolio two levels: put one card per project on a portfolio board, keep that project's tasks as items underneath it, and mirror the underlying plan's key tasks up so the portfolio board reflects real task-level movement rather than a status someone typed in. As with any Planner connection, a Microsoft 365 administrator has to authorise the connector once for the tenant before anyone can import a plan.

With the group in place, the weekly status report stops being a job someone does by opening each plan in turn. A report can aggregate across the whole board group: task counts by status, workload per assignee, and traffic-light indicators computed from due dates and progress rather than typed in by judgement. Two shipped report templates cover most of what a portfolio review needs — progress tracking and project overview — and either can go out on a schedule, the same reporting used on the Placker portfolio management solution, so the review starts from a document nobody had to build.