One of the most popular requests ever since Planner was released was to be able to save plans as templates and reuse them to create new plans.

It makes logical sense, since many teams have a standard process and steps which includes the same set of buckets, labels, people and so on. This is especially true if the same team is working on multiple projects and has a plan for each of the projects. Recreating each of the entities is a royal pain.

In addition, this problem gets aggravated due the absence of the capability of adding Custom fields, which can then be applied to multiple plans.

In light of this, a recent feature released for Microsoft Planner, Copy Plan, is a tremendous help for teams that use Planner for repeatable processes and steps.

Instead of rehashing what has already been written, I will direct you to this detailed article by the Planner team on this feature.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Planner-Blog/Planner-s-new-copy-plan-feature-helps-streamline-work-management/ba-p/364048

If you want to use this feature for templates functionality, here is how I see it working.

1. Create plans that will serve as your templates.
2. Set the names clearly to denote that they are templates. (Something like “Template – Rapid Application Development”
3. You may decide on setting this as a Public Plan or a private Plan depending upon how your team works.
4. Voila, now every time you create a plan, you will be able to use the “Copy Plan” feature to create it from template.