Planning Groups

What it does

A planning group is the base unit of workforce management. It bundles the queue-and-channel combinations that generate work for a team, sets the time zone and service objectives for that work, and becomes the scope every forecast, capacity plan, schedule and performance report inherits.

Key facts

A queue-and-channel combination can belong to only one planning group at a time — the platform enforces this so the same interaction volume can't land in two forecasts.
Each group carries a name, a time zone (which governs forecasting and scheduling intervals), a demand scope of one or more queue/channel combinations, service objectives, and its associated shift plans, forecast scenarios and capacity plans.
Requires the Workforce Management for Customer Service package installed from the Power Platform admin centre, and the queues/channels configured in Customer Service or Copilot Service admin centre first.
Managed from the Copilot Service workspace site map under Workforce Management > Planning Groups.
Selecting a planning group on a forecast scenario populates Time zone, Channel and Queue from the group and makes them read-only. Leave the group blank and you set those three by hand, exactly as before.
Capacity plans built from a forecast scenario inherit that scenario's planning group. Capacity plans built from an uploaded forecast file don't — you pick the group yourself.
The forecast scenario list carries a Planning group column you can sort and filter on.
The adherence tracker has a Planning group filter, with a Not applicable option for shift plans that aren't attached to a group.
The adherence history report can also be filtered by one or more planning groups, combined with the existing duration, time zone, shift plan and representative filters. It associates representatives with groups through their scheduled shifts, so the group needs representatives assigned before the filter returns anything.

When to use / skip

Use planning groups as the first thing you set up in WFM — nothing else (forecasts, capacity, schedules) exists without one. Group multiple queues that a single team handles into one group so you forecast them as a unit rather than juggling a scenario per queue.

Configuration decisions

Where to draw the group boundaries: per team, per business unit, or per skill pool. This decides the granularity of every downstream forecast and schedule.
Which queue/channel combinations belong together — get this wrong and you either over-aggregate (losing per-queue accuracy) or fragment (more scenarios to maintain).
The time zone, which fixes the interval boundaries for the whole group.
Service objectives, set once on the group and reused by its capacity plans.
Whether to attach a group to each forecast scenario at all. Attaching it locks the scenario to the group's time zone, channels and queues; leaving it off keeps the old free-hand behaviour but loses the inheritance downstream.

Gotchas

The one-group-per-combination rule bites during reorganisations: you can't just add a queue to a second group, you have to move it, which reshapes the losing group's demand.
Supervisors only see the representatives, schedules and requests inside their authorised planning group, so the boundary you draw is also a visibility boundary — not purely a forecasting one.

Consultant notes

Clients routinely scope groups around their org chart rather than around how work actually flows, then wonder why forecasts drift. Draw the boundaries around shared queue/channel demand and skill pools, not reporting lines.
The time zone choice surfaces late — usually in UAT when a follow-the-sun team sees intraday intervals that don't line up. Nail it down per group during design.
Because the group is also the supervisor visibility scope, a "tidy" forecasting split can accidentally hide representatives from a supervisor who legitimately manages them. Check the two requirements together before you commit the boundaries.
Attaching a planning group to an existing forecast scenario greys out the time zone, channel and queue fields. If someone had tuned those by hand, the group's values overwrite that tuning silently — check the scenario output afterwards rather than assuming it survived.
The adherence history report filter works off scheduled shifts, not off a direct representative-to-group link, so a group with no shifts yet returns an empty report and looks broken.

Worth revisiting after the next release wave. Last refreshed 2026-09-15 when planning group scoping reached forecast scenarios, capacity plans and both adherence reports.