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The Challenge

This U.S.-based employee benefits and health insurance provider offers a range of customized, self-funded health plans, voluntary benefits, and wellness programs to organizations across the country. Its major initiatives already ran through Microsoft Project Online, giving the organization solid governance over its largest, most formally structured programs. But not every piece of important work fits neatly into a project plan.

Day-to-day operational work, smaller tasks, recurring responsibilities, and cross-team requests without a formal project structure, had no consistent home. That kind of work tends to live in email threads, personal to-do lists, and informal spreadsheets, which makes it nearly impossible for a team to see workload at a glance, track deadlines reliably, or hand off responsibilities cleanly. The organization needed a lightweight way to manage this tier of work without asking every team member to become a project manager, and without duplicating the structure already in place in Project Online.

The Solution

PPM Works piloted Microsoft Planner Premium specifically to close that gap. The pilot was designed to demonstrate Planner Premium’s capabilities to both experienced project managers and “accidental” project owners, employees who end up managing initiatives as part of a broader role rather than as a dedicated discipline. That dual audience shaped the approach: the configuration had to be simple enough for a first-time user to pick up in minutes, while still offering enough structure for experienced PMs to trust it with real deadlines and deliverables.

The pilot environment let the team assess current workflows and customize Planner Premium to fit how the organization actually operates, rather than forcing a generic template onto every team. Plans were built to streamline task tracking, clarify resource allocation and time management, and set clear priorities and deadlines for smaller operational projects. Tight integration with the company’s existing Microsoft 365 environment meant tasks, updates, and communications stayed inside the tools employees already used every day, so adoption didn’t require learning a new ecosystem, just a new way of organizing the work already happening inside it.

The Results

The pilot demonstrated clear day-to-day efficiency and time savings for the teams involved, along with a noticeable improvement in visibility into work that had previously lived in email threads and personal to-do lists. Teams reported clearer priorities, more reliable deadline tracking, and an easier way to hand off tasks without losing context: exactly the gap the pilot set out to close.

On the strength of those results, the organization is now using the pilot’s findings to inform a broader rollout of Planner across additional teams, with an eye toward giving every group, not just those running formal, Project Online-governed initiatives, a consistent, lightweight way to manage their work.