Efficiency Improvement

Evidence and data. Interviewees came from organizations across industries with varied company sizes and operational challenges. Despite these differences, interviewees consistently discussed overall efficiency improvements for their organizations’ employees who used Planner. Employees at the interviewees’ organizations frequently reallocated the time they saved, typically to higher-value tasks.

This benefited employees across many levels of organizations. The director of portfolio and PMO at a government organization said: “Planner could save 10% to 20% of people’s time at various levels of the organization, all the way from our steering and governance committees and VPs down to the individual who’s actually doing the work. The VPs need to see how it all fits together. The individual needs to know what to do this week and next week.” 

Interviewees and survey respondents mentioned many ways in which Planner (including Copilot within Planner) enabled that efficiency. How each factor affected a given organization varied based on the organization’s current operations and challenges, the roles for which the organization licenses premium versions of Planner, and the number of employees in those roles. Interviewees noted that in addition to this, each employee had a different mix of the tasks Planner helped with and spent different fractions of their workday on each of those tasks.

Examples of how interviewees and survey respondents saw Planner improving employee efficiency include the following:            

• Providing access to less siloed/more organized information via a single consolidated view. Interviewees said Planner made it possible to access information in one place. This information ranged from plans, goals, and timelines to an individual’s tasks and to-do lists. This consolidated view enabled many other efficiencies the interviewees described. The principal consultant at a professional services firm said, “Materials are all in a centralized location, so people aren’t having to bounce back and forth between tools looking for information.” The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company estimated Planner cut the time spent searching for information from 4 hours per week to 1 hour because information was consolidated, organized, and easy to find.

• Decreasing time spent in meetings. Several interviewees mentioned how better access to information shortened periodic meetings from 60 to 30 minutes, saving time for all participants. The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company noted, “Because everyone’s got everything right there, a meeting where you might have spent an hour on just trying to remind everybody and pull pieces together can just focus on priorities or certain topics and be done in half an hour.”
  Interviewees said that in some situations Planner eliminated the need to meet at all and gave examples like reducing a project manager’s time in weekly status meetings from 10 hours per week to 2 or 3 hours. The associate vice president of portfolio management at a financial services company said: “Having that visibility [from Planner] frees up time to get things done rather than meet to determine statuses. Because all the information is right there and the system flags things that are going to impact the schedule, you may only have to meet about escalations or roadblocks.”

• Reducing time spent on meeting preparation and follow-up. Planner also saved time previously spent preparing for and following up after meetings. The director of data science at a healthcare company estimated project managers who led sprint meetings saved several hours of postmeeting work per sprint which, combined with shorter meetings, saved a total of 20% of a sprint manager’s time. The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company said: “I can ask Copilot to summarize the meeting and send out meeting notes, whereas before I would do all that manually. For a significant meeting, it typically would take me 30 minutes to summarize, set actions, do all that stuff. If I’m able to have Copilot help me with that, you’re down to half that time or even less.”

• Creating documents, email, and other content. The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company said document creation that previously took 60 minutes could be reduced to 15 minutes by using Planner’s templates with Copilot and then cleaning up the results. 
   

• Leveraging generative AI in varied ways. Based on their initial use of Copilot within Planner, interviewees had already seen efficiency gains from their use of it and felt its impact and value would increase as they went further with it. The senior manager of PMO and governance at an industrial company said: “There’s going to be a lot of value from Copilot. We haven’t even scratched the surface on all the potential use cases for it yet. It’s really cool that you can create a project plan or schedule with it instead of starting from scratch or use it to analyze some project data.” The principal consultant at a professional services firm indicated, “We’re already saving a lot of time by using Copilot for meeting minutes, but we can go a lot further with our use of it.”
  
  The associate vice president of portfolio management at a financial services company noted: “With Planner, it’s all there. You can comment, you can escalate, you can use Copilot to summarize. If people are keeping Planner up to date, then the information should be there, and Copilot should be able to summarize statuses and issues rather than having to jump on a call and go around.” The vice president of PMO at the same company said: “We’ve thought of hundreds of examples. I’m looking forward to getting an overview of my team’s projects just by asking Copilot what’s going on or pinpointing the most immediate project needs with the highest impact.” In explaining their organization’s use of Planner, the information technology auditor at a financial services company explained: “Copilot is a game-changer. The AI-powered insights improve our decision-making.” 

• Providing transparency and accountability. The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company said: “We used to have meetings where we would assign tasks to various people only to have them say at the next meeting, ‘I forgot that was assigned to me.’ Planner allows you to convey, ‘This was assigned to you.’ It sends emails and reminders. It gives deadlines.” The systems engineer at an educational institution explained: “Everything’s better organized and there’s just more transparency about who should be doing what. For instance, when a new employee comes in, they need a badge and email. With Planner, our IT group can plan that out in a trackable form. That’s cut out blaming about ‘Who dropped the ball?’” 

• Increasing reuse and decreasing duplicated work. Interviewees said Planner’s consolidated information and task management enabled their employees to save time by more frequently reusing existing work and avoiding duplicating it. The systems engineer at an educational institution explained, “People now spend less time doing work that might have been avoided because they’re more often able to find and reuse existing work.”
  
  The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company said: “Planner can help identify and let folks know what has already been done. We used to get people working in a silo with no idea of what other people were working on. They’d think it was a good idea to do something — but then some other person ended up doing the same thing. With the views in Planner, everyone can see if someone is already working on a particular task.” That same manager estimated that if Planner were used in the right way, it could save 10% or as much as 20% of some groups’ collective time by reducing the time they spent on avoidable work.

• Streamlining processes, including collaboration and task management. Interviewees shared examples of how Planner helped streamline processes, including reducing the time needed to collaborate and coordinate across teams by 10% to 15%. The systems engineer at an educational institution noted: “Our departments now work well with each other. That’s huge. Our entire process of onboarding a new employee is much more streamlined, and we’ve been able to fix a lot of workflow and communications gaps. For example, we need to onboard several hundred new employees each year. For each, an HR person used to spend about 30 hours working with various departments. Now they spend five.”  
  
  Interviewees said Planner simplified determining task statuses because employees could go to a single place to see all their tasks that were due and mark them as completed, instead of going into individual plans or multiple applications to do so. The product owner of Microsoft 365 at an insurance company explained: “Planner helps you manage your time for your tasks without having to look in 12 different places. It notifies you: ‘You have a task coming up. Do your task. These tasks are due in the next week.’ And it will email you daily if they’re late. It also saves time for managers, because they don’t have to spend all of the one-on-one time with people just trying to track statuses.”
  
  The director of digital services at a government organization said: “With Planner, all your tasks are consolidated. You can pull that up to see everything that’s been assigned to you, even if you’re on multiple projects. You can see and update tasks directly instead of sending emails back and forth or waiting until a meeting. That’s definitely a productivity gain.”      

• Automating tasks. For some tasks associated with certain kinds of roles, the automation capabilities included in P3 and P5 versions of Planner enabled interviewees’ organizations to automate low-value or mundane tasks. This freed up workers’ time and reduced errors from manual work (which saved additional time). The systems engineer at an educational institution noted, “We spend less time fixing errors now because errors don’t happen as much.”
  
  The information technology auditor at a financial services company estimated that using Planner’s automation capabilities saved an internal auditing group of 15 people about 80% of their time. The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company described a repetitive and mundane task of identifying and cleaning up unused employee IT accounts. By automating this with Planner, a task that previously required 100% of an employee’s time now needs just 5% to 10% of that time. That same manager said IT aspects of their company’s onboarding had been fully automated with Planner, freeing up the time of a team that previously had been dedicated to creating accounts and assigning privileges. 
  
  The director of data science at a healthcare company explained that before Planner, several analysts assigned to each of their 10 departments spent at least 50% of their time manually checking if all sprint work had been completed and if that work adhered to PMO best practices. With Planner, nearly all that checking was automated (with alerts generated for any exceptions the automated process identifies). The analysts instead spend about 5% of their time troubleshooting or spot-checking things that could not be automated. That director explained, “So for example, if every time the network team has a project, they forget the firewall, we’d have an RPA [robotic process automation] to auto-create that task in Planner for that department.”
  
  This director also noted that, although the largest targets for automation would likely be their organization’s institutional review board, research reviewers, and security, they could see other line managers and operations using automation as well.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews and survey, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The number of employees leveraging premium versions of Planner grows from 800 in Year 1 to 2,200 in Year 2 and 3,600 in Year 3.

• As individuals, workgroups, and the overall organization gain experience with Planner’s functionality and how it can save time for them, their efficiency (compared to before Planner) increases. The percentage of work time saved due to premium versions of the new Planner is projected to be 2.00% (low) to 4.80% (high) in Year 1, 3.75% (low) to 9.00% (high) in Year 2, and 5.00% (low) to 12.00% (high) in Year 3. 

• The average fully burdened annual salary for an employee using premium versions of Planner is $95,680.

• Employees reinvest half of the time they save toward tasks that provide the organization with greater value.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $10.4 million (low) to $25.0 million (high).

Results may not be representative of all experiences because efficiency improvement can vary based on:

• The extent to which the organization leverages Planner’s functionality.

• The prior state and overall maturity of the organization’s task and project management.

• The nature of the roles using Planner.

• Prevailing local compensation rates.

Incremental Income

Evidence and data. Interviewees and survey respondents expected Planner to drive incremental revenue — and thus incremental income — through a combination of factors that include freeing up the time of people across many roles from low-value efforts (e.g., mundane tasks, looking for information) so they can focus on higher-impact efforts and simply think more; enabling higher-quality work; and providing sales people with more time and better information for their selling efforts. According to interviewees, this incremental revenue and income would not have happened without Planner as it represented money a company made because it could do new/different things compared to how it operated before Planner. 

• The principal consultant at a professional services company said: “By using Planner, our consultants produce higher-quality deliverables and increase the speed of making progress in our clients’ eyes by producing them faster. The resulting client satisfaction helps us win new projects.”

• That same principal consultant attributed increased revenue to salespeople getting time back to actually sell (rather than spending time on low-value tasks) and having better information with which to do so. The principal consultant said: “For our people in client-facing roles, an extra few hours per week saved by Planner can be used for business development. If you let the salespeople out, they’re going to land something. It’s just sometimes they can’t get the time to do it.”

• The director of data science at a healthcare company indicated, “Strong project management is very helpful for improving the hospital revenue cycle.”

Because of the nature of those factors, interviewees said it would take time to realize incremental revenue and income. 

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews and survey, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The organization’s baseline annual revenue is $6 billion. For model simplicity this is held constant.

• Given the nature of the factors that produce incremental revenue, no Year 1 revenue increase is attributed to Planner.

• The revenue increase attributed to Planner is 0.10% (low) to 0.35% (high) in Year 2 and 0.20% (low) to 0.70% (high) in Year 3.

• Forrester applies a net margin of 8.67% to top-line revenue growth to focus the study on bottom-line financial improvement.²

• The resulting incremental net income is an ongoing benefit that continues over subsequent years.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $1.2 million (low) to $4.2 million (high).

Results may not be representative of all experiences because incremental income can vary based on:

• The extent to which the organization leverages Planner’s functionality.

• The nature of the organization’s business.

• The organization’s competitive landscape.

• The degree to which the organization’s culture encourages idea generation and innovation.

• The organization’s operating margin, which is influenced by geography, industry, and competitive landscape. 

Faster Time To Value

Evidence and data. Interviewees and survey respondents said their organizations could complete cost-saving or revenue-generating corporate initiatives faster after deploying Planner.

The principal consultant at a professional services firm said, “Our internal initiatives are getting done faster, which had been a pretty big issue for us before Planner.”

Interviewees and survey respondents cited better organization of projects and improved communications and collaboration among multiple reasons why Planner accelerated these initiatives. They also noted the following:

• The director of data science at a healthcare company said, “Planner reduces what we call the fuzzy front end — that period at the beginning of an initiative where the project management structure isn’t defined and we’re not yet tracking sprints or weeks and getting the stakeholders together and having a clear view for what to do.”

• The senior manager of PMO and governance at an industrial company indicated: “Planner is how we’ll approve projects, allocate resources to them, and get under way. We are going to build a consistent way of intaking projects by bouncing project requests against utilization and allocation. All that will deliver quantitative savings.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews and survey, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:

• The composite organization could have completed these initiatives without Planner but would have needed more elapsed time to move each initiative from concept to reality. Because the composite organization uses Planner, each initiative starts to deliver value (cost savings or revenue) sooner than it otherwise would.

• Without Planner, the composite’s average elapsed time for each corporate initiative is six months.

• The composite attributes Planner with reducing that elapsed time by 7.5% (low) to 10% (high) in Year 1, 11.3% (low) to 15% (high) in Year 2, and 15% (low) to 20% (high) in Year 3.

• Each year, the composite executes 18 corporate initiatives. Nine of these are cost-saving and nine are revenue-generating. For the revenue-generating initiatives, Forrester applies a net margin of 8.67% to the resulting top-line revenue growth to focus the study on bottom-line financial improvement.³ The resulting average cost savings or incremental net income per initiative per month is $6,000.

• The accelerated cost savings or net income from each initiative that gets completed faster is a one-time benefit recognized only in the year in which that initiative is completed. 

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $178,000 (low) to $237,000 (high).

Results may not be representative of all experiences because reductions in the time to value can vary based on:

• The extent to which the organization leverages Planner’s functionality.

• The prior state and overall maturity of the organization’s task and project management.

• The organization’s typical operating pace, which is influenced by the organization’s age and culture.

• The number of corporate initiatives intended to directly reduce costs or generate revenue.

• The nature and scope of those initiatives and the resulting average monthly cost savings or incremental revenue from each.

• The organization’s operating margin, which is influenced by geography, industry, and competitive landscape. 

Cost Savings From Retiring Legacy Solution

Evidence and data. Interviewees and survey respondents reported that after their organizations replaced their prior work management solutions with Planner, they saved on software licenses for their legacy solutions, infrastructure on which that software ran, and people time needed to manage their prior solutions. These are net savings since their organizations now incur ongoing costs associated with Planner. Sixty percent of respondents have reduced/expected to reduce or eliminate their costs for other workplace, project, or task management tools because they no longer need them.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews and survey, Forrester assumes the following for the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization:
 

• After deploying Planner, the composite organization retires legacy solutions with prior annual costs ranging from $60,000 (low) to $300,000 (high) for software and infrastructure.

• One system administrator previously spent half of their time managing and maintaining those legacy solutions. The average fully burdened annual salary of a system administrator is $121,500.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $300,000 (low) to $897,000 (high).

Results may not be representative of all experiences because cost savings from retiring a legacy solution can vary based on:

• The number and nature of the organization’s legacy work management software programs.

• The number of users of the legacy solution.  

• The infrastructure needed for the legacy solution.

• The internal labor needed to manage the legacy solution.

• Prevailing local compensation rates.

Unquantified Benefits 

Interviewees and survey respondents mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Expanding project management capabilities and ownership beyond formal project managers. The director of portfolio and PMO at a government organization indicated: “With Planner, it’s not just the PM who can help put a plan together. Their team members who may not be project management gurus can all help with that.” The director of digital services at that same organization said: “The biggest advantage is the way Planner shifts the mindset around how a project team works together. Everyone owns the plan and works on it, instead of the PM owning the plan and telling others what to do with it. Everyone on the team can update their status before a meeting, so the meeting can be a discussion instead of simply a status update. It’s a different way of thinking that empowers the team.”

• Reallocating effort to higher-value tasks. Interviewees said that because their organizations’ employees save time by using Planner, those employees can apply that saved time and mental space to higher-value, more impactful efforts. Examples included IT staff building their skills by attending training and HR staff improving their ability to better serve employees. The information technology auditor at a financial services company explained: “Employees don’t want to waste time doing repetitive processes. If something can be streamlined or automated, why not do it? That saves you a lot of thinking time to focus on other aspects of your job. There’s always something else that needs to be done.”

• Achieving a higher percentage of goals. Interviewees said that by using Planner, their organizations were able to achieve a greater percentage of the goals they set and thus gain the anticipated value because they could better manage the projects underlying those goals. The manager of IT customer experience at an energy company explained: “[By using Planner], you know what the goals are, you know how to get to them, and you track it. So more of the goals get delivered on and produce results and value.” The systems engineer at an educational institution said, “Because we can plan better now, we’re more likely to get the right outcomes.” 

• Improving accountability. The director of portfolio and PMO at a government organization noted: “The transparency of information in Planner makes it clear to people what’s been assigned to them at a task level. There’s no more, ‘Oh, I thought someone else was doing that’ kind of thing.” 

• Delivering higher-quality work. Interviewees indicated that efficiencies and information provided by Planner enabled employees to deliver tasks with a higher level of quality. The systems engineer at an educational institution noted, “Giving teachers 5% of their time back would let them be better prepared and deliver a more efficient lesson and a better learning experience.” The information technology auditor at a financial services company observed: “People just have more bandwidth to do a better job. For instance, we have more complete and more accurate compliance reporting.”

• Increasing employee satisfaction. Interviewees cited employees’ positive reactions to the easier collaboration enabled by Planner and Planner’s automation of low-value, mundane work. The director of data science at a healthcare company said: “In terms of our overall organizational mission, we strive for excellence and having the best tools. So having tools that are helpful to employees and they’re actually happy to use is important.” 

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Planner and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Using Planner for additional use cases and groups of employees. Interviewees expected to expand their use of premium versions of Planner to other use cases and groups of employees over time. For example, the systems engineer at an educational organization indicated that although their organization’s initial Planner users were concentrated in business and IT functions, expanding Planner use to teachers (nearly half of total staff) could save 5% of their time and enable higher-quality teaching by reducing time spent on low-value tasks.

• Leveraging Planner’s capabilities (including AI) more completely. Interviewees noted their organizations would continue to explore additional ways to capitalize on Planner’s functionality (especially Copilot) and gain even greater value from it. The principal consultant in a professional services firm mentioned potentially automating some of the process around onboarding a new client, such as tailoring an onboarding presentation for each client. 

• Capitalizing on additional Planner capabilities (e.g., agentic AI) as Microsoft introduces them. Interviewees said they anticipated gaining additional value by using enhanced and new features as Planner continues to evolve. One example is Planner’s Project Manager Agent (PMA), an agentic AI tool. Although no interviewee had direct experience with PMA because it was introduced during the period when interviews were conducted, the director of digital services at a government organization said, “Planner’s two AI pieces — Copilot and agents — could really make a project much more efficient by taking away a lot of manual stuff like creating a project plan and dealing with a project’s outstanding tasks.”
  
  The director continued: “I’m really looking forward to and hopeful about Planner’s Project Manager Agent because of how it could reduce routine stuff project managers do. I see those agents getting smarter and smarter, where you could say to the agent, ‘Create me a status report on Monday at such and such a time.’ Instead of the PM having to manually go and try to figure out which tasks to include and what their status is, the agent in Planner uses that information to more intelligently pull a standard report. We would get more consistent reports that way.” That director also mentioned: “We’re constantly dealing with follow-ups, but if the status of a follow-up was old, you could have an agent deal with it. Think of it like an assistant for a project manager, where you can say ‘Go follow up on all these people and why their tasks are outstanding. See if they haven’t completed those tasks or just haven’t updated them.”

• Integrating Planner with other Microsoft applications. Several interviewees mentioned plans to integrate Planner with other Microsoft applications their organizations use, such as using Planner with Power BI to customize existing reports or create new reports. The director of data science at a healthcare company anticipated using Microsoft’s Power Automate in conjunction with Planner’s default functionality to enable more complex business intelligence reporting and additional dashboards and visualizations.

• Integrating Planner with proprietary applications. Interviewees noted their organizations could also infuse their proprietary, homegrown applications with new capabilities via integration with Planner. The associate vice president of portfolio management at a financial services company explained plans to enhance their company’s practice management system for client services by integrating Planner into it. That integration would provide client-facing staff with better client-specific plans and task lists (created with Planner), along with templates to speed creation of client service plans and client communications. The interviewee noted it would enable account teams to provide consistent information to clients and work together more efficiently and effectively (especially when a client relationship spans multiple lines of business).
  
  The associate vice president estimated that the enhanced system would save each client-facing employee — who are around one-third of overall staff at their organization — 4 to 5 hours each week by creating efficiencies in how they service clients. Those efficiencies would free up time for them to serve clients in other ways, which would help with cross-sell, upsell, and client retention. This interviewee noted: “Adding Planner made our legacy system much better than what we had. If I create a new task list in the legacy system it automatically creates a plan in Planner, and people can manage all their plans within Planner. You get all the great functionality of Planner and the summarization. You can see your tasks across all your clients in one spot, and it all syncs with the legacy system.”

• Leveraging Planner for merger and acquisition efforts. The vice president of PMO at a financial services company envisioned using Planner to streamline and accelerate the integration efforts around future corporate acquisitions by consolidating information and standardizing and automating integration workflows.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).