Creating groups in Planner

I lead a team of 20 who each partner with 5 other people on external teams (to us but still internal to the company). I have been using the planner to give each 1:5 ratio group a single place to track status on tasks. However, every time I want to make a new group to add to the planner, I have to request it via microsoft. Our IT can't get around that. It takes weeks for my group requests to be approved and really ties up onboarding. Is there a way around this? Or any other way that I could get the same result minus the hectic waiting for groups to be granted access?