Microsoft Copilot AI agents set to transform project management

Microsoft made several announcements at its Ignite 2024 conference late last year, including the release of Copilot agents.

The tech giant describes the appropriately named Copilot agents as specialised AI assistants designed to enhance the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by connecting to your organisation’s knowledge and data sources.

It says these agents help users perform a variety of tasks, working alongside them to offer suggestions, automate repetitive tasks and provide insights to help make informed decisions.

Microsoft has several out-of-the-box agents available, such as its project manager which currently focusses on plan creation and task management, or customers can create their own agent for any purpose using Copilot Studio.

Canberra-based Mojo Up has been working with customers to deliver Microsoft-native Project Management (PPM) solutions, and says the release of Copilot agents provides an interesting opportunity to leverage investments to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of PPM processes across organisations.

“The concept is simple,” Mojo Up director Daniel Buchanan says.

“From a project management perspective, if all an organisation’s project information – schedules, risks, assumptions, actions, issues, dependencies and decisions – are stored in its Microsoft tenant, then this information can be used to power an agent.”

Daniel says the best use case to demonstrate the benefits of agents in this scenario is project support tasks.

“These tasks may be performed by the project manager in smaller projects or by dedicated project support officers (or similarly titled roles). They typically have responsibilities such as scheduling governance meetings, collating and chasing project and program status reports, chasing feedback, reviews and approvals, and so on,” he says.

“So when agents were first released, we decided to develop a rapid proof of concept. We chose to build an agent that checked if each project and program manager had completed their monthly status report in the current month and, if not, send them a reminder notification.

“Fairly simple – but if it worked it would demonstrate the viability of the use case. Extrapolate this out and agents could easily handle several common project management activities.”

Daniel says building the basic proof of concept has not been difficult. It was completed in 1.5 hours, half of which was troubleshooting integration with Microsoft Teams.

He says with an approval framework in place, an agent can assess an approval request based on business-defined criteria, direct the request to appropriate approvers, and follow up if approvals have not been completed with a specified timeframe. Or, with a defined project governance meeting cadence, an agent can schedule the recurring meetings and collate and distribute the meeting reports.

“If a basic proof of concept can be completed in a couple of hours by one person, imagine the capability and maturity that could be built over weeks, months, and years with relatively few skilled resources.

“While this would still make sense for smaller organisations, the impact for larger organisations is that at scale this translates to very significant time and cost savings that can be realised or redirected.”

Daniel says the new technology usually isn’t the hard part. Managing the change, training and adoption will be the real challenge.

“Helping people to understand why these practices are important is critical and we find it’s best to focus on the outcomes for each persona,” he says.

“For the project and program staff, it means there are fewer mundane and repetitive tasks which gives them more time to manage delivery.

“For the PMO [project management office] and governance functions, it’s about consistency and timeliness of information and reporting. And for the executive, it’s about data-driven decision making, efficiency and value for money.”

For Mojo Up, Daniel says this directly aligns with and extends its Microsoft-native PPM offering.

“With respect to PPM, we are focussed on Microsoft-centric organisations that want to get the basics right across people, process, technology and data,” he says.

“Now, not only can we help establish these foundations, but we can accelerate data- and process-driven practices by setting and codifying standards for project and program management.”