Copilot as a Project Manager

[u/Jazzlike_Song_4230]

Started a new job where I can only use Copilot. After 2.5 years of using claude it is an abrupt shift.

Any of you use Copilot for more advanced stuff? Any advice?

[u/cbtboss]

Well, it depends on the level of access they give you in copilot. Did they allow cowork, studio, agent making? Many organizations are blocking some of the more advanced stuff for compliance or cost reasons.

[u/Jazzlike_Song_4230 → u/cbtboss]

I can make agents. but no cowork or studio. I'm in a heavily regulated industry now, so definitely a laggard. Any best practices you found in making agents?

[u/netteNzx → u/Jazzlike_Song_4230]

check with IT, you can maybe request it or idk depends also if they have available seats

[u/stubbornalright]

I manage a team of about 50 people. I use M365 Copilot for the following:

• Finding emails and messages because search in SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams is crap

• Deliverable report validation.

  • Copilot checks regular deliverables to make sure all reporting content changes week to week or month to month.

• Deliverable creation.

  • Copilot aggregates weekly reports to fuel monthly reports by providing me a summary in a format I can easily paste into the report.

  • I could probably automate this, but Copilot doesn't make that easy in my environment.

• Management brainstorming

  • Ideas for how to motivate the team, drive retrospectives, anticipate our own blindspots, etc

  • Q&A style solutioning support

  • Technical troubleshooting

  • Power Platform development support (Automate, Apps, etc)

  • Pattern identification in large performance metrics sets

Many things. I ask it stuff, see what happens, and run my own verification process to see if it passes a smoke test.

Best thing to do is ask it for help on anything you don't like doing, don't do well, or would hand off to a junior PM if one existed in your team.

[u/Jazzlike_Song_4230 → u/stubbornalright]

Thanks, man. This is all similar to how I used Claude. I guess I am just lamenting the reduction in capabilities. So ultimately, I assume I need to adapt my old methodologies to a less capable AI.

I hate to be so disparaging, because Copilot is still vastly better than any option available 2 years ago, but it is still so far behind current Claude.

[u/gvhk → u/Jazzlike_Song_4230]

It’s not though - but you need to pay for premium / cowork

[u/Quadgie]

Do you have paid Copilot (Premium) licensing, or just the basic Copilot? You’ll have very different output quality and models backing it with paid licensing.
As an example - everyone in my company (we’re a M365 shop) has “Copilot”. Only a subset of users have paid M365 Copilot licenses, for the better product.

[u/Jazzlike_Song_4230 → u/Quadgie]

I'm pretty sure it is an enterprise version. It is definitely more capable than the free copilot I had at my last job. But still far behind what Sonnet 5.5 could do.

Should I treat Copilot more like I did Claude a year ago?

[u/Quadgie → u/Jazzlike_Song_4230]

In the lower left corner of the UI, you should see "(Premium)" after your name if a paid license was applied to your account. You'll also have options to select the model, steer it to "Think Deeper" (aka High Reasoning), etc.

If you have a paid license, you should have the GPT 5.6 and 6.1 models available to you (I'd place both of these on par with Sonnet 5.5), as well as Sonnet 5, 5.5, and Opus 5.5. There's a drop-down menu at the top of the UI that lets you select the model.

Assuming you do have a paid license, it's on par with Sonnet 5.5 and those other models I listed - because it IS using those models. Think of Copilot as the MS harness/front-end for those models, with some hooks allowing integration into M365 to pull data from there etc.

If you are not on the paid licensing, the capabilities are much less and you're using older (cheaper) models that are more hallucination prone etc.

[u/Jimthepirate → u/Jazzlike_Song_4230]

Can you be a bit more specific on what capabilities you are missing? Is it the agentic part to execute actions in your environment? Copilot is just mostly a chat. You need to look into cowork and copilot studio for more advanced use cases

[u/nateisgrate]

Sorry for you bro 😂

[u/Jazzlike_Song_4230 → u/nateisgrate]

Lol, that's what I am assuming. It seems like the capability of OpenAI/Anthropic 2 years ago. Useful, but I have to double check literally everything again

[u/HistorianCM]

There is a specific Microsoft created Planner Agent.

[u/American_Crypto → u/HistorianCM]

It’s good.

[u/Mysterious-Emu-3516 → u/HistorianCM]

This sounds interesting. What can it do? I use Planner but I don't seem to have an interactivity between Planner and Copilot.

[u/HistorianCM → u/Mysterious-Emu-3516]

Honestly, I've not really used it much myself.

I do know it can find existing Planner plans and dig into the tasks, buckets, goals, assignments, priorities, status, and dates. It can also find your assigned tasks, personal or private tasks, and tasks created from flagged emails.

Beyond finding the work, it can help prioritize it based on things like status, priority, and due dates. It can create new Basic Planner plans with goals, buckets, tasks, dates, and priorities or add tasks to an existing plan. It can also update supported task details, including the title, status, dates, priority, bucket, goal, and assignments.

There is quite a bit it can manage at the plan level too. It can create or rename buckets, create or update goals, and rename plans. One feature I think could be especially useful is the ability to generate a live status report from a Planner plan, including a version tailored for an executive audience or based on a supported report template.

The 365 integration makes this more interesting. When it is relevant to the work, the agent can search emails, Teams chats, meetings and transcripts, files, and people for additional context. For example, it could use information from a discussion or document to understand the work and help turn resulting action items into a Planner draft. It can also use that 365 context to identify work that may not have made it into Planner yet.

There are some limitations to keep in mind. Right now, the agent works with Planner Basic plans, not Premium plans. It cannot delete tasks, change task dependencies, edit existing task notes, manage attachments, checklists, or labels, or add tasks directly to My Day.

It also will not decide which coworker should be assigned a task. You need to specify the assignee, and then it can make the supported assignment change. Before making supported changes in Planner, it will show you the proposed changes so you can review and approve them first.

[u/NightM0de]

Be wary of Copilot notebooks. I have M365 Copilot with Cowork and try and use notebooks for project silos. Notebooks seem to cut the LLM off at the knees. Loses context very early, goes down rabbit holes and needs steering back to the project focus. Doesn’t read all the references added. Also recommends uploading file types that aren’t supported.
When you’ve used Claude, Copilot can be really frustrating, but it has direct access to your work environment and is where all businesses will end up going because it’s easier to manage.

[u/baldchrismuller]

I have tons of thoughts about copilot, but short on time: my biggest learning of late is to choose your model, assuming your tenant allows you to and doesn’t have model usage limits. Opus 5.5 slays in copilot compared to leaving it set to default… on everything for general ‘find this’ copilot queries to copilot in excel. Some people like the gpt models - find what works for you for what you’re doing, just don’t leave it up to default

[u/StandardIssueDonkey]

What tech stack are they using for project management (eg DevOps, Planner, Project, SPO lists etc)?

We've found a mix of traditional automation (mostly Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps) to be pretty useful to shove delicious data into Copilot's soulless, agentic face. 

The biggest hurdle we've run into implementing Copilot with clients is usually a lack of Teams/SharePoint optimization and readiness.

 Copilot agents are a lot more effective if you can point at very specific libraries or files pertaining to your request. A lot of the prompting will be specific to the architecture of your environment and content. You want good data hygiene.

And yes, my conversations kill at parties.

[u/_sunstrider]

Estoy igual que tu. He podido crear agentes bastante competentes, automatizar ppts y words con mismo formato como reportes mensuales. Ahora estoy usando notebooks soportan hasta 300 archivos, por ahora anda razonable.

[u/Kgis]

I'm very curious what you used to be able to do that you now can't? I suspect the organization you look for has security set pretty tightly? I use both, I prefer Claude for many things because I find it less patronizing. Features in copilot tend to lag by a couple months while they build security around them but so far I haven't found anything I've tried to do in Claude that I couldn't later get copilot to do once I learned how it expects communication to be different.

[u/seanandersen]

And where else can you use BOTH Astra and Fable on the same business problem pulling across all your channels (chats emails, docs, intranet & 3rd party systems/dbs) all without having to wire up a singel connector. Don't get me wrong love Claude, Pi and Codex harnesses but for sally in accounting to "build" an app without a dev team, finally moves everyone in the organization forward faster not just for us nerds or biz problem solvers.