Tag / microsoft

by Simon Doy

Manage and deliver your 90-Day Action Coach Success Plan with Microsoft 365 – Part One


Introduction

If you are working with an Action Coach Business Coach like Iain Strachan as I am you will be used to the 90-day strategy planning session.

In these 90-day planning sessions, we define 4 Goals which are 3 business goals and one personal goal and build a plan on how to achieve those goals over the next 90 days.

Over the 5 years that I have been working with my coach, I have been trying different approaches to help me stay organised.

The challenges that you might have are:

  • How can I be reminded of the tasks that I need to do?
  • How can I see all the tasks that I need to complete?
  • How can I assign and track tasks that I have delegated to the rest of my team?
  • How can I record and track the metrics I have chosen to measure if the goal is complete?

In this post, I will show you some approaches I have been using to tackle these challenges. Plus tips and tricks and the approach that I take with Microsoft 365. Before I do, I need to make you aware that this post will use Microsoft 365 features from a Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Microsoft 365 E3 license and you will need licenses for Microsoft Viva. The Microsoft Viva license that you will need is the Viva Workplace Analytics license.

iThink 365 are specialists with Microsoft 365. We help organisations take a people-centric approach to achieve success with Microsoft 365 to improve their collaboration, communication, business process automation, AI approaches, management information decision making and employee experience.

Let’s get into it.

Planner – The Key to Managing Your Tasks

Firstly, Microsoft Planner is our recommendation to help you work with the tasks and actions in the business. For our scenario, we are going to use it to manage, track and remind us of the tasks that need to be completed for each of your goals.

The Planner application is available via Microsoft Teams, as shown below.

My suggestion is to create a Microsoft Team called Senior Management Team and create your Plan within that team.

You can find the following Microsoft training content to help you create your Microsoft Planner, plan.

With Planner you have a concept called Buckets which are the columns shown below, they allow you to group your tasks together.

We will use buckets to be able to manage our tasks and group them around each of the business and personal goals. Buckets are created for each goal type as shown below.

Next come tasks these are the activities that you have decided on to deliver your goal. Using the plan, these tasks are grouped under the Goal bucket.

Once you have your tasks assigned to the Goal buckets, you are well on track. Using Planner, you will be reminded when you need to do a task. Most importantly these tasks are visible within several Microsoft 365 applications including Microsoft To Do, Planner and Outlook. This will help to keep you pushing to meet your goal, as the tasks that you need to complete will be a consistent reminder.

So, we have a way to track and be reminded of the things we said that we needed to do to meet our goals. But how do we know we have met them?

Well, this is where we need to talk about Viva Goals! But let’s delve into Viva Goals in the next post.

Conclusion

In this post, we started talking about how you can use Microsoft 365 to track, manage and measure your 90-day Strategy Planning work.

Microsoft Planner was introduced as a way to help you manage, track and be reminded of the activities that need to occur.

In the next post, we will delve into how we measure your goals, track the measurement and bring it all together into one dashboard for you to track your progress to deliver your 90-day plan

by Simon Doy

What and Why Would You Want To Build a Custom Copilot?


Introduction

In my recent blog series about building a Teams AI Library-based Custom Copilot, I realised that I had not really talked about what a Custom Copilot is and why you might want to build one. Simon Sinek, would not be impressed!

So, in this blog post, I start with the why. So, why would you want to build a Custom Copilot? Plus I suppose I better explain what they are.

I talked about these aspects in a recent session I did for Chirag at M365 UK, called Custom Copilot The Options so you are welcome to watch that instead.

Session 2 (54:45) : Custom Copilots in Microsoft 365 – The Options – Simon Doy MVP

Anyway, here we go.

Why would you want to build a Custom Copilot?

So, why would you want to build a Custom Copilot and what are they?

So, a Custom Copilot is a Generative AI Chatbot that is specific in what it provides, it might cover a particular role or task and is not generic. For example, you might have a Copilot for HR which provides information for employees on HR matters.

Its power is in that it is specific. However, that can also be its downfall because it is specific and only knows information about a topic.

A Custom Copilot need not only be an information gatherer, it may also be a way to perform actions for example, the Copilot for HR might allow someone to submit a form for changing personal details for example.

So, now we have explained what a Custom Copilot is, then let’s explain why you might want to build one. As we mentioned they are great when you need to build something that provides a specific purpose or role. One of the challenges with broader Copilots, for example, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is that they can access a lot of data and information and that makes it hard for the LLM behind the Copilot to know what is important. By having a more specific dataset and providing a particular need the Copilot can be built with that in mind.

All these capabilities make the Copilot easier to use and it will likely be better at providing more relevant results. Additionally, for organisations looking to have these built, the risk is reduced of them failing. This is because their scope is smaller, so testing and getting feedback on how they perform is quicker and more targeted.

Custom Copilots can be made available in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint, actually, they can be delivered through a huge number of different channels via the Microsoft Bot Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio.

We want to build one, where should we start looking?

Well of course you can come and chat with us at iThink 365.

However, there are lots of resources out there. I would recommend watching the Microsoft 365 Development Community calls and reading these resources found on Microsoft Learn.

Building your custom copilot on Teams with the Teams AI Library

Create copilots with Microsoft Copilot Studio – Training | Microsoft Learn

Of course, have a look at my blog post on Building Custom Copilots with Teams AI Library and Azure AI Search.

What do you need to think about?

To be honest this area is moving quickly and changing all the time. The technology behind the Custom Copilots is very new and uses GPT models such as GPT 3.5 and GPT 4.

The patterns that are used for knowledge management-based Custom Copilots need a lot of testing and development as whether they are fit for your purpose depends on how the data is structured, chunked up, and put into the search index. There are a lot of variables that need to be managed here and tried out to give the users the results that they expect and help them get their jobs done.

However, it should not be underestimated the amount of time this will take and the tweaking that is required.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this post and I look forward to hearing how you get on with your Custom Copilot journey.

Please feel free to reach out if you need support on your journey.