Zach is a Lead Service Delivery Manager at Advania – he’s been one of the early Copilot adopters in our pilot programme running since the beginning of this year.
With our company now licensing Copilot for Microsoft 365 across our entire workforce, we’re sharing how the success of the pilot programme supported our decision to go big on our Copilot investment. Find out how Zach has been using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to save valuable time throughout his day.
What is service delivery?
As a Lead Service Delivery Manager, I’m responsible for managing the delivery of IT services to our clients, ensuring that we meet their expectations and service level agreements (SLAs).
I also provide data analysis and reporting to help them understand their service performance and identify areas for improvement. All this means that I work with a lot of data in my day-to-day work, which can be time-consuming and tedious, especially when manually extracting and summarising data from different sources. I’ve been part of our Copilot for Microsoft 365 pilot group since the start of this year, exploring how the various Copilots across the Microsoft 365 apps can help me work better.
Using Copilot throughout the day
In my role, I often have to deal with ad-hoc queries, service reports and incident reports – not to mention meetings with customers and colleagues to handle how services are delivered. I’ll take you through what a typical day could look like with Copilot as my personal assistant.
Starting the day catching up on my inbox, I can ask Copilot in Outlook summarise long email threads to quickly get up to speed on the situation with the right context. Now, I know that my client’s testing phase was a success, and the team can proceed to go live with their project – and Copilot’s made it easy to understand when and how the project will be proceeding.
Moving on to a scheduled call with my colleagues later in the morning, switching on Copilot in Teams during the meeting allows me to focus on finding a solution to any issues that are raised. Using the Teams Meeting Recap, I can grab a handy summary of the meeting, along with a list of action items for everyone involved, ready to share with the team.
Before the morning’s out, I want to review comments that have been made to a draft contract proposal by both internal and external stakeholders. I can ask Copilot to generate a table specifying the user comments and notes, adding that I want specific columns to categorise the details of each comment.
In the afternoon, I turn my attention to an ad-hoc request to create a service report for a specific department. Instead of manually reviewing data within our ITSM tool Service Now and writing a summary from scratch, I can use Copilot to pull out the key findings and recommendations with justifications for each of them from a PDF report of incidents from the past quarter. This saved plenty of time, not only on compiling the document, but also providing context and value that I could share with the department.
With the time I saved on this request, I explored how to streamline the major incident reviews process with clients. Major incidents are reported when a complete outage affects everyone in an organisation – and we have an entire team to handle these. However, creating the reports on these can be a lengthy task.
By exporting the technical report from ServiceNow, I can ask Copilot to provide a summary that includes key information required in the report template. The result is a comprehensive, accurate and professional report – and although it would need to be double checked against the Service Now report before sharing with the client, it’s saved valuable time for the incident response team.
This particular use case was so impactful that we had to share it with the team once Copilot was rolled out across our entire workforce. This meant that we could help streamline the creation of post incident reports used within our Major Incident Management practice at Advania.
Q&A: Zach’s experience of Copilot for Microsoft 365
How has Copilot for Microsoft 365 changed the way you work?
Copilot has significantly increased the efficiency of completing specific tasks – like content creation for knowledge-based articles, analysis of data within Service Now and summarisation of meetings, emails and chats.
I’ve also seen it significantly increase the value within Team Meetings – which take up a significant proportion of my work week. Using Copilot to summarise key discussion points, list different perspectives by topic and identify action owners ensures that I can maintain focus on participating in the meeting without needing to worry about capturing notes.
What are some of your own learnings from exploring Copilot?
Some of Copilot’s benefits are immediately obvious – like Teams Meeting and Outlook email summaries. However, other use cases require you to really be inquisitive and seek out potential use cases. I was able to do this by really targeting tasks that often require significant manual effort and then considering how I could use Copilot to help streamline them. I initially found this tough but through increased adoption, trial and error and prompt training, I’ve been able to incorporate Copilot into more aspects of my role.
How has learning about prompting helped you use Copilot?
Massively. Initially my prompts were vague and this was reflected by the output – which didn’t meet the expectations of what I was looking for and if I’m honest, made me question the value of using Copilot outside of Teams and Outlook.
The “promptathon” training made me appreciate that Copilot’s capabilities can be maximised by using more effective prompts, and gaining an understanding of the GCSE framework has allowed me to really accelerate my adoption of Copilot in my role.
What are some of your tips and tricks for using Copilot?
Be inquisitive. Stick with it. Speak to others.
How do you collaborate and share use cases with your colleagues?
We’ve incorporated this into our Service Management Team Meeting with the aim of building a Use Case Library that can be referenced by Service Delivery Managers. I’ve also reached out to wider teams where I’ve identified use cases that can significantly benefit them (like Major Incident Management). As our adoption increases across the business, building a mechanism to share use cases will be key to harnessing Copilots capabilities across the business.
How much time do you think Zach has saved today?
Copilot for Microsoft 365 can help people across your company save valuable time each day. We’ve seen it ourselves – 76% of our pilot users saved up to an hour each day, leading us to roll out Copilot licences to our entire workforce of over 1,000.
