by Bill Dall
Ever feel that status updates are more trouble than they’re worth?
Anyone who has worked with me knows that I’m somewhat hit and miss on the weekly status update. I feel they’re a great idea for a while but then fall off the wagon as things get busy - the Friday syndrome of ‘I wanted to accomplish THESE THINGS this week and I will do it, come what may!’ That’s why they often slip to Monday, or disappear entirely.
Good news is I’m (somewhat) okay at intentionally planning my day, so I actually do adapt to what’s needed and what’s important, but I do that probably more privately than my co-workers would like. (So maybe don’t ask by co-workers about this… 🙂)
But regardless of your personal success level on these fronts, keeping everyone in the loop as to what is going on is a big part of everyone’s job, and if you’re a project manager, a main part of your role. Too much information and everyone tunes out. Too little information, and people don’t get what they need.
And all this work is toil - you’re not making key decisions or doing deep work, you’re executing a process to keep ‘the machine’ running. Imagine reclaiming 3 hours a week by automating updates and spending that time on real problem-solving.
At Cypress Falls we’ve used MS Power Automate and Copilot Studio to create a number of AI-enhanced document workflows so that we can focus on our deep work and our clients.
One example is that we have a shared TODO list and automatic daily updates with summaries and interpretation from a Copilot model. This provides us with a nice digest we can review quickly, and save us from the endless SPAM we get if we turn ticket notifications on.
As a project manager you can imagine a world where every stakeholder group gets a tailored update, all at the touch of a button, saving you hours of collating and drafting each week, and based on your source systems as a single source of truth (including even that personal master excel sheet everyone keeps.) You improve stakeholder alignment - everyone gets the update they need - and you do less toil and more value-added work.
Power Automate + Copilot Studio provides a rich source of intelligent automation that works in your Microsoft enterprise ecosystem - as examples, it can track inboxes, interact on Teams, check apps and databases, generate documents, scan documents, write emails, and run approval workflows, all with intelligent agents injected in key parts of the workflow.
What’s the one repetitive task you’d love to automate? Drop your thoughts below.
Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash