Empowering Victorian Health and Housing Departments with Copilot for Microsoft 365

The Department of Health Victoria (DH) & The Department of Families, Fairness & Housing (DFFH) are large government organisations that helps the community to stay healthy and safe and deliver a world class support that leads to better outcomes for all Victorians.

The challenge

The Victorian departments DH & DFFH have a diverse workforce of over 20,000 employees, who use various M365 tools daily to collaborate and communicate.   

With an increasing strain on resources and the expectation to deliver, staff are often asked to “do more with less”. This conundrum leaves people across the departments searching for innovative ways to save time and make efficiencies so they can focus on what really matters.   

Some of the challenges included: 

Difficulty in finding relevant information and content across different platforms and channels and tools  

Time-consuming and manual processes for creating and sharing documents, presentations, and meeting notes 

Low engagement and innovation with repetitive tasks 

With the recent launch of Copilot for Microsoft 365, DH & DFFH wanted to explore how AI could help them overcome these challenges and improve their employee’s productivity, creativity, and skilling. In particular, the department was excited to learn more about the ability to provide contextual and personalised assistance to users across various M365 applications, such as Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Loop.  

These included:  

• Generating content from scratch or based on existing documents. 
• Summarising information from various sources and formats. 
• Finding information and experts across the organisation. 
• Generating new ideas and suggestions for content creation and brainstorming. 
• Capturing questions, comments, actions, and discussion points for meetings. 

Our approach

Our Transformation & Change practice adopted a user-centric and agile approach to deliver the Copilot Assessment and divided it into two phases:  

Phase one: Prepare for Copilot 

The aim of this phase was to focus on the understanding how people were working, identifying opportunities to leverage Copilot and build a business case for a wider roll out. Additionally, due to concerns around sensitive information leakage, we conducted an information management risk assessment.  

This phase focused on three key areas: 

• Discovery – To ensure that we could deliver value through Copilot, we needed to understand how people were working within the departments. To achieve this, we conducted deep dive workshops and focus groups to establish scenarios and personas. We quickly identified that there we three key high value scenarios to focus on: smarter meetings, document creation and finding information. 
• Planning – Taking the findings of the discovery we then formulated a change plan and assessment approach to create Copilot awareness across the department, train key audiences and provide continued support. 
• Sensitive information audit – To make sure that information management best practices across SharePoint and M365 were in place, we created an ‘Oversharing Risk Report’ to understand how secure the departments information was, assess the risk of oversharing, and provide steps to remediate. We achieved this by analysing over 34 million data points, gathered information from and analysed 5989 SharePoint sites and completed four deep dive risk assessments on high-risk sites. ​ 

Phase two: Copilot Assessment launch to 150 employees  

With phase one complete and an understanding of what the department waned to achieve, we moved on to on launch preparation and sustainment activities.  

Within this phase we provided: 

• Communications campaign – The communications campaign was vital for creating awareness of the Copilot Assessment We ran briefings and an email campaign to ensure everyone understood what was happening and when. 
• Training and learning activities – We focused our training efforts on high value audiences including the Fit365 champions, executive support teams and people leaders. We developed supporting materials, reference guides and cheat sheets.  
• Copilot Assessment community support – It was important to support all users through the assessment o ensure they were onboard with Copilot, so our team provided regular drop-in sessions and a Copilot Teams channel Q&A forum to support any queries along the way.  

To showcase the value that Copilot delivered and articulate the business case we also delivered the following:

• A recommendations report – “Where to from here?” is the biggest question following assessments like these. We made sure that we paved a way forward for DH & DFFH to take Copilot from the assessment stage, to take off and beyond, by listing next steps, risks to watch out for and tips for success.
• Value playback – Understanding the real value of a tool like Copilot is important. We analysed user data, anecdotal feedback, and sentiment to paint a holistic picture of the real impact and potential of Copilot.

Result

There were high expectations of what of Copilot for Microsoft 365 could achieve at DH & DFFH and we are proud to have demonstrated the possibilities of how AI will have a positive impact on their employee’s productivity and efficiency, as well as increasing their M365 ROI.

The overwhelming response from users and stakeholders has been positive and we are delighted that the DH & DFFH have decided to expand the use of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to more users and scenarios, and to continue to work with Engage Squared to ensure a smooth and successful adoption journey.

• 88% of Copilot pilot users said – it’s quicker to summarise a meeting.
• 83% of Copilot Assessment users said – it’s easier to take actions after a meeting.
• 75% of Copilot Assessment users said – they could get to a first draft quicker.
• 72% of Copilot Assessment users said – they could search for information easier.

The key impact of the assessment engagement included:

• Increased awareness and confidence in using M365 tools and features – Copilot provided contextual and personalised assistance and guidance.
• Improved productivity and efficiency – Copilot helped users to save on average 10hrs per month per user (based on self-reported survey data from assessment participants) this equates to an average time saving of 125hrs per user per year.
• Enhanced creativity and innovation – Copilot helped users to generate new ideas and suggestions and has allowed them to create engaging and informative content.
• Improved skilling and learning – Copilot helped users to learn new skills and capabilities, and to access relevant resources and training materials.
• Increased user satisfaction and engagement – Copilot provided a positive and interactive user experience, and a supportive and collaborative community within the department.