95% Efficiency creating Contract Renewal J&A with M365 Copilot
Episode 1: “The COR Files – Automating the Annual Grind” In the world of federal procurement, Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) are the unsung heroes. Managing contracts, ensuring they contracts are executed effectively and in compliance with the FAR. Among their many responsibilities, every contract requires full and open competition unless "the agency head determines that it is not in the public interest" (FAR 6.302-7); or maybe it's due to use of brand name (FAR 11.104). No matter the reason, when an exception is required the COR will prepare a Justification and Approval (J&A) document showing salient physical, functional, or performance characteristics of the solution. During a recent Prompt Design engagement at the Microsoft Innovation Hub, Washington DC, a COR walked us through the process they have to do for each of the 800 contracts their office manages. Each year, as many as 800 contracts go through a J&A. Depending on familiarity with the contract this can take 4-5 hours of research, organization, documentation, and even creating a presentation. We have over 100 people who, as a tertiary responsibility, must create these or risk a contract being lost and the organization has to start from zero in bidding the solution again. However, in 30 minutes of brainstorming and testing, their Prompt Design team developed the following M365 Copilot prompt. The COR then used Copilot in PowerPoint to automatically generate a slide deck from the output, applied the agency PowerPoint template, and they were done. The result? What normally took half a day was completed in under 30 minutes. Under 5 minutes to create the salient characteristics and the PowerPoint slides, the remaining time reviewing the content and validating its accuracy. “As a Contracting Officer's Representative, I want to develop salient characteristics about [NAME OF TECH] to write a justification and approval using my OneDrive folders [REFERENCE FOLDER NAME OF TECHNOLOGY DOCUMENTATION]. Reference old procurement documents [REFERENCE FOLDER NAME OF SAMPLE PROCUREMENT DOCUMENTS] to help understand the expected format.” When scaled across an agency managing 800 IT contracts, the COR estimates a potential savings of as much as 3,600 hours annually and more than 95% efficiency gained. What ways has your agency successfully used M365 Copilot to gain efficiencies in the annual grind? Copilot+Alt+Gov COPILOT+ALT+GOV is a series dedicated to sharing government use cases for generative AI from real government employees. In the spirit of reproducing these results in as many agencies as possible, we will work to share as much information about the process, the use cases, and the impact of these use cases. If you have a use case YOU want to share, reach out to and me, we'd love to work with you on it! Learn more at aka.ms/copilotgovImmersive Reader comes to PowerPoint and OneDrive plus more updates for Dyslexia Awareness Month
PowerPoint gets more inclusive One of the top requests we’ve heard from students, parents and educators has been to add the Immersive Reader to PowerPoint. It has also been a top UserVoice request for the PowerPoint team. Today we are thrilled to announce that we are adding the Immersive Reader to PowerPoint in two areas.
Immersive Reader comes to PowerPoint for the web, OneDrive, SharePoint and MakeCode
We are thrilled to announce that the Immersive Reader is rolling out to four additional Microsoft apps and services, including PowerPoint for the web, OneDrive, SharePoint and MakeCode. This set up updates that bring this powerful literacy tool to even more places!Record Slide Show in PowerPoint for Mac coming soon, plus additional PPT updates available today
We’re excited to announce that new updates are now available on PowerPoint for Mac that allow users to record presenter video and inking during their Record Slide Show sessions. These new capabilities will enable you to create more robust recorded presentations. We hope that this feature can help simplify your presentation recording process and better engage your audience.Easy Learning and Testing with PowerPoint and Forms – HLS Show Me How
In this HLS Show Me How video I demonstrate how a nurse could easily create training for a shared workstation using PowerPoint and the new Insert > Forms capability. While this use case addresses nurses and surgical scrubbing it can easily be applied in a myriad of use cases.
