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Keep a project on track with the Project Manager agent

Hand the agent your plan and let it do the nagging — tracking action items, chasing owners, and flagging what's about to slip — so you stop being the human status-checker.

Stage: First-Party Agents · For: Champion, Manager · Level: Starter · Time: 10 min

Status: Public preview — verify current availability on the Agents in Microsoft 365 roster.

When to use this

You built the plan (maybe with Copilot — see the Stage 1 walkthrough). Now comes the unglamorous part: keeping it alive. Who owns what, what's due, what's quietly slipping. Project Manager is the prebuilt first-party agent for this: it ingests a plan or a set of tasks, tracks status, nudges owners, and surfaces risk before it becomes a fire. It's the difference between making a plan and running one.

For champions and managers this is where delegation gets real — you're not asking for one answer, you're handing off an ongoing responsibility.

What you'll need

  • M365 Copilot license with access to the Project Manager agent (Agent Store / agents rail)
  • A plan or task list to track — from a doc, a meeting's action items, or a Planner/Loop board
  • The owners reachable in your tenant, so the agent can attribute and follow up

Try it now — the prompt

Point the agent at your plan and tell it what "on track" means:

@Project Manager track the action items from this plan. For each one, capture the
owner and due date, tell me what's at risk of slipping and why, and draft a friendly
nudge to any owner who's overdue. Give me a status summary I can share weekly.

Why this works: it defines the unit of work (action items), the attributes (owner, due date), the signal you care about (at risk + why), and a deliverable (a shareable weekly summary). You're describing a standing job, not a one-time read.

Step by step

  1. Open Project Manager and give it the plan. Find it in the Agent Store or agents rail and point it at your source — a doc, a meeting's action items, or a task board.
  2. Review the tracked items. The agent lists each action with owner, due date, and a status read. Confirm it parsed the owners and dates correctly before you rely on the tracking.
  3. Check the risk calls and the nudges. It flags what's slipping and drafts the follow-ups — you approve the tone and the recipients before anything goes out.
  4. Set the cadence in plain language: 
    Give me this status every Friday at 3pm, only escalate items that are overdue
or blocking others, and keep the summary to one screen.

Screenshots

We deliberately don't ship screenshots that go stale — the Microsoft Copilot UI changes often. Follow the numbered steps above, which we keep current. Maintainers can regenerate fresh captures with the Playwright tool in tooling/screenshots/.

Make it better

Tracking is the floor; steering is the ceiling: - Roll up a portfolio. "Summarize status across all three of my projects and tell me which one needs attention first." - Tighten the nudges. "Make the overdue reminders warmer and CC me only when something's a week late." - Connect it to the source of truth. Have it track the same board your team already lives in, so the agent's view and reality don't drift apart.

📚 Learn more. The Agents in Microsoft 365 Adoption Hub introduces the prebuilt agents in plain language, and the M365 Copilot resources hub covers how these agents fit the broader Copilot experience.

Watch out for

  • It tracks what it can see. Work happening in side channels or someone's head won't show up. The agent's status is only as complete as the sources you point it at.
  • Approve the nudges before they send. A well-meaning automated reminder to the wrong person, or in the wrong tone, costs you goodwill. Keep a human in the loop on outbound messages.
  • Risk flags are prompts to look, not verdicts. "At risk" means check this — confirm with the owner before you escalate.

Where this leads (the ramp)

You've now let an agent run a standing responsibility, not just answer a question. The next step is handing off whole multi-tool tasks — "pull the inputs, do the work, deliver the artifact." That's Stage 3 · Cowork, where delegation stops being one agent doing one job and becomes Copilot orchestrating the chain.

Next: Cowork → Hand off an end-to-end task to Cowork

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