Efficient project management: KVL Group counts on Microsoft 365 Copilot

The challenge: Manual project management slows down project control and leads to communication errors

Projects and buildings go through various phases that involve different parties—from planning and construction to commissioning and any subsequent renovations during the period of use. The KVL Group has been ensuring that all these phases run smoothly since 2003. “As an international technical and strategic real estate consultancy, we ensure that construction projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the specified quality,” says Sven Seehawer, Managing Partner at KVL. “Our project managers act as pilots in project control and keep everyone involved continuously informed about the current status.” Coordination takes place by email or in meetings, for example, with appointments, deadlines, and task assignments documented in detail. This is the only way to monitor project progress and to make decisions and understand them with absolute certainty.

In the past, project managers at KVL had to juggle numerous documents: schedules, cost overviews, and monthly and quarterly reports had to be kept up to date at all times. “Errors can always creep in when manually updating and consolidating information, which then results in an inconsistent data basis,” Seehawer says. “In addition, manual summaries always take up a lot of time. For example, if we wanted to know how a project had developed over multiple quarters and what challenges there were, we had to work through the individual reports in detail. The same was true when it came to assessing two comparable projects in order to identify similarities or deviations and thus any potential risks. These handwritten notes would frequently turn into a new report on the actual report.”

This is also a challenge for the subject matter experts at KVL, who are often brought in only once construction projects have reached a certain stage. Within a very short time, they familiarize themselves with the documentation for complex projects so they can properly assess problems or evaluate risks with regard to planning, awarding contracts, or the building’s location. “To calculate the probability of various risks occurring and the associated amount of damage, our experts need to be able to compare properties across projects—quickly and with assured quality,” explains Frank Peterlein, Head of IT and AI at KVL. “Despite the fact that documents are systematically stored on SharePoint, it used to take them up to a week just to get to grips with a project.”

“We wanted to provide our project managers, our pilots, with a copilot to support them with recurring processes and tasks,” Peterlein continues. “At the same time, this assistant needed to integrate as seamlessly as possible into our existing infrastructure and the applications we work with on a daily basis. That’s why we wanted a standardized solution with low maintenance requirements and automatic access management.” As a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, QualityHosting AG brought Microsoft 365 Copilot into play for KVL. Seehawer felt this was the next logical step given KVL’s existing Microsoft environment, “We’re always asking ourselves whether there’s anything we can improve in our technological setup. Trying out new technologies directly is in our DNA.”

The solution: Microsoft 365 Copilot speeds up every day work and ensures information quality

In summer 2024, KVL and QualityHosting launched the first proof of concept with Microsoft 365 Copilot. They prepared the IT environment, set up access and authorizations, and trained employees in areas such as prompting. The findings and feedback from these training sessions were in turn incorporated into subsequent implementation steps. At the same time, a community for exchange and mutual support emerged in Viva Engage at KVL.

“Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn’t just provide KVL employees with answers to questions; as an integrated solution, it enriches those answers with company data,” says Silke Braun, Customer Success Coach for Microsoft Cloud Services at QualityHosting AG. “Copilot cites its sources by referring specifically to the meeting or email where it found the information.” For example, to track the progress of a project using the monthly and quarterly reports, the project managers ask Copilot for, and receive, a summary based on all relevant content and documents. The AI-based tool helps summarize chats and meetings in Microsoft Teams, extracts tasks from email threads, and creates documents based on information about a project. Automating certain tasks reduces communication errors at KVL while increasing the quality of the information.

For the experts at KVL, Copilot researches suitable projects with similar circumstances in the area of risk assessment, evaluates the documents, and distills the required information. Employees can also search for specific topics in the monthly and quarterly reports and have Copilot complete these reports.

“Microsoft 365 Copilot saves us up to 20 percent of the time we spent on project management, while also helping us dig into projects more deeply and in greater detail,” Seehawer says. “It gives us more transparency and lets us work in a more structured way and with more foresight. This strengthens us enormously as a company.” That’s because the automated support provided by Copilot ultimately has a positive effect on the customer relationship, too: since project managers receive information from the documents effectively in real time, they can make it available to customers more quickly. The automated summary of the monthly and quarterly reports ensures the completeness of the data at KVL.

“Past decisions are fully traceable, which makes it easier for our contact persons to make follow-up decisions and communicate them to superiors or stakeholders,” Seehawer says. “The transparency and speed we can offer with Copilot has a positive impact on the customer experience and customer loyalty.”

In the future, agent solutions will also support project management and project control at KVL. “For example, when it comes to checking whether a project is eligible for a sustainability certificate. Then we can make even more comprehensive recommendations to our customers,” Peterlein says. An initial pilot project is already underway in which a helpdesk agent is to serve as the first point of contact for employees with IT issues. The agent will provide direct assistance, thus reducing the number of tickets for simple problems. All KVL employees will soon have access to these agents and will benefit from that in their day-to-day work—meaning KVL will not only remain fit for the future but will also be in a position to shape it.