Exercise 1, Task 2: Use Copilot in Whiteboard to identify potential risks

As the project moves into the planning phase, your IT team needs to identify potential risks that might affect schedule, budget, security, or operations. You’re responsible for facilitating a collaborative brainstorming session to capture and categorize all risks associated with the project. To achieve this goal, you plan to use Copilot in Microsoft Whiteboard to document these risks and group them into categories. Doing so can aid the IT team in developing mitigation strategies. Copilot in Whiteboard should base this list of risks on the project framework summary Word document that you created in Task 1 for the Network Modernization and Security Upgrade project.

Think of this exercise as basically an AI-assisted sticky-note exercise. Have you ever participated in a brainstorming session before that involved sticky notes? Meeting attendees write ideas on sticky notes and then stick them to a whiteboard or to a wall. From there, the meeting facilitator rearranges the notes by organizing them into various categories, removes duplicate ideas, edits ideas for clarification, and so on. When you finish the session, you end up with stacks of ideas, organized into categories.

Well, that’s really what this exercise is - just a virtualized sticky-note exercise, all with the help of Copilot in Whiteboard. However, instead of having a room full of people brainstorming ideas and writing them on sticky notes, Copilot takes their place. Watch as Copilot generates a list of ideas, writes each one on a graphical sticky note, and attaches each note to your Whiteboard canvas. As the meeting facilitator, you can then edit and delete any of the notes. And then with your final list of notes in place, Copilot can organize them into various categories. Doing so aids future documentation and helps ensure that none of the notes are overlooked when creating the project plan.

Perform the following steps to complete this task:

In the Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat window, select the Apps icon in the navigation pane. In the Apps menu that appears, select All apps. Under the top section of apps in the Apps window, select All apps→. In the All apps window, scroll down and select Whiteboard.
In Whiteboard for the web, start a new Whiteboard session.
The Board name for this session defaults to Whiteboard X (where X is a number). Select this field and change the Board name to Project Risks – Network Modernization.
Select the Copilot icon next to the menu bar at the bottom of the page and then select Suggest from the menu that appears.
In the Suggest content with Copilot window, ask Copilot in Whiteboard to suggest a list of possible risks to upgrading a company’s corporate network infrastructure to improve performance, enhance cybersecurity, and support hybrid work.
By default, Copilot in Whiteboard generates ideas in groups of six. In the Suggest content with Copilot window that appears, note the first six ideas that it generated. Copilot gives you two options here - you can either attach the ideas to your whiteboard if you’re satisfied with the suggestions, or you can have Copilot generate more suggestions. Notice how the Insert (6) button indicates the number of ideas that Copilot generated - in this case, six. While six suggestions are a good starting point, you want to dig deeper into the potential risks, so select the Generate more button. Note how Copilot generated another six ideas, so the Insert (12) button now displays 12.

Generate at least 18 risks, if not more, and then insert them on to your Whiteboard canvas.
Notice how Copilot attaches the suggested ideas to your whiteboard in the form of yellow sticky notes. As with a real-world brainstorming session involving actual sticky notes, you can edit a particular note, delete it, lock it from future removal, and so on. In Microsoft Whiteboard, these activities are supported through standard whiteboarding functionality. If you haven’t used Whiteboard before, try selecting (double-click) a specific note, and then in the menu bar that appears above it, you can select the Edit text (pencil) icon or any of the other options. Selecting the ellipsis icon at the end of the menu bar displays a menu of more options, such as deleting the note. Again, the idea behind Microsoft Whiteboard is to mimic real-world sticky-note exercises. Feel free to edit any note as you wish.
In looking at the risks, you notice that there are few, if any associated with network downtime. Select the Copilot icon at the bottom of the page and then select Suggest from the menu.
In the Suggest content with Copilot window that appears, ask Copilot to suggest any risks associated with system downtime.
Insert the six risk mitigation ideas associated with system downtime. Note how the block of six notes is highlighted with a line around the block. This block of notes is known as a note grid. You can move or resize a note grid just like any other element on your whiteboard. As you resize a note grid, the sizes of all the sticky notes inside it adjust accordingly. If the block of six notes overlays on top of one of the existing blocks of notes, select one of the outside lines around the note grid and drag the entire block of six notes to the side so that it doesn’t overlay any of the previous notes. If you run out of space on the screen and part of the block falls off the screen, select the Fit to Screen icon on the bottom-right corner of the page to display all the notes on the screen (the Fit to screen icon appears when a block is partially off the screen). You might need to select the icon more than once to fit the content onto the screen.
After making one last review of your Whiteboard, you identified a note that you want to remove. Select a note that you no longer want, and then in the icon tray that appears, select the ellipsis icon and then select the Delete option.
At this point, you should be done editing the notes. You now want Copilot to organize them by category. When you categorize notes, Copilot determines the names of the categories and organizes the notes accordingly.

[!WARNING] When you choose the option to categorize your notes, Whiteboard automatically selects the sticky notes that are currently in view on the canvas. In doing so, it displays the selected notes within a border. Notes outside the current viewport aren’t included within this border, so if you proceed immediately, those notes that are outside the border aren’t categorized.

There are two ways to expand the selection so that all notes are included within the border:
- Show more notes on the screen. When you select the Copilot option to categorize notes, Copilot grabs everything that’s in view and places them within the border. To avoid the situation where Copilot doesn’t include all the notes within the border, zoom out or pan until all the notes you want are visible.
- Select everything explicitly using a keyboard command. Press Ctrl+A to select all objects on the canvas, including sticky notes that aren’t in view. Select one of the edges of the border and drag the entire selection of notes into the view on the canvas so that you can see all the notes.
For the purpose of this task, select Ctrl+A to select all the notes.
Note how Copilot selected all the sticky notes, even ones that weren’t currently in view on the canvas. If some of the notes aren’t fully in view on the canvas, select one of the edges of the border and drag the entire selection into the canvas so that all the notes are visible.
With all the notes now appearing within view on the canvas, select the Copilot icon on the bottom of the window and select the Categorize option in the menu. Doing so displays a Categorize selected notes window. Select the Categorize button that appears in this window.
Note what happened. Copilot generated a set of categories and reorganized the notes accordingly. It also assigned each category a different color to help identify the differences between categories. Sometimes the rectangle containing the notes is small and hard to read. If this situation occurs, select the Fit to Screen icon on the bottom-right corner of the page. You can select this icon multiple times until the image is large enough to read, but not too large that it exceeds the size of the screen.
Note the icon tray that appears below the organized group of notes. If you aren’t satisfied with the categories, select the Regenerate button on the icon tray that appears.

[!TIP] You can select the Regenerate button as many times as needed until you’re satisfied with the categories that Copilot provides. Select this button several times and note the changes that Copilot makes each time. Besides changing category names and relocating notes, Copilot may add or reduce the number of categories with each regeneration.

After regenerating the categories several times, you’re not sure which iteration you liked best. While Copilot doesn’t currently support going back to a previous categorization, it does allow you to start over. Select the Revert button to return to the starting list of yellow sticky notes.
To categorize the sticky notes once again, select the Copilot icon at the bottom of the page and then select Categorize from the menu. In the Categorize selected notes? window, select the Categorize button.
Now that you know how the Regenerate button works, for the sake of time, select it once or twice if necessary until you’re satisfied with the category results.
At this point, you realize that you would like a short summary of the brainstorming session added to your whiteboard content. To do so, select the Copilot icon and then select the Summarize option.
You now want to save this summarization to a Word document so that you can include it as a resource in the PowerPoint presentation you create in the next task. In the Summary window that Copilot creates in your Whiteboard, highlight the text and then copy it to your clipboard (Ctrl+C). Open a blank Word document, paste in the Summary notes, and then save the file to your OneDrive. When you’re done, return to your Whiteboard.