# Project Setup Agent

Agent blueprint, validated with 7 team members · Task: Set up new projects · Project Administration · readiness 84/100 · Ready for an agent

When a notice to proceed or signed contract arrives in Outlook, the agent reads the contract, drafts the Vantagepoint project (client type, contract type, billing terms, phase budgets) and the ProjectWise folders, and shows them to the coordinator. After approval it creates everything through the APIs, so nothing is retyped from the PDF.

**Trigger:** An email from a project manager with a notice to proceed or signed contract (Agreement and Fee Schedule PDF) arrives in the shared project administration mailbox in Outlook.

**Inputs:** Email and PDF attachment: signed contract or notice to proceed, with the fee schedule; Contract data: agreement number, fee by phase, rates, overhead cap, dates; Standard ProjectWise folder template; Mapping of contract type to billing terms, as the team described it; PM's budget confirmation (before charging starts)

**Done when:** The project, phases, budgets and billing terms exist in Vantagepoint, the folders are created in ProjectWise, and the project site has been requested.

## Steps

1. Detect contract or notice-to-proceed email and capture the PDF attachment (Microsoft Outlook, connector): Power Automate flow starts on new mail with an attachment; Copilot Studio classifies whether it is a project setup request.
2. Read the agreement and fee schedule and extract project data (Adobe Acrobat, ai): Pull agreement number, client, client type, contract type, fee by phase, rates, overhead cap and dates from the PDF, noting where each value was found.
3. Propose billing terms from the contract type (Deltek Vantagepoint, ai): Cost plus fixed fee gives cost plus with fee by percent complete; lump sum gives percent complete; time and materials gives hourly.
4. Flag missing or unclear values, and unusual contracts, for the coordinator (Deltek Vantagepoint, ai): Flag work starting before signature, multi-year funding by year, or fields not found in the contract.
5. Assemble the draft project, phases, budgets, billing terms and folder plan (Deltek Vantagepoint, ai): One review summary with the contract excerpt beside each value.
6. Review the draft against the contract and approve, correct or reject it (Deltek Vantagepoint, person): Coordinator confirms values and that the PM has confirmed the budget. No records are created before this.
7. Create the project, phases, budgets and billing terms (Deltek Vantagepoint, api): Write only the approved values. Return the project number.
8. Create the project folder structure from the standard template (ProjectWise, api): Uses the project number from Vantagepoint.
9. Submit the project site request (SharePoint, connector): Current process requests the site in the browser. Confirm the request route before building.
10. Draft a confirmation email to the PM with the project number (Microsoft Outlook, ai): Optional. Only a draft; the coordinator sends it.
11. Review and send the confirmation to the PM (Microsoft Outlook, person): Coordinator sends the message. The agent never sends it unattended.

## Approvals

- Coordinator approves the prepared project, phases, budgets, billing terms and folder plan before anything is created in Vantagepoint, ProjectWise or SharePoint.
- Coordinator reviews and sends any message to the PM.

## Prerequisites

- Service account with API permissions to create projects, phases, budgets and billing terms in Vantagepoint
- Service account with permission to create folders in ProjectWise, plus the standard folder template
- Shared mailbox access and the Outlook connector in Power Automate
- Copilot Studio and Power Automate licenses (premium connectors or HTTP actions for the APIs)
- A route to request the project site that can be automated (SharePoint connector or other)
- A sample set of past contracts with the resulting Vantagepoint entries, to test extraction

## Risks

- Contract formats and fee schedules vary, so extraction may misread amounts. Phase budgets need side-by-side checking.
- Approval fatigue: if the coordinator approves without checking, errors pass through (the current mismatch rate is about 4%).
- Duplicate projects if the flow runs twice for the same contract email or is retried after a failure.
- At-risk and multi-year setups are undocumented, so they stay manual at first and limit time saved.
- The browser-based site request may not be automatable.

## Measure after launch

- Median working time per setup (baseline 38.6 min; 25 cases/week, 15.2 team hours/week)
- Share of contract data retyped by hand (baseline 84%)
- Mismatch rate between contract and Vantagepoint (baseline about 4%)
- Share of cases completed without manual correction by the coordinator (baseline: main path in 76% of cases)

## Decisions

| Decide | Rule | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Client type | Read it from the contract and enter the matching category (DOT, federal, city or private). Observed entries are mostly Municipal and State DOT. Team mostly agrees; how values beyond DOT are determined is unclear. | team |
| Contract type | Enter whatever the contract states. DOT work is almost always cost plus fixed fee. Observed entries split evenly between cost plus fixed fee and lump sum. | team + data |
| Billing terms | Follows the contract type: cost plus fixed fee gives cost plus with fee by percent complete (90% of 10 observed cases), lump sum gives percent complete (100% of 10), time and materials gives hourly (not observed). | team + data |
| Whether to proceed with setup or hand to a person | Set up from the signed contract or notice to proceed. If work started before signature, open an at-risk project (details not described). Multi-year contracts with yearly funding are a special case. Team disagrees on how often unusual cases occur. | team |
| Whether charging can begin | Not until the project is set up and the PM has confirmed the budget. How the PM confirms is not described. | team |
| Phase and budget structure for multi-year contracts | Not known yet: ask the team | unknown |

## Still to answer before building

- What is done differently for multi-year contracts with yearly funding (phase and budget structure)?
- How is an at-risk project set up and later converted once the contract is signed?
- Which contract details are hardest to find, and what causes missing or unclear information? Nobody answered this.
- Is time and materials used, and how are Client type values determined beyond DOT?
- Is the mismatch after retyping (about 4%) checked, and by whom?
- How does the PM confirm the budget, and where is this policy written down?
- How is the project site requested today (form, email, SharePoint), and can it be done through the SharePoint connector?
- Respondents disagree on how often unusual cases occur (half say almost never, one says often). What share should the agent expect to hand over?

## Exceptions

- When Work starts before the contract is signed (share not stated; the team says unusual cases are rare): Agent does not create the project. It hands the case to the coordinator with what it found; the coordinator opens an at-risk project. The conversion process is not yet described.
- When Multi-year contract with separate funding by year (share not stated): Treated as a special case: the agent extracts what it can and hands over to the coordinator. The phase and budget structure was not described.
- When A required field (agreement number, fee by phase, rates, overhead cap, dates) is missing or low confidence: Agent lists the gaps and the contract page where it looked, and returns the case to the coordinator. Nothing is created.
- When Contract type is time and materials or client type is not DOT, federal, city or private: Agent proposes a value but flags it as unconfirmed for the coordinator to decide.
- When About 24% of cases do not follow the main path (the data shows no consistent detour): Hand to the coordinator with extraction results; coordinator completes setup manually.
- When Vantagepoint or ProjectWise API call fails after approval: Stop, record what was and was not created, and notify the coordinator. Do not retry creation blindly, to avoid duplicate projects.

## Build with

- Copilot Studio: Agent that reads the contract, extracts fields, applies the billing terms mapping and builds the review summary.
- Power Automate: Triggers on Outlook mail, handles the approval, calls the Vantagepoint and ProjectWise APIs, and uses the SharePoint and Outlook connectors.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot: Helps the coordinator check the extracted values against the contract and draft the PM email.
- Deltek Vantagepoint API: Creates the project, phases, budgets and billing terms.
- ProjectWise API: Creates the folder structure from the standard template.

## Effort and return

- Size M, about 3-5 weeks (Copilot Studio, Power Automate, REST API integration (Vantagepoint, ProjectWise), Document extraction and testing against real contracts)
- Team time on this task now: 15 h/week; expected back: 5-8 h/week

## Evidence

- 76% of cases follow the same steps
- 15 team hours a week
- data is moved by hand from Adobe Acrobat to Deltek Vantagepoint (84% retyped)