Tracked under AI at Work roadmap ID 576855 and communicated to tenants via Microsoft 365 Message Center notice MC1455028, the capability reached general availability in August 2026 for Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant) cloud instances on the web. Rather than forcing team leads to sift through an entire organization's roster to see who has wandered off schedule, the update ties intraday adherence monitoring directly to the same planning group structures that workforce managers already use for forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling.
What Changed in the Adherence Tracker
At its core, the real-time Adherence tracker in Copilot Service workspace is designed to compare what customer service representatives are scheduled to be doing against what they are actually doing at any given moment. Before this update, supervisors could narrow the tracker view by time zone, shift plan, or individual service representative. Now, Microsoft Learn documentation and the AI at Work roadmap confirm five primary capabilities introduced with planning group support:
- Scoped Planning Group Filtering: Supervisors can filter the live adherence tracker by a specific planning group, displaying the shift plans associated with that group. Microsoft Learn's adherence tracker documentation also notes that supervisors can select Not applicable in the Planning group filter to surface shift plans that are not attached to any planning group.
- Combinable Filter Logic: The new planning group filter works alongside the existing Shift plan and Service representative filters (as well as the Time zone selector). A supervisor can scope the view to a broader planning group first and then drill down into a specific shift plan or subset of representatives within a single unified view.
- Shift-Aligned Representative Display: The tracker populates representatives based on the planning groups associated with their scheduled shifts, rather than relying on static organizational charts or permanent team rosters. This keeps the live view strictly aligned with the shift plan being used to calculate adherence.
- Dynamic Metric Recalculation: When a supervisor applies a planning group filter, the tracker dynamically recalculates overall adherence percentages and out-of-adherence counts for that specific filtered scope. That gives leads an immediate, planning-group-level readout of intraday performance.
- Cross-Session Filter Persistence: Nobody enjoys reconfiguring five dropdown menus every time a browser tab refreshes. The Adherence tracker now saves each supervisor's filter selections across sessions, automatically reopening with their previously selected scope.
| Adherence Tracker Component | Operational Behavior with Planning Group Support |
|---|---|
| Navigation Path | Copilot Service workspace > Workforce management > Adherence tracker |
| Planning Group Filter | Scopes the view to shift plans tied to a selected planning group (or Not applicable for unassociated shift plans) |
| Representative Inclusion | Determined by the planning group linked to the representative's scheduled shift |
| Summary Metrics | Recalculates overall adherence percentage and out-of-adherence counts for the active filter scope |
| Session Persistence | Remembers each supervisor's selected filters across browser and workspace sessions |
Section Summary: The August 2026 update adds a persistent Planning group filter to the real-time Adherence tracker in Copilot Service workspace, recalculating live adherence metrics for the selected scope and aligning displayed representatives with the planning groups attached to their scheduled shifts.
Why Planning Groups Matter in Contact Center Architecture
To appreciate why this filter is more than just another UI dropdown, it helps to look at how Microsoft structures Workforce Engagement Management in Dynamics 365. According to Microsoft Learn's planning group documentation, a planning group is the foundational operational unit in workforce management.
Instead of managing forecasting, staffing, and intraday supervision in disconnected silos, a planning group bundles several critical parameters into one shared context:
- Demand Scope: One or more queue-and-channel combinations (such as Voice Tier 1 - East or Billing Chat) that generate incoming interaction volume. To prevent double-counting interaction volume across forecasts, Microsoft enforces a strict rule: a specific queue-and-channel combination can belong to only one planning group at a time.
- Time Zone Governance: A governing time zone that dictates scheduling and forecasting intervals across all associated workforce artifacts.
- Service Objectives: Performance targets including Service Level (%), Target Answer Time (seconds), Shrinkage (%) (time unavailable due to breaks, training, coaching, or unplanned absences), Occupancy (%), and Concurrency (how many interactions a representative handles simultaneously, such as
1for voice). - Associated Artifacts: Shift plans, forecast scenarios, and short- or long-term capacity plans that inherit the planning group's time zone, demand scope, and service objectives.
The Nuance of Shift-Based Inclusion
Here is the architectural detail that IT administrators and contact center leads need to keep in mind: the Adherence tracker displays representatives based on the planning groups associated with their scheduled shifts.
Why does Microsoft build it this way? In large enterprise contact centers, agents frequently cross-train or float between different queues and shifts during the week. A representative might work a Tier 1 Voice shift on Monday and Tuesday, and a Specialized Escalation Chat shift on Wednesday. If the Adherence tracker filtered purely by a static HR team attribute or a supervisor's direct reports, a supervisor monitoring the Tier 1 Voice planning group on Wednesday would either see agents who aren't scheduled for that workload that day or miss floating agents who were brought in via a shift plan to cover a demand spike. By anchoring the tracker to the planning group tied to the scheduled shift, the live adherence view always matches the actual capacity plan on the floor.
Section Summary: Planning groups act as the single source of truth for queue-and-channel demand, time zones, and service objectives. Because the Adherence tracker evaluates representatives via the planning group attached to their scheduled shifts, intraday monitoring stays synchronized with actual shift plans rather than static org charts.
Real-Time Tracker vs. Historical Analytics: Knowing What This Feature Does (and Doesn't Do)
When evaluating Microsoft roadmap rollouts, it is always wise to separate what a feature actually changes in the software from the broader operational outcomes it aims to support.
First, this update improves visibility and metric scoping; it does not alter how adherence is calculated at the agent state level, nor does it introduce automated corrective workflows. Within the tracker, supervisors examine three main areas as documented by Microsoft Learn:
- Service representative list: Shows all scheduled representatives for the shift plan alongside their current live state (such as Available, On break, or In training), Time in state (mins), and Total scheduled time (mins).
- Adherence Gantt chart: A visual timeline comparing each representative's actual activities against scheduled activities, highlighting out-of-adherence periods as distinct segments.
- Adherence summary metrics: Team-level rollups including overall adherence percentage, total scheduled time, and total time out of adherence.
Filtering by a planning group scopes this list and recalculates the summary metrics and out-of-adherence counts for that group. However, it is still up to the human supervisor to notice that a representative has been stuck in On break 15 minutes past their scheduled window and reach out to rectify the issue.
Second, administrators should distinguish roadmap ID 576855 (MC1455028) from historical reporting. This specific feature applies to the real-time Adherence tracker used for intraday management. Microsoft separately rolled out planning group support for Adherence historical analytics under a distinct Message Center notice (MC1456408), which focuses on post-hoc trend analysis and cross-group comparisons over historical date ranges. Together, the two updates bring planning group parity across both live intraday tracking and historical review, even though they live in separate reporting views.
Deployment Prerequisites and Step-by-Step Usage Guide
If your contact center supervisors open Dynamics 365 Customer Service and don't see Workforce management or the Planning group filter, the missing link is almost certainly administrative package installation or workspace configuration.
Notice that Microsoft's AI at Work roadmap metadata lists the feature as enabled by "admins/makers/marketers for end users," whereas Microsoft Learn's 2026 release wave 1 documentation phrases the enablement column as "Users by admins, makers, or analysts." Regardless of the slight terminology difference in Microsoft's metadata tables, the actual technical prerequisites on the back end are identical.
Administrator Prerequisites
Before supervisors can use the Adherence tracker and its planning group filter, an administrator must complete the following steps:
- Install the WEM Package: Open the Power Platform admin center and install the Workforce Management for Customer Service package.
- Enable the Feature: Enable the Workforce Management / adherence tracker capability within the Copilot Service admin center (or Customer Service admin center, where queues and channels are also configured).
- Configure Planning Groups and Shift Plans: Ensure that active Planning Groups have been created under Workforce Management > Planning Groups in the Copilot Service workspace site map, and that your Shift Plans have been associated with the appropriate Planning Group via the Planning Group lookup field.
How Supervisors Use the Planning Group Filter
Once the package is installed and shift plans are linked to planning groups, supervisors can put the filter to work immediately:
- Sign in to the Copilot Service workspace on the web.
- In the left-hand site map, navigate to Workforce management and select Adherence tracker.
- Locate the filter bar at the top of the Adherence tracker page.
- Select the Planning group filter to choose the specific planning group you oversee (or choose Not applicable if you need to inspect shift plans that have not yet been assigned to a planning group).
- Optionally refine your view further by selecting the Time zone, Shift plan, or Service representative filters.
- Review the recalculated Adherence summary metrics, scan the Adherence Gantt chart for highlighted out-of-adherence segments, and check the Service representative list for current agent states and time-in-state durations.
When you close your browser or end your shift, Dynamics 365 Customer Service retains your filter selections automatically so your workspace opens to that exact planning group scope on your next login. For enterprise contact centers juggling hundreds of seats across tiered queues, that small quality-of-life improvement turns a noisy global roster into a focused, team-specific dashboard from the very first click.