Writing WBS and WBS Dictionary Using ChatGPT

Hey everyone, it's Helena here and welcome back to my YouTube channel. In today's video, I'm going to give you a prompt that will help you write your work breakdown structures. So work breakdown structure is really important as a project manager because it helps you visualize how the overall scope of your work can be broken down to smaller and smaller sections. The lowest level of the work breakdown structure is something called a work package, and generally the rule of thumb for a work package is that it's between 8 to 80 hours of work, and this represents the lowest level of the tree structure that represents the work breakdown structure. Then you would assign the work package to the team member who's going to be responsible for performing all of the work to complete that work package, and the individual team member will be the one who further divides the work package down into activities. Now the good thing is now we can use AI to help us write and brainstorm what this work breakdown structure would look like. So I'm going to teach you a prompt on ChatGPT to help you do this. Now ChatGPT has already learned everything on the web and it can write in any tone and style and structure. So it's definitely a tool that you want to start utilizing as a project manager because it's going to help you write all of your documentations so much faster. But if you prompt ChatGPT the wrong way, wrong way in quotes, you're not going to get as great of a result. So if you give it better instructions, you're going to get a better output. That's why it's so important to learn how to prompt and how to get better results out of ChatGPT. ChatGPT. So right now I want to share a prompt with you for, for WBS, and I'll point out the different elements that you need to start incorporating into your prompts so that you can start writing better prompts. All right, let's jump into the screen here. So here is my prompt for WBS. So I'm telling ChatGPT that when it's writing the WBS for the project, to consider all of these various elements. And then the structure of this prompt is then I tell ChatGPT to write a prompt for following project. And the example I have here is the project is the construction of a 4-bedroom home. And the elements I'm telling ChatGPT to consider include the project definition. So what's the primary objective of the project? What are the main phases? Then how do we subdivide the phases into tasks? Are there any task dependencies? I also tell ChatGPT to estimate the task duration, assign the resources, create a hierarchical structure, because remember, the WBS is like a tree structure. Finally, review and refine. So review the WBS to ensure completeness and accuracy and document everything in a hierarchical list. Now on top of the WBS, there is also something called the WBS dictionary. So the WBS dictionary goes along with the WBS. It's basically complementary to the WBS. What it shows is more information about each of the boxes that you find in the WBS, because the tree structure you can't get a lot of information on there. But so what you want to do is have the WBS dictionary, which allows you to get a deeper understanding about the various different elements within the WBS. So here is a prompt that you can use to write your WBS dictionary. So in the WBS dictionary, you can find these information. So essentially, I'm helping ChatGPT out to tell it exactly what I want in the WBS dictionary here. So at first, I'm telling ChatGPT, I want you to create this WBS dictionary. And then I go on to say that the WBS dictionary should provide detailed information for each work package and summary level at the control account level. It should include the code of account identifier. It should include the description of work. It should include any assumptions and constraints about that work package. It should also include information about the person who is responsible for completing that work package. It should also include the schedule milestones associated schedule activities, the resources required, the cost estimate, quality requirements, acceptance criteria, technical information or reference, and finally any agreement or contract information. Then I tell it, now write a comprehensive WBS dictionary for the following project. So once we have our prompts down, all we need to do is just copy and and paste this into ChatGPT and have it generate. So I'm going to make this a multi-step prompt. So I'm going to have ChatGPT generate the WBS first, and then I'll have it generate the WBS dictionary. Okay, once I have popped in my prompt here, we can see that ChatGPT has gone to work and wrote an entire WBS for the construction of the home that we wanted to construct. And then following that, I asked ChatGPT to please generate a matching WBS dictionary that goes along along with the WBS structure that it has just generated, and then has come up with the detailed WBS dictionary that goes along with this. And you can always customize this prompt a bit to suit your own needs. I hope you found this video helpful, and please like and subscribe. Also, you can download this exact prompt below. The link is in the descriptions. Thank you so much for joining me for today's training video, and I shall see you soon.