Writing Your Project Management Plan Using ChatGPT

Hey everyone, it's Helena here and welcome back to my YouTube channel. And in today's tutorial, I am going to share with you how you can use ChatGPT and AI to start writing your project management plans. Such a game changer. This is a task that used to take days, if not weeks, and sometimes I've seen it even take up to months to do. And now with the help of AI, you can speed up the process significantly. So the thing with tools like ChatGPT is that to get the most out of this tool— so ChatGPT has already been trained on everything on the internet, so it best practices and knows what project management plan is, and it knows how to write them. But to get the most out of this tool, you need to give it the proper instructions. You need to think of this tool as your personal AI assistant. But the more specific the instructions you give it, the better the results that you're going to get. And this is a process called prompt engineering. A prompt is the instruction that you give to the AI. So I'm going to give you some tips, and I'm going to give you the exact prompt that you can use to enter into ChatGPT to start and getting it to write great project charters. You can download this prompt below, it's in the descriptions. Also, if you're new to this channel, please make sure you like and subscribe. And without further ado, let's jump in and take a look at this prompt over here. And then here you can see I start off by telling ChatGPT that the task, what I wanted to do, is to write a project management plan. So I could have just left it here and just said write a project management plan about and then describe the project, but what you're going to see and what you're going to get is a very, very vague plan. So the more detailed the instructions that you give ChatGPT, the better the results that you're going to get. And you can see this particular prompt is almost a page and a half. All right, let me walk you through the different components here. The next part I tell ChatGPT is that the project management plan combines all this information into a cohesive and integrated approach to managing the project. Typically, the information includes the selected project lifecycle, development approach, key deliverables, the variance threshold, baseline management timing and types of reviews, etc. So now that I told ChatGPT what I want from the plan, I then detail out exactly how I want ChatGPT to write this particular documentation. So I go into the various different components I wanted to write. And then lastly, I will give it some information about the project. So the various different components I wanted to write about include the project lifecycle, which will describe the lifecycle that will be used to accomplish the project. Then the second component of the project management plan will be the development approach. This will document the specific approach that you will take to create the key deliverables, whether you're using predictive, agile, or hybrid. The next component is all of the subsidiary management plans. So this is a list of subsidiary plans that will be part of your project management plan. This can include the scope management plan, schedule management plan, cost management plan, quality management plan, etc. The next component is your scope variance threshold, which will define how much variance in scope will be acceptable to your stakeholders. The next component will be your scope baseline management, which will describe how the scope baseline will be managed, including responses to acceptable warning and unacceptable variances. The next component will be the schedule variance threshold. Instead of the scope variance, we have the schedule variance now, which will define the acceptable schedule variances. For example, if an activity was supposed to take 10 days to complete, it ended up taking 11, is that acceptable? What if it took 20, is that now acceptable? Probably not. So the schedule variance will define where that variance threshold will be. Then we have the schedule baseline management, which will describe how the schedule baseline will be managed, including responses to acceptable, warning, and unacceptable variances. And then we do the same thing for the cost. Remember, the triple constraint that we have on our project is the scope, schedule, and cost. And then in the project management plan, we are asking ChatGPT to help us with the variance and the baseline management of all 3 different components. Then we just had to give it some more information about project, and just like that, we will have our project management plan generated. Now, depending on the type of project you use and the organization and the PMO, there may be different structures that is required when you're writing the project management plan. And if this is the case, then you can take this baseline template and then just add more components to this plan accordingly to what is required for your project. But I hope what you take away from this is a structure that you want to think about when you're writing these different types of plans. So as you can see, you're giving ChatGPT a task, you're giving it the specific style and different components that you want it to include. And you can also include like a tone of voice, for example, write concisely, write like a docu— a professional document writer who is also a project manager. That is something else you can add in the prompt right over here. And you're describing the exact task in a very condensed and concise fashion. That is the important thing here. So let's try out this prompt now. So it has already finished writing the project lifecycle and the key activities, key deliverables, entry criteria, exit criteria, and key reviews for all 5 phases of the project. Next, they went into the development approaches. It's telling us that we'll use a iterative and incremental approach. Then it has written the subsidiary plans. And we can even, if we don't like something here and we want to include something else in our project management plan, we can also, for example, in this case, ChatGPT just told us what all the subsidiary plans are. And if we wanted to write it out more, we can say expand on section 3 and write out all of the subsidiary plans. So you can converse with ChatGPT and it does actually have memory. So whenever you give another prompt over here, it remembers all of the previous prompts that it has, that you have already written in this particular chat thread. Okay, so it has written the scope variance, scope baseline management, as well as schedule and cost variance and baselines here as well. So you can see that within a matter of seconds, we have a boilerplate project management plan that we can already start using and run with. Alright, so I hope you got a lot of value out of this tutorial. I hope it starts to help help you think through how you can start writing these various different prompts to help you become a better project manager and speed up your efficiency. Thank you so much for joining me in today's tutorial, and I shall see you soon.