Project management is a communication-centric role. One of the primary ways project managers communicate is through project documents (e.g. assumption log). Consider this: the PMBOK Guide 6th edition lists a whooping 42 different deliverables that project managers should be ready to produce and maintain. These documents include everything from charters at the start of projects, to lessons learned registers at their end. Of course, these are often indispensable – they provide much-needed direction for project teams.
But they come with a couple of downsides.
First, these project documents are resource-intensive to produce. A scoping document, for instance, can take between 1-3 hours to develop, depending on the complexity of the project. Plus, much of this time is spent writing boilerplate sections if an organization lacks a set of templates.
Second, the time spent producing project documents contributes to a misperception – project management is an “administrative” role. This only makes it more difficult for project managers to advocate for the importance of their role to more senior team members.
How, then, can we produce project documents – a vital form of communication – more effectively? By using ChatGPT! Here’s the gist: we spawn a virtual assistant, which accepts project details and returns documentation that we share with our team members. It is a straightforward process. But one that requires some context on how ChatGPT applies to the project management profession.
Understanding Chat-GPT in the Context of Project Management
Chat-GPT, at the risk of oversimplifying, is an algorithm that gives computers the ability to read and write. It is no small feat. Indeed, tech luminaries like Bill Gates consider it a breakthrough. But how does it work? Basically, AI researchers threw virtually all the text on the internet to a neural net. This produced a model that, with some further optimization, is remarkably adept at generating human-like responses to questions. In fact, Chat-GPT’s responses are so high quality that they reach expert-level performance across a wide variety of domains, including medicine.
What does this mean for project management?
Here’s how I think of it: Chat-GPT is like a virtual project assistant. Give it the details of a project, some time to “reflect,” and out comes assets with a level of quality often comparable to a project manager with a couple of years of experience. In effect, you can think about Chat-GPT as another stakeholder, one that is always available and hyper-efficient.
Workflow for Using AI to Produce Project Deliverables
We want to efficiently produce project documentation. But that isn’t going to just happen! We need a workflow like the one shown in the figure above. Here I will provide a quick overview of the process, then we’ll dive deeper with an example.
Start by gathering relevant information from stakeholders, like project objectives. Then roll this information into a prompt for chat-GPT, which specifies your desired deliverable (e.g. scoping document). Then, you’ll take the first draft GPT produces, request any edits, and, if necessary, get feedback on the document before submission.
This workflow is versatile. You can apply it to a range of deliverables throughout the project lifecycle, thereby reducing busy work and streamlining project communications. Let’s now turn to an example to see how this works in practice.
Case Study: Using Chat-GPT to Produce a Project Charter
Imagine this: You are in a Zoom meeting, and a colleague expresses an interest in taking on a project. Let’s say it is to enhance employee onboarding. The value of this initiative is clear; it would improve the new hire experiences and streamline their integration into the company. You, as project manager, are eager to help kick-start the endeavor, knowing that a well-defined project charter would prime this work for success.
But there’s a problem! Your Google calendar is overflowing like a mailbox that hasn’t been checked in months. In other words, you’re busy. How can you balance the workload while ensuring the onboarding project receives the attention it deserves? Chat-GPT, and similar tools, can help. One of the main benefits of using this tool is to overcome “blank page syndrome,” which describes the sense of overwhelm, and in turn paralysis, one can experience when first starting to write a piece.
Chat-GPT solves this problem fast, enabling you to more rapidly define work while juggling a busy schedule. The result of this workflow will be a project charter. But keep in mind, we can use a process similar to the one below to produce other deliverables, such as scoping documents.
Step 1: Acquire Key Information About the Project From Stakeholders
First, gather crucial information related to the project (seriously, don’t skip this step). These details form the foundation of the charter and will allow ChatGPT to write a more precise and comprehensive document.
The specific details you’ll require include the project title and description, the objectives, success criteria, key stakeholders and their roles, the scope of work including major deliverables and milestones, high-level project risks, assumptions, and constraints, and the project’s high-level timeline and budget.
To be sure, you don’t need ALL of this information, but the more inputs you have, the better. Hence, why it is often worthwhile to schedule calls with stakeholders to clarify these points (e.g. what are the goals?) in advance.
Step 2: Request a Project Charter from Chat-GPT
Now that we have the project details, let’s compose a rich prompt that returns a first draft of a project charter. Here’s an example prompt that you can adapt with your own information:
“As an accomplished project manager, you have a strong proficiency in a variety of methodologies including Agile, Scrum, and Waterfall. You’re adept at utilizing project management tools like Microsoft Project, Asana, Trello, and Basecamp, and excel in managing cross-functional teams, identifying risks, effective communication, and problem-solving.
Your mission is to support an eCommerce startup in the fashion industry with $500,000 gross annual revenue. Here are the project details:
- Project: “E-commerce Optimized Checkout”
- Objective: To design, develop, and implement an optimized checkout page to enhance user experience and reduce cart abandonment rates.
- Stakeholders: Senior Management, IT Department, Customer Service Department, and our valued customers.
- Scope: The scope encompasses design, development, and implementation of the optimized checkout page, to be completed within a one-month timeframe and a budget of $5,000. Key Deliverables:
- A functional prototype by Week 1, including guest checkout, trust badges, and progress indicator
- Usability testing by Week 2 with 5-7 members of target audience
- Final page launch by Week 3
- Potential Risks: cart abandonment actually increases, potential budget overruns, and possible development delays.
Your task is to craft a succinct yet comprehensive project charter. Specifications for the charter include:
- Format: Bulleted points
- Length: Not exceeding two pages
- Tone: Professional yet friendly
- Summary: A concise overview should lead the document.”
In effect, we are requesting a virtual project assistant, informing them about a project, then asking them to produce a charter for it. Here are a couple of additional techniques you might use:
- Use Plugins: For chat-GPT Plus users, there is a plugin store available. One of the most useful plugins is called AskPDF, which lets you upload a PDF and then efficiently extract information from it. Consider using the AskPDF plugin to share additional information with Chat-GPT regarding the project and its context.
- One-Shot Training: Do you have examples of previous project charters? If so, you can share it with Chat-GPT and then request a new charter be produced in a similar style. This technique is a form of one-shot training, since, with one example, you are training the model to mimic the charter’s style.
In sum, we can use add-ons to Chat-GPT and a little prompt engineering to get a higher-quality first draft of our charter. The keyword there is first draft. Because it is very likely the case that we’ll have to edit the output we receive.
Step 3: Edit the Charter Using Chat-GPT
We have a charter. But undoubtedly, it could be improved. After all, ChatGPT has its limitations: it tends to write verbosely, and worse yet, will even hallucinate i.e. make things up. To help address this, we can use Chat-GPT during the editing phase. The first step is to carefully read the charter, pinpointing sections that lack clarity or would benefit from elaboration. You may decide it’s worth having additional conversations with stakeholders to work out the details of particular sections (e.g. scope).
Based on your assessment, make a list of desired changes. For example, you might submit to Chat-GPT an edit like: “Reference Asana, our project management tool, in a logistics section.” Then, GPT will include a section that sets expectations for the team on how tasks will be managed in Asana.
You might need to engage in several rounds of these edits – it’s an iterative process. Indeed, this back-and-forth highlights the unique benefits of using Chat-GPT. The user interface makes it seamless to have a conversation with your virtual project assistant about any changes to be made to the project charter.
Step Four: Get Feedback on Your Charter Before Submitting (Optional)
ChatGPT can also serve as a critical reviewer to scrutinize the document before it’s shared with the project sponsor and other key colleagues. All you would do is request a critique or analysis of the project charter based on particular areas of concern. Here are some examples:
- “Critique this project charter for clarity, coherence, and completeness.”
- “Review this charter for adherence to project management best practices”
- “Evaluate the risk management section for thoroughness and realism”
You can request critiques that are more general (e.g. for clarity) or specific (e.g. risk management). Whatever the output, you have the option to say, “Integrate these changes into a revised project charter.” Chat-GPT will then produce a new charter having accounted for its own critiques. Interestingly, the output you get post-integration tends to be significantly better than the earlier draft. In fact, so much so, that bleeding-edge prompt engineering techniques like Smart GPT use this “self-reflection” method to produce higher-quality output.
Conclusion
Chat-GPT offers a new approach to the generation of vital project documents, freeing project managers from the time-consuming task of creating these from scratch. As I have shown in this post, Chat-GPT, acting as a virtual assistant, can take project details and output a draft document ready for editing and refining. This makes it a potent tool. Chat-GPT can greatly increase our efficiency, thereby allowing us to focus human attention where it matters most.
Indeed, as Nieto-Rodriguez and Vargas predict in the Harvard Business Review, project management will evolve into a role more centered on stakeholder engagement, change management, and data literacy. The administrative tasks that once chipped away at project managers’ time will be handled by AI (thank god!).
In the end, new doors will open, old ones will close, and project management will take on a new shape in the age of AI.
Reference
- Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J. D., Dhariwal, P., … & Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33, 1877-1901.
- Explained, A. (2023). GPT 4 is Smarter than You Think: Introducing SmartGPT [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzuvf9D9BU
- How AI Will Transform Project Management. (2023, February 2). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/02/how-ai-will-transform-project-management
- Microsoft. (2023). Bill Gates on AI and the rapidly evolving future of computing [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHb_eG46v2c
- Nori, H., King, N., McKinney, S. M., Carignan, D., & Horvitz, E. (2023). Capabilities of gpt-4 on medical challenge problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.13375.
- Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.). Project Management Institute.