AI for
Project
Managers
Workbook
Chris Croft & Dave Birss
Hi there!
Thank you so much for taking the course. We sincerely hope you found it
valuable. As promised, here are the prompts that we used in the lessons.
We strongly encourage you to use them yourselves.
AI tools have improved in the few weeks since we filmed the course. So
you’re likely to get even better results than we got!
There are three steps we recommend you take with these prompts:
STEP 1
Paste in a prompt with the information we added to get a feel for the
kind of output you can get.
STEP 2
Swap-out the information highlighted in yellow at the end of the prompt
with details of one of your own projects. Then see what results you get.
STEP 3
Have a go at editing the prompt itself to change the output you get. This
starts you on your journey of quality prompt writing
If you want more information on how to write prompts, take a look at
Dave’s How To Research And Write Using Generative AI course. You’ll find
a framework for prompt writing and a bunch of extra prompts to add to
your collection.
If you’d like to hear more from us, follow us on LinkedIn and sign up for
our newsletters.
Many thanks,
Chris Croft & Dave Birss
Find Chris on LinkedIn here
Find Dave on LinkedIn here
Planning for Your Stakeholders in AI Project
Management
This prompt helps you describe your project in the right way to different
audiences. Because the words you use can make a big impact on
getting their support. Just add information about your project (the more
descriptive you are, the better) and tell it about the audiences you want
to persuade.
You are a highly experienced project manager who knows how to
persuade decision-makers to support a project. I want you to help
me understand how my {project} will be viewed by a specific
{audience} of stakeholders. Start by telling me what their
relevant rational, emotional, and social motivators are. Then
tell me what objections they might have - along with how I should
respond to them. Given the list of stakeholders I provide you
with, give me a list of areas where their interests might
conflict with each other and suggest how to approach these
situations. Give me advice on how I should talk about the project
to them to get their support. Finally, write a creative headline
followed by a 100-word paragraph to describe the project in a way
that sounds appealing to all of the stakeholders. Deliver your
response in markdown using headlines, subheads, and bullet points
to make it easy to read.
{project}: We are planning to build a wind farm on the North
Pole. It will have 50 turbines that are 100m tall with 40m
blades. They will transfer power to communities in Greenland to
replace fossil fuel energy.
{audience}: Lead Engineer, Investment Bank Lead, Political
Lobbyist
Follow this up with:
Please go again for the following audiences: environmental
activists, CEO of Greenland's largest energy company and remote
communities in Greenland
Listing Project Tasks Using AI
This prompt helps you generate a task list for your project. The better the
information you provide, the better the results you’ll get. We advise you
to go into a lot more detail than we did in our example.
You are an expert Project Manager who knows how to scope a
project and break it into its constituent tasks. I want you to
help me create a comprehensive task list for my {project}. Stop
and take a breath before you start so you can consider the
problem. I want this list to cover all major tasks for the
project, from preparation to completion. I'd like you to deliver:
- A creative headline summarising the project
- A table where the first column lists the task, the second
column gives a short description of the task and the third column
rates it from 1 to 5 for its importance
- A list of assumptions you made when collating this list
- A list of tasks you may have omitted
- Suggestions of how you might improve your response
Deliver your response in markdown using headlines, subheads, and
bullet points to make it easy to read.
{project}: We are planning to build a wind farm on the North
Pole. It will have 50 turbines that are 100m tall with 40m
blades. They will transfer power to communities in Greenland to
replace fossil fuel energy.
Granularity in Project Planning with AI
This follows on from the output of the last prompt. Once you have your
task list, you can get your AI assistant to break it down into more detail,
even assigning tasks to specific teams.
Please can you break down each of these tasks into more granular
subtasks? These subtasks should involve a single disciplinary
team. Present your response as a table with the task in one
column and the team responsible in the other column. Then give me
a list of the teams the project will require along with a short
description of what criteria would make that team great.
Estimating a Project's Time and Cost Using AI
Here’s a handy prompt to get a ballpark estimate of the time and cost of
your project that follows on from your previous results. Remember that
the AI assistant will be making a heap of assumptions here. If you want
more accuracy, add more information about your team and your unit
costs.
Please help me cost this project. I want you to take the
breakdown of tasks and subtasks and give me an estimate of how
long each would take and how much it would be likely to cost.
Please base your costs on current market rates as much as
possible. Take a breath and think about the problem before you
answer. Then present your response in a table with the following
columns:
- The task or subtask
- How long it is likely to take
- How much it is likely to cost
- A score from 1 to 5 of how confident you are with your estimate
- A score from 1 to 5 of how much risk there is in the task
Then tell me about the assumptions you made in your calculations
and explain where you got your financial information from.
Present an explanation of your costs in the form of a rate card.
Then give me your recommendation on how to approach contingency.
Deliver your response in markdown using headlines, subheads, and
bullet points to make it easy to read.
Then, if you want a breakdown of calculations, you can add:
Please go through the calculations again, showing your workings.
How AI Can Help with Resource Allocation
Again, this prompt follows up on our AI chat and refers to the tasks that
we requested in a previous prompt. We used a document with
information about a fictional engineering team that you can also
download from the resources. Download it and attach it to this prompt.
You are an outstanding project manager with a real talent for
allocating resources. Based on the tasks we have just outlined, I
want you to refer to the list of {staff} and allocate them based
on their scores for different attributes. Create teams and assign
roles within each team. Then tell me what positions we still need
to fill. Finally, outline the risks and potential situations we
should be aware of.
{staff}: in attached document
Then you can try adding:
Please give me a summary of career development benefits from this
project
Assessing Potential Project Risks Using AI
It’s a good idea to assess the risks and forecast potential outcomes for
your project. And this prompt will help you do that rather effectively. Try
running the prompt a few times to see if it gives you different
approaches. Maybe even try it with different AI assistants. Because you
can’t be too well prepared for problems.
You are a highly experienced scenario planner who understands the
factors that affect the success of a project. I want you to help
me identify the potential outcomes of this {project}. Explore
different possibilities and present your response using markup
with the following elements:
- A list of certainties
- A list of uncertainties
- A list of multiple potential scenarios - both positive and
negative - with a comment on their likelihood of happening
- research we should undertake to give us more certainty
- A list of assumptions you've made in your response
{project}: We are planning to build a wind farm on the North
Pole. It will have 50 turbines that are 100m tall with 40m
blades. They will transfer power to communities in Greenland to
replace fossil fuel energy.
Mitigating Project Risks with AI
Following on from the previous prompt, this one will give you some
suggestions to help you reduce risks and increase the chance of a
successful outcome.
Based on the risks you have identified, I want you to give me
some recommended actions we should take to increase the chance of
a good outcome. Please give me a list of the risks alongside
mitigating actions we can take to reduce the chances of them
happening or minimise the harm. Accompany this with a suggestion
of the team that should be responsible.
Using AI to Link Past Knowledge to New
Projects
This prompt helps you learn from past projects. But you’ll need a
document with learnings from previous projects that clearly outline what
has and hasn’t worked. We’ve created one that you can find in the
downloads. Upload your own version to your AI assistant (not all of them
allow you to do this) and run this prompt.
You are a highly experienced project manager with a special
ability to learn from past projects to help improve the outcomes
of future projects. I have attached a document of learnings from
past projects and I'm giving you information on my current
{project}. I want you to take a moment to understand the current
project and think about all the different aspects of realising
the vision. Then refer to the attached document to look for
relevant learnings that could be applied. Give me your response
with the following elements:
- A witty headline
- A table with the following columns: potential risk, advice on
how to mitigate this risk. Look for examples of how the issue has
been handled well in the document as well as where it was more of
a challenge.
- List the issues you are learning from, pointing out the
projects where it was handled pooorly and projects where it was
handled well.
- Then give me a list of the most immediate actions I should take
and the people I need to get involved early in the project.
Please create a comprehensive list. More points are better than
less.
{project}: We are planning to build a wind farm on the North
Pole. It will have 50 turbines that are 100m tall with 40m
blades. They will transfer power to communities in Greenland to
replace fossil fuel energy.
