Good project management is all about staying organized, planning ahead, and being flexible when things change.

While traditional tools help teams collaborate, AI takes it a step further. It automates repetitive tasks, improves communication, and optimizes resources in ways that would be hard for humans to achieve alone.

Here’s how AI is typically used:

• Automating routine tasks: AI takes care of status updates, reminders, and notifications, cutting down on errors and giving you more time for big-picture planning.
• Smarter data for better planning: AI creates and maintains accurate data, helping project managers make more precise forecasts.
• Managing resources and costs: AI evaluates resource availability and efficiently assigns resources, making it easier to stay on time and within budget.

Discover how ChatGPT can transform project proposals into detailed action plans. Learn effective prompting techniques to set achievable deadlines, prioritize tasks, and assign the right team members to each job—all powered by AI.

In this tutorial, part of the Automate Project Management with AI course, you’ll learn how to turn a project proposal into a detailed project plan ready for use in any project management tool. While we’ll focus on using ChatGPT, you can apply these techniques with other AI tools like Claude, Gemini, or Copilot.

We’ll walk you through the process, helping you build a strong project plan and better understand your project’s critical components.

Here’s the step-by-step process we’ll cover:

1. Understand the project proposal
2. Identify key tasks
3. Break tasks into subtasks
4. Assign roles and responsibilities
5. Estimate timelines and identify dependencies
6. Format data for project management tools

The tools you’ll need for this tutorial:

• ChatGPT

Let’s get into it.

Understand the project proposal

A project proposal is a detailed document that describes the project. The first step is to understand the proposal and review its outline. So, we will upload the document to ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the project. This step helps project managers understand the proposal without reviewing the entire document. 

Open ChatGPT and upload the document. Use the following sample prompt by replacing the placeholders with your own info:

Prompt:

[Attach project proposal]

‍Please summarize the key goals, objectives, deliverables, and precise requirements from the attached project proposal: [brief description of the project]. 

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Quick Tip: Instead of uploading a document, you can connect Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive to your ChatGPT account. This feature can sometimes be glitchy in ChatGPT, but when it functions properly, it’s much quicker than uploading a document or copying and pasting content into the chat. If you encounter problems connecting to Google Drive, try refreshing ChatGPT, which should resolve the issue.

Identify key tasks

After reviewing the summary, it is important to identify key tasks required to start the project. Ask ChatGPT to break the project proposal into key tasks, phases, and milestones. 

Prompt:

Using the project proposal as a reference, identify the key tasks or phases necessary to accomplish the project's goals. Organize these tasks into relevant categories or milestones to provide a clear roadmap for achieving the desired outcomes.

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Break tasks into subtasks.

The key tasks in a good project plan seem daunting. Therefore, we will ask ChatGPT to break them into smaller, more actionable subtasks.

‍Prompt:

Break each project task down into smaller, actionable subtasks. Specify the expected outcomes for each subtask.

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That’s more like it. We received a detailed breakdown of tasks, which is more manageable and easy to follow. 

Assign roles and responsibilities

With a list of detailed subtasks, we can now assign roles and responsibilities based on the team resources for this project. 

Prompt:

Based on the team roles and expertise: [list roles and expertise], delegate responsibilities for each identified task and its sub-task

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Estimate timelines and identify dependencies

Another important aspect of project management is identifying timelines and dependencies to avoid unnecessary problems during the project run. For the last section of the project plan, ask ChatGPT to structure all the tasks based on timelines, constraints, and project dependencies. 

Prompt:

Create a project timeline with estimated durations for each task and subtask, incorporating these specific timing requirements: [insert timeline constraints]. Please also indicate which tasks depend on others being completed first.

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ChatGPT gave us tables and graphs to aid in assembling a project plan. That is perfect! 

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It also created a project timeline, which was extremely helpful.

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Format data for project management tools

Since we'll be transferring our project planning from ChatGPT to a proper project management system, we can format our project plan in ChatGPT to easily upload it into whatever tool you decide to use.

Prompt:

Can you convert the detailed plan outlined in this chat into a downloadable CSV file so we can upload it into Airtable? Please use a structure of task name, description, assignee, start date, due date, and dependencies.

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Important to know: We’ll use Airtable as our project management tool in the following tutorial. If you’re using something else, just figure out how to bulk-upload content in your app so you can follow along with this step.

Great! You've made it to the end of this tutorial. We will now go to Airtable to set up our project tracking and reporting system. Using the project plan we created in this tutorial, we will use Airtable’s native AI to build a customized project tracking system quickly.

Click here to go to the next tutorial of the course.

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