Learn ways to use AI to support your projects.

Hello, and welcome to our Impactful Projects and Planning Series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we'll talk about ways to use AI to support your projects. While there are lots of AI tools out there, today, I'm going to focus primarily on chat GPT. As there is a free version, and it's readily accessible to most of my audience, it's also an easy entry point for folks who want to test out AI. Before we dive into using chat GPT. for project management, I do want to offer two points. First, I think it's really important that before you use any AI tool, you understand where it gets its data and information from. So chat GPT was trained on a large data set that comes from mostly textual sources. So books, articles, Wikipedia scientific journals, unlike searching Google or other search engines, which are crawling the Internet to provide users with up to date data as it's being created, chat GPT is not searching the internet for information, and its data set doesn't include much past 2021. So why does this matter? According to open AI, the company behind chat GPT chat GPT may produce incorrect answers. And so users are encouraged to check whether responses are accurate. Second, and I think it's even more important that before you use an AI tool, you understand how it handles privacy, and how it uses the information you share with it. I don't want to go down a rabbit hole with this, we only have 15 minutes. But AI will open AI warns us not to share sensitive data which had GPT as it may learn or train on what we share. My understanding is that only data shared with the paid enterprise versions of chat GPT and their API platform aren't used for training. And so what this means is that we probably shouldn't share or provide it with specific details or data. And often it's that data that probably could help chat GPT give us better answers and content. Now when I see folks talking about uploading files that may contain personal data, or identifiable information into the free version of chat GPT, I get a little twitchy. So having said all of that, how can we responsibly use AI tools, and project management? And so the short answer for how we can use chat JpT and AI as project managers is as idea generation, so to provide us with ideas and examples to supply first drafts of plans and documents and communications, first drafts that we can edit sometimes, which at GPT has helped, but also with our own knowledge of project management and of our projects and environment. And so chat GPT can create drafts for project planning and project communications and documentation. It can help us generate ideas for task management, Resource Allocation and Risk Management, monitoring and controlling our projects, and even team collaboration. And so that's a lot, right. There are a lot of things that it can do. But let's talk about some specific examples and prompts. And so if you've been to any of these sessions before, I often talk about these five key elements of impactful project management scope, stakeholders outcomes or deliverable schedule, and communication. I believe that a focus on these five elements throughout a project can greatly impact your project success, especially for mission driven organizations, so nonprofits, associations, libraries, educational institutions, and government organ organizations. So let's look at some examples of ways to use AI in each of these areas. So for scope or purpose, we can use AI to draft a scope statement. So as our prompt, we might type something like write a scope statement for whatever our type of project is. And so for example, we might prompt chat JpT to write a scope statement for a project to implement a new donor management system. And so when I tried this chat GPT generated a pretty complex Hands of scope statement that had a purpose statement objectives, what's in and out of scope, assumptions and constraints and risks, and a list of stakeholders. And so I'm showing here the project purpose that it generated that I do think could be used as a simple scope statement, especially that first sentence. So the purpose of this project is to implement a new donor management system to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of donor relations, and fundraising activities for whatever our organization's name is. And so of course, we would need to edit it for our own organization and project. But I think this is a really nice starting point. Now with chat JpT. In particular, while you absolutely can start a new chat session with each prompt or question that you want to ask, I found it easier to keep a chat on one project going to continue to prompt it. So after asking about scope, I can prompt it to help me define deliverables and tasks for this project. And so as our prompt, we might type define the deliverables for this new donor management system project. And so when I did that, that got me a list of 12, different deliverables that included the donor management system itself, but also user training materials, and a user support and maintenance plan, I tend to find chat JpT to be pretty verbose. And I likely would not use all 12 deliverables in a real project. But several are ones that I could see adapting to a real world project. And so then another thing I could do was ask it to break each of those deliverables, or a specific deliverables into tasks for me. And so it had a data migration plans deliverable listed. And so as an example, we could prompt it to break that deliverable into different tasks. And so that got me a list of 16 tasks. It gave a lot of information about those tasks. And so, personally, I often end up asking Chet GPT to shorten things for me, so that it isn't quite as wordy. And so I do that by by prompting, it was shorten. And so when I asked it to shorten, I got a much more concise list that I absolutely could see discussing with the tech folks on my project team to get these down to tasks that would make sense for our real life project. Now that we have some deliverables and tasks, we can ask chat JpT to help us with our schedule planning. And so we could ask it to use the project deliverables it has already defined or a revised set, perhaps that we provide it with to develop a project schedule lasting a particular timeline. And so for example, I might prompt it to use the project deliverables to develop a project schedule lasting six months, beginning on January 15 2024. And what that got me was a pretty comprehensive schedule for each two week period over those six months, where it had suggested activities that we would do. Now again, while this is a good starting point, on a schedule, some of the timelines for tasks seem overly ambitious to me. And this has been my experience of asking chat GPT for Schedule help. And so I've highlighted a section here. For example, I doubt most mission driven organizations I've worked with, could create user training materials and train all of their staff in two weeks, especially when project team members likely have other things to work on besides this project. And so editing or prompting to get revisions would probably need to be done to make the schedule reflect the reality of our environment. But again, it gives us a starting point. And I think some really good ideas that we can refine. But what about communication? So we can prompt chat GBT to write a communications plan for whatever our project is. And so when I did that, and asked it for a communications plan for this project, it got me a pretty good communications plan. And so it had a stakeholder list, a bunch of different communication channels, a plan timeline, it listed some responsibilities and some additional information. Now I personally find the communication channels information most useful, because I think there are some really good ideas in here for how we might be how we might want to communicate throughout a project like this. And they really do reflect some best practices around getting stakeholder feedback during projects. Now, of course, we could also use chat GPT and prompt it to write some drafts of these communications for us. And that brings me to stakeholders. So I'm a huge fan of agendas. And a project kickoff meeting was actually a suggested communication channel from chat GPT. So we could prompt it to write an agenda for the project kickoff meeting, or really for any other type of project meeting that we might be holding. And so that project kickoff agenda meeting prompt got me an agenda for a two hour kickoff meeting that does cover all of the key points that I would likely want to talk about. In that meeting. I did like that it suggested an optional icebreaker, it reminded me to encourage active participation I met again, I could prompt it to shorten the meeting. To give give it more information that could help me revise the agenda for my own needs. We might also ask chat JpT to write a reminder email about a task, a deadline, or any other type of email we might want to send during the project. And so prompting for a reminder email about a task deadline got me a pretty good email I could use as a template for sending my own reminders. Again, chat GPT tends to be a little verbose, a little too formal for my tastes. And so I might prompt it to revise the email to sound less formal. And what I got here was, I think, a much better email that I might use. And while I might change some of the wording, I'm unlikely to say hope you're doing awesome. I might say something a little bit different in my own writing style. This really is a good starting point, and something that I could use as a template throughout a project. So that those are just a few really quick examples of ways you might use chat GPT, and project management. It can save project managers time by offering ideas, and first drafts of project plans, documents and communications. And it's easy to ask it to refine those drafts to fit your environment and style. I do also want to point out that AI is increasingly embedded in project management and team management tools. Most of the popular project management tools like Asana, clickup, Microsoft Project, integrate AI into their systems. And so these features may allow you to suggest may help you by suggesting tasks analyzing data and project risks, supporting resource allocation and writing content. I personally use a project management tool called hive. And when I add a deliverable or task, I can click a button and have it suggest tasks and subtasks. To me, again, I often have to edit those or move them around, but it's still a time saver as a starting point. And so that was a really quick intro into using AI for project management. For more help using AI in your projects, you can check out our AI for project managers tip sheet. This simple tip sheet offers some suggestions and prompts for using chat GPT to support project management. And so this free download is available at Yazdaniconsulting.com resources. So if you do need more hands on support leading projects and using project management tools, visit our project solutions page at Yazdaniconsulting.com projects to learn about how we can help. So great, I am happy to take any questions that you have. And so please add those in the comments. There is a slight streaming delay usually. And so I typically like to give folks a few minutes to add their questions. If I'm not able to answer your question live. I'm happy to respond later in the comments. And so let's see. You can also find all of the ways to contact me at Yazdaniconsulting.com contact and so I really am happy to talk more about AI for project management. So don't hesitate to reach out. And so a question is if chat GPT and our project management tool can do all of this, will we even need project managers in the future? And so I love this question. Because I think it's one that's on the minds of lots of folks and not just when we're talking Thinking about project management. And so I have seen articles suggesting that AI might be able to replace 80% of project management tasks. Now, I'm not sure about replacing per se, but I do think it can speed up and help us out with maybe 80% of the the tasks on our to do list help take them off our plate. But generally, I would agree with some leaders in the project management sector, particularly Antonio Nieto, Rodriguez, who have said that while AI can help us handle a lot of details, most of our time as project managers in the future may be spent kind of wrangling the AI to get what we need for our specific environment. But really, that we're going to spend most of our time which I find is already true in the projects that I lead, dealing with people and so generating by in mentoring and supporting team members fostering collaboration. So these are the things that you would still want a project manager for. And I think where a project manager tends to shine. Okay, so I'm not seeing, I'm seeing a couple of questions. Is there a tool that integrates AI to planning scheduling tasks? And so Marcelo, I'm seeing a lot of the AI, a lot of project management tools have this kind of built in that can help you with planning and scheduling, I'm not currently aware of a specific AI tool, a separate tool that that's doing that, although I'm seeing some that are kind of helping with people's calendar on an individual level. But I'm not aware of, of something of anything kind of specific. Victoria is asking, Are there any big no no's. And I really think the big nono is to be really careful about what you what information that you provide. And so while you may not want to provide obviously, personally identifiable information, you know, maybe you don't even want to provide chat JpT with the name of your organization, maybe you don't want to provide it with name, you know, even first names of the people working on a project. And so I really think privacy is is something to think about. But I do think it depends on what tool you're using. And so that's something that, you know, you kind of need to do your due diligence on. And so Amy is asking, is there a project management software tool with integrated AI, you would recommend me, I would say that almost all of the kind of big project management tools these days have some form of AI integrated. And so you know, I, I don't know that there's one doing it better than the other right now. And they're all kind of making leaps and bounds, as they're kind of, you know, this, this whole environment is kind of growing. And so I can't say that I'm, I've seen anyone kind of doing anything significantly better than another tool, but they're all making, you know, AI a piece of what they're doing. And so I really think whatever your favorite project management tool is, I would just kind of dive in to see what they have available. All right, well, wonderful. I'm not seeing any more more questions. And again, I really am happy to answer any questions that you have separately. Reach out, message me with additional questions. And so thank you for participating in our Impactful Projects and Planning series. You can visit us at yazdaniconsulting.com IPP to view all of the sessions in the series and learn about upcoming trainings. So thank you all.