Planning, Processes and Project Management

A project that starts as one vague sentence ("organize the open day") becomes dozens of small tasks that someone has to remember. Breaking things down is something AI does quickly and well, as long as you supply the real constraints. In this lesson you will use an assistant to decompose projects, draft schedules and checklists, write procedures, list risks and follow actions, while keeping the final plan realistic.

You can now research and analyze. This lesson is about turning ideas and decisions into organized work: who does what, in which order, by when.

Nadia's onboarding project

Nadia has to improve the onboarding of new employees. At the moment, each manager does it differently, and newcomers regularly arrive without a laptop or a clear first week. She has a deadline (the next three hires start in six weeks), a small budget and no dedicated time. She decides to build a clear process, with the help of an assistant for the structure.

Decompose the project

An assistant is good at turning a goal into a work breakdown: phases, tasks and dependencies. What it does not know is your reality. So always provide:

• The goal and what "done" looks like.
• The deadline and fixed dates.
• The resources: who is involved, how much time they have, the budget.
• The constraints: tools, rules, approvals, other projects.
• What already exists: documents, templates, previous attempts.

A ready-to-use prompt: project breakdown

I am [job title] and I must deliver this project: [goal and definition of done].
Deadline: [date]. People involved (roles only): [roles and their availability, e.g. 2 hours per week].
Budget and constraints: [budget, tools, approvals, other priorities].
Existing material: [what already exists].

Break the project into phases and tasks. For each task give: description, who (by role), estimated effort as a range, dependencies, and the deliverable. Mark the critical path and the tasks that can be done in parallel.
List the assumptions you made, and ask me up to 5 questions about anything that would change the plan.
Do not invent resources I do not have.

The estimates are the weak spot. An assistant does not know how long it takes your colleagues to get a laptop ordered. Treat its estimates as a starting point and correct them with your own experience.

Schedules and checklists

Once the breakdown is validated, you can ask for a timeline: a week-by-week plan with milestones, and for repeated activities a checklist. For Nadia, a checklist for each new hire could cover: before arrival (equipment, accounts, welcome message), day one (welcome, tour, introductions), first week (training sessions, key contacts), first month (objectives, check-in). She asks for a checklist with owners and a timing for each line ("D-7", "D+1"), then edits it to match her company's reality.

Checklists are among the most reliable uses of AI, because the structure is standard and the content is easy to verify. Their value is in what they prevent: forgetting a step.

A ready-to-use prompt: checklist with timing and owners

Create a checklist for [recurring activity, e.g. welcoming a new employee] in [type of organization, size].
Organize it by time: [before, day 1, week 1, month 1].
For each line give: the action, the owner (by role) and how to confirm it is done.
Keep it practical: no more than [20] lines. Mark with (*) the items that are mandatory or have a safety, legal or security implication so that I verify them against our rules.
Do not assume any tool or policy that I did not mention; if a step depends on one, write [to adapt].

Procedures (SOPs)

A standard operating procedure (SOP) explains how to do a recurring task in a consistent way: who, when, which steps, which checks. Many organizations have such knowledge only in people's heads. AI can transform your explanation into a clear document.

1. Describe the task out loud or in rough notes, as you actually do it.
2. Ask the assistant for a numbered procedure with purpose, prerequisites, steps, checks, common errors and who to contact.
3. Compare it to what you really do: remove invented steps and add missing exceptions.
4. Have someone unfamiliar with the task follow it and note where they get stuck.

Marc, the plumber, applies this to the end-of-day closing of a worksite: protect the area, check that taps and valves are closed, photograph the work, note materials used, tidy and update the customer. The first generated version includes a step that does not apply to his work, which he removes, and he adds a safety check he never forgets but had not written down.

Risks and assumptions

Ask the assistant to play the project's worst critic. A risk list prepared in five minutes often surfaces issues the team would discuss only after they happen: a key person on holiday, a dependency on an external supplier, an unclear approval.

Here is my project plan: [summary of the plan].
List the 10 most likely risks (delay, cost, quality, people, dependencies, data or compliance). For each: what could happen, early warning signs, how likely and how serious it is (low, medium, high), and a preventive action.
Then list the 5 assumptions in my plan that I should verify first.

Then you choose which risks are real in your context, add the ones the AI missed and assign an owner to each preventive action.

Following actions

Plans fail in the follow-up. Use the assistant to maintain a simple action log: each action with owner, deadline, status and next step. After each weekly meeting, you can paste your updated notes (without sensitive data) and ask it to update the table and highlight what is late or blocked. Check, of course, that the updated table still matches your notes, and that tasks have not changed owner without your decision. Remember the rule from the previous chapter: the AI does not assign people; you do.

Bad use versus good use

Bad use	Good use
"Make me a project plan" with no deadline, no people, no budget.	Give the goal, dates, resources and constraints; ask for assumptions and questions.
Using the AI's duration estimates as commitments to your boss.	Treating them as ranges to adjust with your experience and with the people doing the work.
Distributing an AI-drafted safety procedure as it is.	Having a qualified person validate it against the applicable rules and testing it on site.

Your turn: plan one real project

Exercise. Choose a small project you must deliver within two months. (1) Use the breakdown prompt. (2) Correct the estimates and the assumptions with your own knowledge. (3) Generate a checklist for one recurring activity linked to it. (4) Run the risk prompt and keep only the five risks you consider realistic, each with an owner. Note which parts you had to correct most.

See a solution

Nadia's corrected plan: phase 1 (week 1 to 2) agree the standard first-week program with managers; phase 2 (week 2 to 4) prepare the checklist, the welcome pack and the equipment request process; phase 3 (week 4 to 6) test on the three upcoming hires and adjust. She replaced the assistant's estimate for equipment (two days) with five working days, based on the real delay with the IT team, and added a dependency on IT that the assistant could not know.

Risks she kept: equipment delays (owner: IT liaison), managers not following the checklist (owner: Nadia, with a short briefing), accounts created too late, a missing welcome message, newcomers overloaded on day one. The exercise's most useful finding was in the "assumptions to verify" list: she had assumed that managers had time for a one-hour welcome, which was false in two teams.