The fastest way that I found to schedule projects in MS Project is by using chatGPT. What I’m going to show you might change the way you schedule projects.
It’s Kristin from region 6D. For me, it’s always a pleasure to share some of my knowledge in project management to level up your skills. I train and consult for companies.
The project that is behind me, I didn’t create any tasks, evaluate any durations, define any start dates, or define any resources. Everything is done with the help of chatGPT.
My first step was to create a project description. For that, I used MS Word and its capacity to go from voice to text. Our project is the implementation of a CRM system, a customer relation management system. In our company, we are producing services and goods, and we are following our customers through marketing. That is to say, we have a first contact with them, then we have the sales department that is in contact with the customer to check the performances of the different teams involved. Once the CRM system is in place, now we can start the work with chatGPT.
I prepared the project description and I’m creating the first prompt. In that first prompt, I’m asking chatGPT to read my project description and to tell me if it understood.
In the next prompt, I’m telling chatGPT that it is my mentor in project management and that I asked my mentor how shall I proceed with my project.
With the project that is proposed by chatGPT, I’m fine. So now what I’m going to ask it in the next prompt is to schedule the project in a tabular format with some constraints that I have with MS Project concerning the duration formats. And we’ll see what it is going to generate. The table generated is really key here, so I’m really happy with the results.
Now I copy the table, open Excel, and paste that table in there. I’m saving that file and we are going to proceed now with MS Project.
I have opened MS Project and what I want to do is to import the Excel file. For this, I’m going into Open > Browse. It found already one version of the file that I had created previously, but what I’m interested in are Excel files. So I opened the Excel file that we created previously.
Now I’m going here into Open > Import Wizard. I’m going to say I create a new map, I create a new project with this, and for this simple example, I’m interested in the tasks. So I’m selecting here Next.
Within the Source worksheet, I have to define the sheet on which I’m going to work. It’s in my case, Sheet1. And you see here some of the elements. We are in red, it means that we have here the columns from the Excel field and here we have to map them to MS Project Fields.
In Excel, it was named Task and here it is entitled Name. So I’m going to look for Name, which is here, to do the mapping. For resources, I have also something similar. I’m looking for Resource Names. So now I have the mapping which is defined.
You see, I have here some examples with how the name, where in Excel, Task Duration, Start, Finish, and Resources. If I go a bit further here and below, I have two lines that show me how they are going to be converted into MS Project.
With that, I’m done. I can now click on Finish here and we are going to look what happens.
Aren’t you surprised like me how fast this is going, especially now that I show you the Gantt chart?
Yes, I am fascinated by how fast it goes. Yes, you are right. This project is a simple one, but it’s an example to show you the process of how to go from a project description that you dictate to your word processor up to having tasks and a schedule into MS Project.
We are now evolving. We are now at the beginning of something that is different, and I’m eager to discover what you will do as a project in this way.
It’s Christian, and for me, it’s always a pleasure to meet you again in the next module. Bye bye!
