ChatGPT Tools for Project Managers: From Status Reports to Your Own AI Assistant

This hands-on workshop, delivered in two live Zoom sessions, moves past basic prompting to the built-in tools that can take on real PM work: organizing work in Projects, analyzing schedules and budgets, researching vendors, and building custom GPTs for recurring tasks.

Session one covers working with your own project information. Session two covers research, communication, and automation. A short practice assignment between sessions gives participants a chance to try the tools on their own work before building a custom GPT prototype together.

Learners will have the opportunity to:
1. Set up a ChatGPT Project as a central workspace for a single initiative, with project-specific instructions and reference files.
2. Explore how memory and custom instructions shape responses, and when to use temporary chats instead.
3. Practice extracting requirements, risks, and action items from charters, SOWs, and meeting transcripts.
4. Work with data analysis to examine schedule and budget exports, spot variances, and generate charts.
5. Experiment with web search and deep research for vendor comparisons and benchmarking, and practice checking the sources it cites.
6. Use Canvas to co-draft and revise status reports and communication plans.
7. Explore image generation for simple project visuals, and recognize where it falls short.
8. Build and test a custom GPT for a recurring PM task.
9. Weigh each tool against data privacy guidelines and your own PM workflow.

Topics

- ChatGPT workspace tour and plan-level feature differences
- Responsible use and data risk classification for AI tools
- Projects: instructions, files, and organized chat history
- Memory, custom instructions, and temporary chats
- File analysis for PM documents
- Data analysis for schedules, budgets, and resource data
- Web search and deep research with source verification
- Canvas for collaborative drafting
- Image generation for diagrams and slide visuals
- Custom GPTs: design, instructions, knowledge files, and testing
- Other productivity features: scheduled tasks, voice, and connectors