AI powered project planning

You enter a short description of your project, and Tom's Planner returns a complete and ready-to-use project plan within a minute. Seems like a magic trick, right? Are you wondering how we do this? We are happy to explain.

The main part of the work is being done by ChatGPT. For those who haven't encountered it yet, ChatGPT is an Artificial intelligence built by openAI. You can chat with ChatGPT in the same way as you can chat on WhatsApp with another person. You can ask the AI almost anything you like, and it will respond accordingly.

This question-and-answer ability is what we use behind the scenes of this integration. We ask ChatGPT questions about your project and use its answers to create a Gantt chart for you.

To start this off, we ask you to enter a description of your project and use that description to ask the AI the following question: 'There is a project with the following description: {insert the project description here}. Break it down into seven phases and give us the name of each phase.'.

After we get the names of the seven main phases, we ask, for each phase: 'There is a project with the following description: {insert the project description here}. It has been broken down into the following phases '{insert the list with phase names here}'. Break the phase called '{insert the name of a phase here}' down into eight activities.'

And voila, we have a breakdown of the project in seven phases with each eight activities.

The only thing left to ask is: 'There is a project with the following description: {insert the project description here}. It has been broken down into the following phases '{insert the list with phase names here}'. Make an estimation of the start and end dates of each phase'.

And that's it. After asking these questions, we have enough information to make a Gantt chart for you. That's how simple it is. Of course, there are a lot of details to take care of in the background, but this is how it works in general terms.

Usually working with AI's, like ChatGPT, is a bit of an iterative process. For instance, when writing a text, you typically ask it to create a couple of different versions first, and then you ask the AI to further improve upon the text in steps. As it turns out, with project plans, it works the same way.

So we have added a couple of extra functions to Tom's Planner that will allow you to do the same in Tom's Planner.

You can:

• Create a new project phase by breaking up an existing activity into eight new activities. This allows you to go into more detail on some parts of your project.
• Ask the AI to add more activities to a group. This is useful if you are wondering if something is still missing or if there are more steps to consider.
• Adjust the activities in a project phase by giving the AI additional instructions. You can, for instance, ask it to make the activities more actionable, or maybe you want them to better reflect some details that the AI might have missed earlier in the process.
• Add a new phase yourself to the project and ask the AI to fill it with activities. This allows you to expand your project plan beyond the initial project description.

And when creating a new chart, you can customize the result by adjusting the following settings of the Gantt chart:

• Number of main phases
• Number of activities per phase
• Start date
• Duration in days, weeks or months
• The language

Feel free to give all this a try yourself. We are curious to see how you will be using this.