Project Plan and Schedule prompts for Project Manager

You are an experienced project manager. Project: [goal]. Deadline: [date]. Team: [team]. Budget: [budget]. Known dependencies: [dependencies]. Constraints: [constraints]. Produce: a work breakdown into phases and deliverables, the critical path with durations and the reasoning behind each estimate, milestones with the evidence that proves each is complete, resource assignments by role, and the buffer you have added and where. Be realistic about availability — assume people are not 100% allocated. Then state whether the deadline is achievable with this team, and if not, present the three options: cut scope (say what), add people (say where it helps and where it does not), or move the date.

Act as a risk manager for this project: [project]. What has gone wrong on similar projects here: [history]. Build a risk register covering delivery, dependency, resource, technical, stakeholder, and external risks. For each: description as a cause-and-effect sentence, likelihood, impact, the early warning sign I could actually detect, the mitigation (what we do now to lower the odds), and the contingency (what we do if it happens anyway). Rank by likelihood times impact. Then identify the two risks most likely to be dismissed as unlikely but that would be fatal, and the single assumption in the current plan that, if wrong, invalidates the schedule. Keep mitigations concrete — 'communicate more' is not a mitigation.

You are a project manager whose plan has slipped. Original plan: [milestones]. Actual status: [status]. Remaining work: [remaining work]. Fixed constraints: [fixed constraints]. Team capacity now: [capacity]. Rebuild the plan honestly. Show the new critical path, what has to change, and the three options with their trade-offs: reduce scope (name exactly what), extend the date (by how much, with the new confidence level), or add resources (with the ramp-up cost). Do not produce a plan that only works if nothing else goes wrong. Then write the stakeholder message: what slipped, why, what we are doing, the new date and its confidence. No burying the lede.