Work Breakdown & Milestone Planner

The problem this kills

Someone says "we're doing the warehouse migration in Q3," and now it's your job to turn that one sentence into an actual plan. So you open a blank spreadsheet and stare at it. What are the phases? What tasks live under each one? Who owns what? How long does any of this take, and what has to finish before what else can start?

You eventually hammer out a list, but half the tasks have no owner, a third have no estimate, and the dependencies live only in your head. Two weeks in, someone asks "wait, who's doing the data cleanup?" and nobody knows. The "plan" was never really baselined - there's no agreed, locked version everyone can point to - so every status meeting is an argument about what the plan even was.

This tool gets you from a brief to a reviewed, approved baseline fast. The AI does the tedious first draft - breaking the work into phases, tasks, and milestones, suggesting durations and dependencies. You, the PM, do the part only a human should: editing it, assigning real owners, fixing the estimates, and approving the baseline. Nothing gets locked until you say so.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Takes a project brief (typed or pasted) plus your people list and any template phases your org reuses.
• Has the AI draft a work breakdown structure: phases -> tasks -> milestones, each task with a suggested owner, a rough duration, and dependencies (what blocks what).
• Shows the draft in an editable plan grid where you change durations, reorder tasks, fix dependencies, and assign real owners.
• Flags every task with no owner or no estimate so nothing slips through into the baseline half-finished.
• Enforces a hard approval gate: the draft is just a draft until you, the PM, review and approve it into a locked baseline.
• Dedupes tasks on (project + normalized task name) so the AI can't draft the same task twice and you can't accidentally create duplicates.
• Exports the approved baseline as a CSV in the exact columns your PM tool (MS Project, Smartsheet, Asana, Jira, monday.com, a spreadsheet) wants for import.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how you plan projects today, what your typical phases and milestones look like, the exact fields and naming your PM tool expects, how big your projects usually get, what your approval and baseline rules are, and your messiest edge cases (parallel workstreams, fuzzy estimates, owners who span projects). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a planner shaped to how your team actually works, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, the brief-to-WBS AI drafting step, the editable plan grid, owner/estimate flagging, dependency editing, the baseline approval gate, and the CSV export.
• The hard human approval gate and the duplicate guard.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your PM tool.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a real planning process needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the projects and plans that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every draft, edit, owner assignment, estimate change, and baseline approval is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI drafts the WBS, but a real PM must review, edit, and approve before a baseline is locked; nothing is auto-baselined.
• Duplicate guards so the same task (project + normalized name) can't be created twice.

Who it's for

Project managers, program managers, team leads, and ops/BPM folks who keep having to turn "we're doing X" into an actual plan - and who want a fast, repeatable way to draft and baseline a work breakdown without wrestling a blank spreadsheet or buying heavyweight planning software. You don't need to write code. You need a brief, your people list, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.