AI Process Manager and Knowledge Base

Get AI-supported answers to stubborn questions like:* where do I start with a piece of work?* what task is next? how do I do it?* what's the status of org work?* how do I improve in my role?

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get in the elevator

Do you make lists?

Do you maintain Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)?

Are you unsure of:

  • where to start with a piece of work?
  • what task to do next or how to do it?
  • how to improve in your role?
  • who’s responsible for certain work?
  • the status of work across the org?

Well process management is your task list on growth hormones💪, on nutrient-dense compost🌱. Process is the machinery that holds the world together.

Think of processes as actionable templates of tasks that you repeat, like onboarding employees, preparing OKRs, writing content, or building a product team.

Come to this tool to:

  • learn how your organization works from a single source of truth
  • create projects and tasks from your processes
  • log feedback as you use processes
  • make meaningful updates to your processes

AI is tastefully sprinkled throughout the tool, supporting your work by:

  • creating your processes, their steps, and work resources (templates, checklists, , etc.)
  • responding to your searches and queries, answering your plain language questions
  • giving feedback on ways to improve your processes.

Inspiration

In my consulting practice, Morning Strategy, I've helped a number of businesses confront challenges in work design (who does what), process management (how do we do it?) and collaboration (I have to work with him??). I continue to see space in the SAAS marketplace for process-based tools, especially those that simplify work using AI. Welcome to v1.0.

What it does

To simplify it, this tool is Process Street for Coda. AI Process Manager helps you create, action, and improve your processes.

7 benefits of process management

  1. Faster, Better Work → when you write down work as steps, unwanted redundancies and inefficiencies become apparent and surprisingly accessible. Then you can make changes.
  2. Embed Strategy → it’s hard to step outside of day-to-day work and see the point of it all: see from a larger perspective. Process management helps people make connections between disparate work activities and creates stronger links between team work and organizational strategy.
  3. Strong Collaboration → perspective again: when you see how your work connects with your team’s, you make more people-positive decisions.
  4. Easy Adaptation → why wait for evolution to make our processes better? Active process management gives you control over your work, helps you simplify it, and targets effective improvements
  5. More Automation → making work explicit - identifying and breaking it into steps - is the precursor to assigning machine-work to machines and keeping the people-work for people
  6. Efficient Onboarding → new hires can refer to best practice processes to help them understand their work. When they get stuck, they can ask a process directly or quickly find the process owner and reach out.
  7. Reduced-risk Offboarding → departing colleagues have already documented their knowledge, or at least those aspects of their expertise that can be made explicit.

why AI?

There are a few problems with process and knowledge management that AI can help address.

First, it can be hard for some people to start thinking in terms of process. So this doc uses AI to create the processes while you focus on observing, amending, and adapting them.

Second, there’s always a risk that knowledge will go stale, or that people will have to spend time updating their processes to keep knowledge relevant. To that I say, well, good? You should be spending some time thinking about and working with your processes from a second-order perspective. But not all your time. The application of AI in this doc, along with the use of feedback for continuous improvement, is designed to help you reduce time spent on bad work, and make space for value-add activities.

How I built it

I woke up at 4am and clicked on the keyboard. I started with a single process, a table of template steps and a button that would copy them. I added AI to the components that would benefit a human. I clicked the keys some more. Two weeks later, I submitted to this hackathon. I documented a number of the steps in between in this YouTube playlist.

Challenges I ran into

I had a number of difficulties with my AI prompts. The AI continually disregarded specific requests like "include only the title of the process and no other material", so I was constantly rewriting the prompts until I found the right combination of words to elicit the pattern I wanted.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm glad to have created something ambitious, not just a gimmicky AI tease but something that can actually help people with their work.

What I learned

To be careful how complicated a doc I build relative to the amount of time I have to prepare documentation and onboarding support. To leave more room for user testing and feedback (it's a hackathon though, so meh...)

What's next for the AI Process Manager

Two AI-supported add-ons

  1. employee skills matrix and assessments (related to processes and the work they're involved in)
  2. dynamic capacity planner - when running a process, determine who has the necessary skills and create tasks in their name.

Built With

  • coda
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