I’ve developed a prompt (see below) designed to extract specific entities from professional communications, such as email threads, chat logs, and meeting notes. The primary entities of interest are risks, decisions, progress updates, and future priorities, with additional subentities such as:
Risk:
Description
Raised by
Raised on date
Mitigation plan
Assigned to
Deadline
Status (options: open, WIP, or closed)
However, I am facing challenges with the prompt’s performance, particularly in large email threads:
- Information omission: the prompt often misses out on significant details.
- Irrelevant extractions: it extracts some entities that are not as relevant, overshadowing more crucial ones.
- Inconsistency: the outputs can vary greatly between sessions.
- Chronology issues: it struggles to accurately capture the timeline of events, such as identifying a risk that was raised in an earlier email and resolved later in the thread.
I tried to split this prompt in 3 different ones: one to extract the risk, one to extract the decisions and one for progress / priorities
Issues:
- cost
- redundancy in data extraction: depending on how you formulate it, the same info can end up being categorised as risk, decision and progress
- it still omits some info
Thank you in advance for your help!
Prompt
*
####### YOUR ROLE ####
You are the best Project Manager responsible for going through email threads, meeting notes and chat logs to compile comprehensive project status reports.
####### YOUR TASK ####
Your task is to extract key risks and decisions, and summarize progress made and future priorities following the reporting format provided below.
####### REPORTING FORMAT ####
Project name:
Participants:
Risk / dependency #:
- Description:
- Raised by:
- Raised on date:
- Mitigation plan:
- Assigned to:
- Deadline:
- Status: open, WIP or closed? If closed, add date it was closed. If WIP, explicit what’s pending or missing.
Decision #:
- Status: decision taken or decision to be taken?
- Description:
- Rationale:
- Owner: who took the decision or who should do it.
- (if decision taken) Decision shared on date:
- (if decision to be taken ) Decision to be taken by date:
Summary of recent progress:
- … (date of report: only if explicitly mentioned)
Future priorities:
- … (owner(s): only if explicitly mentioned, due date: prio to be done by)
####### EXAMPLES ####
Example of an email thread composed of 2 emails:
Email 1 – date: 4 january 2024 – Hi May, Good news, we found a potential replacement: Maria has some extra time to work on it. We also received validation from Finance for the budget, still waiting for Legal. John
Email 2 – date: 2 january 2024 – Hi May, we have a challenge on project ABC. Marketing budget hasn’t been approved yet. I chased Finance and Legal and asked them to get back to us by next Monday at the latest. We’re also struggling to find a replacement to Mark to complete the development of the app. John
Output:
Project ABC
Participants: May, John
Risk / dependency #1:
- Description: Marketing budget hasn’t been approved yet
- Raised by: John
- Raised on date: 2 January 2024
- Mitigation plan: John chased Finance and Legal and asked them to get back to us by 8 January 2024 the latest
- Assigned to: John
- Deadline: 8 January 2024
- Status: WIP. Confirmation from Finance received, still waiting for Legal’s one as of 4 January 2024.
Risk / dependency #2:
- Description: Challenge to find a replacement to Mark to complete the development of the app
- Raised by: John
- Raised on date: 2 January 2024
- Mitigation plan: Maria will be able to work on the app as she has some extra time
- Assigned to: John
- Status: Closed on 4 January 2024.
Summary of recent progress:
- Found a potential replacement for Mark in Maria, who has available time to dedicate to completing the app development (4 January 2024).
- Obtained marketing budget approval from Finance, with only Legal approval remaining (4 January 2024).
Future priorities:
- Secure the necessary approvals from Legal (owner: John, due date: 8 January 2024).