PM101
PM101
Solution Guide
The project management platform for small teams: the skills, templates and AI-powered tools to run projects properly, without enterprise overhead.
For every PM. Accidental or not. · pm101.co.uk
Contents
What’s inside
- 01IntroductionWhy small teams need a different kind of PM platform
- 02FeaturesGuided setup, delivery workspace, portfolio visibility
- 03AIThe Context Engine, the assistant, agents and scenarios
- 04The PlatformEvery tool in PM101, and what each one is for
PM101 · Solution Guide · Ask it. Run it. Pocket it.
Solution Guide
PM101 Solution Guide
The project management platform for small teams: the skills, templates and AI-powered tools to run projects properly, without enterprise overhead.
For every PM. Accidental or not.
Introduction
Small businesses run projects constantly: office moves, system rollouts, product launches, client work. Most of the people running them were never trained as project managers, and there's no PMO to fall back on.
PM101 exists to close that gap.
Run projects properly, without the overhead
In most small and mid-sized businesses, projects are run on instinct. Plans live in spreadsheets, updates live in email chains, and every project feels like starting from scratch. Deadlines slip, budgets drift, and nobody's quite sure what good looks like.
The people running these projects are rarely career project managers. They're founders, operations managers and team leads who've been handed a project alongside the day job. Formal training is expensive and academic. Enterprise PM tools are overkill for a team of ten. And generic AI gives you raw output with none of the method behind it.
That's where PM101 comes in: a project management learning and tools platform built for SMEs. It combines plain-English learning, ready-to-use templates, a library of expert-written AI prompts, and a full project planning tool in one place, so small teams can run projects with the confidence of a much bigger organisation.
You don't need to learn a methodology before you can be productive. You start doing, and the learning happens alongside the work.
Built for real businesses
Every template, lesson and tool is calibrated for teams of 5 to 50, not scaled-down enterprise. No 40-page methodology documents. No jargon. Everything is sized for a business where the person running the project also has a day job.
AI-native from day one
AI isn't bolted on; it's baked in. Prompts come pre-loaded with PM best practice, so the output is useful first time, not after an hour of rewriting. And the more you feed it, the better it gets.
What is PM101
PM101 is a single web platform where learning and doing live side by side. Ask it your exact question. Run prompts, templates and agents that already know project management. Pocket it, and take the whole thing with you on Telegram.
Everything works from one account. Browse bite-size lessons in Learn, pick up a template with the guidance built in, or run an expert-written prompt from the Prompt Library. When you're ready to manage a real project, the Project Plan Manager gives you a proper workspace: plans, milestones, risks, dashboards and exports, with AI drafting a click away.
Because it's one platform, the pieces reinforce each other. The PM Assistant answers questions grounded in the same good practice the templates teach. The Agents marketplace adds community-built tools for specific jobs. And underneath all of it sits the thing that makes PM101 different: the Context Engine.
The PM101 difference
The Context Engine
Generic AI knows everything and nothing about your project. PM101 is built the other way round. At its core sits the Context Engine: every answer and every artefact is generated from three layers of context at once, and you control all three.
- Follows your stage gates
- Uses your house format
- Reflects live project facts
- 1Give it context
- 2Get better output
- 3Fix less, ship more
- 4Feed it again
Why this matters
Ask a generic chatbot for a project charter and you get a generic charter. Ask a task tracker's AI and you get a summary of your task list. PM101 combines what you're doing, what good practice says, and how your business works, in the same run. Where your standards conflict with textbook practice, yours win. That precedence rule is the difference between output you edit for an hour and output you send.
Nobody else stacks all three
The big platforms are adding AI that reads whatever happens to be sitting in them. PM101 works the other way round: you choose what the engine knows, and expert PM practice is in the stack from day one. The result is simple to say and hard to copy: the more context you give PM101, the better it works for you. And only you have your context.
PM101 pricing
Start free, upgrade when it earns its keep. Plans are priced for small businesses, not enterprise procurement.
Free
£0
Perfect for exploring PM101
- Browse the full Prompt Library, Templates and Learn
- 3 prompt or agent runs a month
- 5 PM Assistant messages a month
- 1 video generation a month
Pro
£9/month · £89/year
For people who use AI daily
- Unlimited prompts, agents, chats and videos
- Full Project Plan Manager: projects, wizard, dashboards, exports
- Business Context: teach the engine how you work
- Priority support
Team
£49/month · 5 seats
Small PM teams sharing projects
- Everything in Pro, for the whole team
- Shared workspace and projects
- Portfolio view across projects
- One set of company standards for everyone
Business & Enterprise
£149/month · 20 seats
PMOs that need control and analytics
- Admin console with per-seat usage and spend caps
- Priority AI models and SSO
- Enterprise: custom seats, SAML SSO, SLA and dedicated support
The PPM and assistant stack, without the PPM price tag
The live comparison tool at pm101.co.uk/compare prices PM101 against Monday, Asana, Jira and MS Project for your team size. A 3-seat team typically saves hundreds of pounds a year, and new capabilities land in every plan as they ship. No per-feature pricing, no surprises.
Features
PM101 supports the full life of a project, from "I've just been handed this" through planning and delivery to the final report. Learn what to do, grab the template that does it, and let AI handle the heavy lifting.
The following sections walk through the four capability areas of the platform: starting well, planning and delivering, staying visible, and working together.
Feature area A
Start every project right
Guided project setup
Most projects fail at the start, not the end: fuzzy objectives, no owner, no plan. PM101's project wizard walks you through the questions that matter. What are you trying to achieve? Who's involved? What are the milestones, and what could go wrong? There's no PM vocabulary to learn first; the wizard asks in plain English and translates your answers into proper project structure behind the scenes. Ten minutes later you have a structured project, not a blank page.
Learn as you go
The Learn library gives you bite-size, plain-English lessons on the skills each stage needs: scoping, stakeholders, risk, budgets, status reporting. Content builds into a system rather than a pile of disconnected tips, and each lesson links to the template or tool that puts it into practice, so you learn the method by using it.
Templates with the thinking built in
Project charters, business cases, kick-off agendas, RAID logs, status reports: every template comes with context and guidance, so you know what each section is for and what good looks like before you type a word. Use them as-is, or let the Context Engine fill them from your project's own information.
A charter people sign
Objective, scope, owners and top risks on one page, drafted from your wizard answers and ready for sign-off.
A plan skeleton
Phases, milestones and dates laid out and ready to refine, instead of an intimidating blank grid.
A starter risk log
Likely risks suggested up front, so the first RAID review isn't an empty page.
From idea to approved project
Make the case
When a project needs sign-off, PM101 helps you build the argument: the problem you're solving, the options considered, expected benefits, costs and risks. The business case template keeps it to the length a busy owner will actually read, and the AI drafts a first version from whatever notes you already have.
Set the ground rules
Scope boundaries, assumptions, dependencies and risks get captured before delivery starts, so the awkward conversations happen early and cheaply. Decision-makers see what they're agreeing to; the team knows what's in and what's out.
Ten minutes with the wizard beats two weeks of "we'll sort the plan out later."
- 1
Capture
Answer plain-English questions about the project. No PM vocabulary required, no blank-page dread.
- 2
Structure
PM101 turns your answers into a proper project: objectives, milestones, owners, risks.
- 3
Draft
Generate the charter, plan and kick-off pack with AI, grounded in your inputs rather than invented.
- 4
Go
Share it, get the nod, and start delivery with everyone pointing the same way.
Feature area B
Plan and deliver
A real project workspace
The Project Plan Manager gives every project a home: the plan, milestones, owners, budget, risks and updates in one place instead of five tabs and someone's inbox. It's deliberately simpler than enterprise PPM. Approved projects carry everything captured at setup straight into delivery, so nothing gets retyped and nothing gets lost between "yes, go" and actually going.
Milestones and progress
Break the work into phases and milestones with clear owners and dates. Simple status keeps the plan honest: on track, at risk, delayed. Progress is visible at a glance rather than buried in a spreadsheet, and when a date moves you see what it pushes, so slippage gets managed instead of discovered.
Risks, issues and dependencies
A living RAID log sits inside the project, not in a document nobody opens. Capture what could go wrong, who owns it and what you're doing about it, with severity, mitigation and review dates. The AI suggests likely risks before they hit you.
Budgets, without a finance degree
Track the approved budget against what's actually being spent and committed, in language a business owner recognises. Simple signals show when the numbers are drifting, early enough to do something about it rather than in the post-mortem.
Everything has an owner
Every milestone, risk and action carries a name, so "I thought you were doing that" stops being a project management method. Updates live on the project record, which means the answer to "where are we?" is a link, not a meeting.
Test the plan before reality does
Scenarios: ask "what if?" safely
What if the fit-out slips three weeks? What if we lose a key person in March? Scenarios let you apply a "lens" to your plan and see the knock-on effects without touching the live project. Stack lenses, compare outcomes, and promote a scenario to become the plan if it's the better answer.
Draft with AI, stay in control
Any section of the project can be drafted by AI from what the project already knows: charter, plan narrative, status commentary. You review and edit; nothing is invented that isn't grounded in your project's information.
Change without chaos
Plans change; that's fine. Because scenarios are separate from the live plan, you can explore options in front of stakeholders without anyone panicking about the numbers moving.
Exports that look the part
Turn the live plan into shareable, client-ready documents in a click. Share read-only scenario links so stakeholders see exactly what you see. No logins, no attachments.
Enough structure to deliver consistently, without the process burden, the admin overhead, or a single Gantt chart you didn't ask for.
Feature area C
Visibility and insight
Know where you stand, without chasing
Dashboards show delivery health as it is, not as it was three status meetings ago. Progress, milestones, risks and budget signals roll up per project and, on Team plans and above, across the whole portfolio. Because the dashboard reads straight from the live project record, there's no Friday-afternoon reporting ritual: keeping the project up to date is the reporting.
No screenshots of spreadsheets, no version-seventeen attachments. Problems surface weeks before the deadline, not three days after it.
Feature area D
Collaboration and community
One workspace, one way of working
On Team plans, projects live in a shared workspace: invite collaborators, share the portfolio view, and apply one set of company standards to everyone's work. Role-based access keeps the right people editing and everyone else informed. New starters inherit the house way of running projects on day one, because it's built into the tools they pick up, not a handbook they'll never read.
A community that ships templates
PM101 users share prompts and templates back into the library, reviewed before publishing so quality holds. The Agents marketplace goes further: complete AI tools, built by the community, for jobs like meeting summaries, risk reviews and lessons-learned write-ups. You're not just buying a product; you're joining the people who use it.
Codify how your team works
With the Agent Builder, teams turn their own repeatable workflows into agents ("our weekly client update, done our way") and share them across the workspace. Combined with Business Context, the house method stops living in one person's head and starts living in the platform.
PM101 in your pocket
Link the Telegram bot and your projects come with you: on site, between meetings, on the school run. It's a genuine two-way channel. Interrogate your projects, get assessments, and make updates from chat.
Feedback that becomes product
PM101 is early and moving fast. Community requests genuinely shape the roadmap, and new templates, lessons and agents land regularly as part of every plan. The platform you join keeps getting better without an upgrade conversation.
AI
Anyone can paste a question into a chatbot. The difference with PM101 is what's behind the answer: the Context Engine, drawing on practitioner-written practice, your live project data, and the way your business actually works.
It starts with an assistant that talks your language, and it gets dramatic when you hand it a document and click Generate.
The PM Assistant
Ask the exact question you're stuck on. Plain-English question in, grounded answer out: not a search engine, not a generic chatbot, but an assistant wired into the PM101 library and your own projects.
Answers and advice
From "what goes in a project charter?" to "my sponsor keeps skipping our check-ins, what do I do?" Practical, situation-aware guidance, like a mentor on tap who's seen it all before, and honest when it doesn't know.
Drafting and doing
Charters, status reports, risk logs, stakeholder comms: drafted from what your project already knows, in your house format once you've taught it one. Question to finished document, in one run.
The assistant is everywhere you work: the search bar on every page of the platform, draft buttons inside the Project Plan Manager, and the Telegram bot when you're away from a desk. Free accounts get a monthly allowance; Pro and above are unlimited. And because the PM expertise is in the prompts, you get useful results first time, without learning to "prompt engineer".
Where the time comes back
One click to a governance foundation
Every project needs the same foundation: a charter, a plan, a risk log, the right stakeholders, a reporting rhythm. Building it by hand takes days. PM101 builds it from a document you already have.
- 1
Upload what exists
A proposal, a contract, a statement of work, meeting notes, even an email thread. Whatever the project already has, drop it in.
- 2
Click Generate
The Context Engine reads your document alongside the PM101 library and your business context, and drafts the whole governance set in one run.
- 3
Review and go
A structured project, not a wall of text: every section editable, every claim grounded in what you gave it, gaps flagged instead of invented.
What comes out
A new client engagement goes from signed contract to governed project in the time it takes to make a coffee. The output isn't a static export either: it lands as a live project in the Project Plan Manager, ready to track, with every artefact connected to the same record.
The hours you used to spend re-keying the same facts into five documents are the hours this page gives back. That's the Context Engine doing what it's for.
Examples of how PM101 can help
Draft a document
You
Draft a project charter for our office move. 22 staff, new Leeds site, done by end of November.
PM101
Here's a first draft based on your project. I've set the objective, scope, milestones and top risks. The broadband lead time is your critical path, so I've flagged it.
Office-Move-Charter.docx
Get an answer from your portfolio
You
Which projects have the most open risks right now?
PM101
Across your 7 projects: CRM rollout has 6 open risks (2 high), Office move has 4, Website relaunch has 2. Both high risks on the CRM rollout concern data migration. Worth a focused session this week.
Turn notes into a status report
You
Turn this into a client-ready status update: fit-out on track, IT quotes late, need decision on desk layout by Friday.
PM101
Done. Overall status Amber. Progress: fit-out proceeding to plan. Watch item: IT quotes overdue, chasing supplier. Decision needed: desk layout by Friday, otherwise move week is at risk. Want it in your company's status format?
Know what to do next
You
My sponsor keeps skipping our check-ins. What do I do?
PM101
Common, and fixable. Three moves: shrink the ask to 15 minutes with a fixed agenda, send a one-page pre-read so the meeting is decisions-only, and if it happens twice more, escalate gently: "I need 15 minutes or these two decisions slip." Want a template for the pre-read?
Every example above runs on data you control. The assistant only sees the projects and documents you've put into PM101, and it tells you when it doesn't know instead of guessing.
Pro and above
Business Context: feed the engine
The Context Engine runs on three layers. Two of them fill themselves as you work: your project data and the PM101 library. Business Context is the third, and it's where you turn a smart assistant into your assistant.
Teach it once
Fill in a short business profile: company, industry, methodology, governance, tone of voice. Then upload the documents that define how you work, in four categories: your own document formats, your policies, your security standards, and your PM practice.
It applies everywhere
Drafted charters follow your stage gates. Status reports use your format; when your template fits, PM101 prefers it over its own. Portfolio answers respect your policies. Where your standards conflict with textbook practice, yours win.
Your charter, in your format, following your governance, drafted in the time it takes to make a coffee.
For teams
On Team plans, Business Context is shared across the workspace: one set of company standards, applied to everyone's projects. Consistency without a compliance police.
Evidence, not invention
Business Context shapes how things are written. It never lets the AI fabricate a policy, approver or control that isn't in your documents. If it can't ground a claim, it says so.
All plans · unlimited on Pro
The Telegram bot: your projects, from your pocket
Most project management happens away from a desk: on site, in the corridor after the meeting, in the car park where the board just told you something that changes everything. The PM101 Telegram bot puts the full assistant in that moment.
Interrogate your projects
Ask anything you'd ask at your desk: current status, open risks, what's slipping, what's on this week. Answers come from your live project data, the same source of truth as the dashboards, not from memory or guesswork.
It's two-way: assess and update
This is the part that changes behaviour. Tell the bot what just happened, and it reasons about your project. New funding approved? It reassesses the status, re-scores the affected risks, and recommends the follow-up actions: update the charter, raise the change request, revisit the business case. Then it makes the updates you confirm, so the project record reflects reality minutes after reality changed.
Grounded, like everything else
The bot runs on the same Context Engine as the rest of PM101. Recommendations follow recognised PM practice, expressed in plain English and sized for your business. Link your account once from your PM101 profile. Free linked accounts get a daily allowance of AI questions; Pro and above are unlimited.
PM101 bot · online
You
The CRM project got another £200k from the board. Assess this and give me a new status.
PM101
The CRM implementation is currently RED: a funding blocker plus serious resource concerns. The £200k injection lifts the budget from £15,000 to £215,000 and clears the "too expensive to run" risk.
- New status: AMBER until resource availability is resolved.
- Update the Project Charter for the revised budget and scope.
- Re-score the running-cost risk (impact 5) in the Risk Register.
- Formalise the funding via a Change Request; refresh the Business Case ROI.
You
Do it. Log the funding, set the status to Amber, and raise the change request.
PM101
Done. Budget updated to £215,000, status set to AMBER, and change request CR-014 drafted for your approval. The resource risk stays open; I've set a review date for Friday.
The Platform
No two accidental project managers have the same week. Some need a template by Thursday; some need to convince a board; some need to run twelve client projects without dropping one.
PM101 is built as a set of connected tools. Use one, use them all: they get better together, because they share the same Context Engine.
A tool for every part of the job
Twelve connected tools, one account, one source of truth. Start with the one that solves this week's problem.
Learn
Free to browseBite-size project management lessons in plain English: scoping, stakeholders, risk, budgets, reporting. Written by a practitioner with 20 years in programme management, for people doing the job rather than studying for an exam.
Every lesson links to the template or tool that puts it into practice.
Templates Library
Free to browseReady-to-use project documents with guidance built in: charters, business cases, plans, RAID logs, status reports, comms plans. You know what good looks like before you type a word.
Every template can be AI-filled from your project's information, and your company's own formats take precedence once uploaded.
Prompt Library
Free to browseExpert-written AI prompts pre-loaded with PM best practice: kick-off packs, risk workshops, stakeholder maps, lessons learned. Pick one, add your specifics, get a useful result without the tinkering generic AI demands.
The library grows constantly, including reviewed community submissions.
PM Assistant
All plansAsk questions, get grounded answers drawn from the full Context Engine, with honesty about what it doesn't know.
Free accounts include a monthly allowance; Pro and above are unlimited. Also on Telegram, so help is wherever you are.
Project Plan Manager
ProA proper home for each project: guided setup wizard, plan and milestones, RAID log, budget signals, dashboards and clean exports. Structure without a configuration project.
Any section can be drafted with AI; Team plans add shared projects and a portfolio view.
Scenarios
ProTest "what if" against your plan without touching the live project: slipped dates, lost people, cut budgets. Stack lenses, compare outcomes, and promote a scenario when it's the better answer.
Share read-only scenario links so decisions get made on what everyone can see.
Agents Marketplace
All plansCommunity-built AI tools for specific PM jobs: meeting summarisers, risk reviewers, lessons-learned writers, estimation helpers. Browse, run and rate them like an app store for project work.
Every agent runs inside PM101, under the same controls as everything else.
Agent Builder
All plansBuild your own agent without writing code: describe the job, set the guardrails, test it, keep it private or publish it to the marketplace.
Teams use it to codify their repeatable workflows and share them across the workspace.
Video Generator
All plansTurn content into short, shareable videos: project updates, training snippets, announcements. For when a two-minute watch lands better than a two-page read.
Free accounts get one generation a month; Pro and above are unlimited.
Business Context
ProThe third layer of the Context Engine: your methodology, governance, policies, security requirements and document formats, taught once and applied to everything PM101 drafts.
Shared across the whole workspace on Team plans.
Community
All plansA forum of people doing the same job you are: accidental PMs, founders, ops managers, swapping templates, prompts and hard-won lessons.
Submissions are reviewed before they join the library, so quality holds.
Telegram Bot
All plansThe full assistant in your pocket, and genuinely two-way: interrogate your projects, get status assessments, and make confirmed updates straight from chat.
The project record reflects reality minutes after reality changes.
Start with the tool that solves this week's problem. The rest will be there when next week's problem shows up.
One account, no integration project
Because everything lives on one platform, there's nothing to wire together: the template knows your project, the assistant knows your templates, and the bot knows all of it. The compound benefit of a suite, for the effort of signing up once.
Always getting better
New lessons, templates, prompts and agents land regularly and are included in every plan. You choose what to switch on. No versions to buy, no surprises at renewal.
Ready to run your projects properly?
PM101 helps small teams move from winging it to running it, and the people already making that shift are seeing the difference.
Start free: browse the libraries, try the assistant, run your first prompt. Upgrade to Pro for £9 a month when you're ready to manage real projects on the platform, and give the Context Engine something to work with.
© PM101 · pm101.co.uk · For every PM. Accidental or not.