For the people who need the whole picture, on demand. These are the prompts where stepping up to a daily-driver model (Sonnet or Terra) earns its keep. See the model article for how to choose.
In this article:
- The portfolio pulse
- The deep dive
- The critical path
- The coaching plan
- The branded status dashboard
The portfolio pulse
The moment. Leadership wants the state of onboarding, and the honest answer usually takes half a day to assemble.
Try this
"Give me a portfolio snapshot of our active projects: which are healthy, which are slipping, and where the overdue work is concentrated."
What happens. One call returns per-project health aggregates across the active portfolio (completed, overdue, and blocked work, milestones, and percent complete), and your assistant turns them into the narrative you would have built by hand.
What you need. Any TaskRay license, which is what lets your assistant read your TaskRay data. The health aggregates come from your live projects, so the more active projects you have in flight, the more complete the snapshot.
The deep dive
The moment. One project on that snapshot looked wrong, and now you want to know why.
Try this
"Pull the full project tree for Northwind and walk me through the path to the go-live milestone. Where is the schedule risk?"
What happens. Your assistant reads the entire project tree in one call, including subprojects, dependencies, and milestones, and reasons about where the plan is tight.
What you need. Any TaskRay license. This prompt surfaces and reasons over whatever project hierarchy and subprojects you have built in TaskRay. It narrates what is there, not what it infers on its own.
The critical path
The moment. Someone asks what actually drives the go-live date, and the Gantt chart answers with colors instead of math.
Try this
"Pull the Meridian Health project's tasks, dependencies, and dates. Calculate the critical path: which tasks have zero slack, which have room, and what truly drives the go-live date. Show me the math."
What happens. Your assistant walks the dependency chain, runs a forward and backward pass on your real dates, and returns the critical path with slack per task, computed from your live data.
What you need. Any TaskRay license. You must have view access to the project and its task dependencies.
Pro tip. Slack and lag are different numbers. Lag is set on a single dependency link. Slack is calculated from the whole chain.
The coaching plan
The moment. Several of your PMs have red projects, and the one-on-ones deserve better prep than a status export.
Try this
"Review all Red projects and group them by project manager. Identify why each is behind: delays, overdue work, resource issues, or customer dependencies. For each manager, build a coaching guide with key issues, questions to ask, and immediate actions. Flag any conclusion that lacks sufficient data."
What happens. Your assistant turns project data into a per-manager coaching guide grounded in what the records actually show, and tells you where the data is too thin to conclude anything.
What you need. Any TaskRay license. You must have view access to all the projects in scope.
Pro tip. "Flag any conclusion that lacks sufficient data" is a habit worth stealing for every analysis prompt in this guide.
The branded status dashboard
The moment. The exec update deserves better than a wall of text.
Try this
"Build me a TaskRay-branded status dashboard for the Meridian Health onboarding that I can share with the exec team."
What happens. In AI surfaces that can generate visual artifacts, such as Claude, your assistant pulls live project data and TaskRay's brand styling and produces a styled dashboard instead of a plain text summary.
What you need. Any TaskRay license with view access to the project. Visual output depends on your AI surface. Tools with artifact or canvas features produce the richest output.
Where to go next
- Choosing Your AI Model and Effort Level, since these prompts benefit from a daily-driver model.
- Scheduling Recurring TaskRay MCP Automations, to run the portfolio pulse on a schedule.