AI Project Management: Automate Tasks with Agent Skills

Step-by-Step Setup

The following instructions use Linear MCP and Slack MCP as the primary example because they cover the most common engineering team workflows. The same pattern applies to all five skills.

Step 1: Get Your API Keys

For Linear, go to Settings → API → Personal API keys and create a new key with full workspace access. For Slack, create a new Slack App in the Slack API portal, add the required bot scopes (channels:read, chat:write, users:read), and install it to your workspace to get the bot token.

Step 2: Add the MCP Servers to Your Config

Open ~/.claude/settings.json and add the project management servers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "linear": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@linear/mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "LINEAR_API_KEY": "lin_api_your_key_here"
      }
    },
    "slack": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-slack"],
      "env": {
        "SLACK_BOT_TOKEN": "xoxb-your-bot-token",
        "SLACK_TEAM_ID": "T0123456789"
      }
    },
    "github": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "ghp_your_token"
      }
    }
  }
}

Step 3: Restart and Verify Each Connection

Restart your AI assistant and test each integration:

• "List my assigned Linear issues for this sprint" — verifies Linear MCP
• "Post a test message to #dev-standup" — verifies Slack MCP
• "Show me open issues in the main repository" — verifies GitHub MCP

Step 4: Add Notion for Documentation

Notion MCP requires creating a Notion integration and sharing your target pages with it:

"notion": {
  "command": "npx",
  "args": ["-y", "@notionhq/mcp-server"],
  "env": {
    "NOTION_API_KEY": "secret_your_integration_token"
  }
}

Complete Project Management Workflow

A full AI project management cycle moves through five stages. Here is how each stage maps to the MCP skills above.

1. Plan: Sprint Setup and Backlog Triage

At the start of each sprint, the agent queries Linear or Jira for all unassigned issues in the backlog, scores them by priority and estimated effort, suggests which issues to include in the sprint based on team capacity, and creates the sprint cycle. New issues submitted during the sprint are triaged automatically: the agent reads the description, assigns a priority label, and routes it to the relevant team member.

2. Assign: Intelligent Work Distribution

The agent checks each team member's current workload in Linear or Jira, identifies who has capacity, and assigns new issues accordingly. For specialized tasks, the agent reads the issue description and matches it against team members' expertise based on their recent issue history. Assignment notifications are posted to Slack automatically.

3. Track: Continuous Status Monitoring

Throughout the sprint, the agent monitors issue transitions — from Todo to In Progress to In Review to Done — and flags any issues that have been sitting in the same state for more than two days. Blockers are escalated to the team lead via Slack with a summary of the issue and what is needed to unblock it.

4. Standup: Automated Daily Updates

Each morning, the agent pulls status changes from the previous 24 hours for each team member from Linear or GitHub Issues, generates a concise standup summary, and posts it to the #standup Slack channel. The format mirrors your team's existing standup template: done yesterday, doing today, blockers.

5. Retrospective: Sprint Review and Lessons Learned

At sprint end, the agent compiles velocity metrics (issues completed vs. planned, story points delivered), identifies issues that were carried over and why, surfaces recurring blocker patterns from issue comments, and writes the retrospective document directly to a Notion page. The generated retrospective is shared in Slack for team review before the next planning session.

Comparison Table

Use this table to match each project management skill to your team structure and toolchain.

Frequently Asked Questions