How Artificial Intelligence Stands Out in Project Management.
How Artificial Intelligence Stands Out in Project Management.
discover | Thursday - 26 / 09 / 2024 - 6:21 pm
Through a simple application on his smartphone, the CEO of a company was able to inspect the seven strategic initiatives of the organization. He knew the status of each project, tracked and evaluated its performance, as well as the expected benefits achieved by each project. In a different window, he accessed project documents and key performance indicators “KPIs” within moments. The most remarkable feature was seeing the morale level of each team member and general acceptance from stakeholders.
Before making any decisions, the CEO communicates with the project manager, who now spends most of his time training and supporting the team, maintaining regular conversations with stakeholders, and fostering a high-performance culture. A few weeks ago, the project was slightly behind schedule, and the application recommended that the team apply Agile techniques to accelerate the project’s progress… During meetings, they simulate possible solutions and agree on a path forward. The project is evaluated and the plan is updated automatically, notifications are sent to affected team members and company stakeholders about changes and expected outcomes…
Thanks to new technologies and AI-driven work methods, what could have been a strategic project spiraling out of control – or even failing! – is now on track for success once again and achieving expected results.
Currently, project management doesn’t always go smoothly (and all of this is just an imaginative vision of a future that may be closer than we think). The more companies invest in AI-supported project management technology, the faster we can reach this future.
Project Management Today and the Path to the Future:
Every year, nearly $48 trillion is invested in projects. However, according to The Standish Group, only 35% of projects are successful! After years of developing solutions for commercial and industrial project management, we’ve discovered the reason:
The extremely low success rates of projects are due to the low maturity level of the technologies available to manage them. Most organizations still use Excel and other applications that haven’t evolved much over the past few decades. While these applications may have been sufficient to measure project success based on final results and met deadlines, they fall short in today’s ever-changing business environment.
If adopting artificial intelligence in project management could improve project success rates by just 25%, it would mean adding trillions of riyals in value and benefits to organizations, communities, and individuals.
Six Aspects of Project Management That Will Undoubtedly Change!
At Logix, we see these upcoming technological developments as an unprecedented opportunity, provided that organizations seize this pivotal moment in the history of digital transformation and pay attention to the changes we will mention below. These changes will have a significant impact on almost all aspects of project management, starting from planning, going through performance evaluation, and ending with people.
- The Pursuit of Better Prioritization: Which projects will bring the greatest value to the organization? When data is clean, machine learning can discover patterns that cannot be discerned by other means, making machine learning significantly more accurate than humans in making predictions. Machine learning-driven prioritization will soon lead to:
– Faster identification of ready-to-launch projects with the right assets.
– Selecting projects with higher chances of success and returns.
– A better balance in the project portfolio and a comprehensive overview of the organization’s risks.
– Removing human biases from the decision-making process.
- Supporting Project Management Offices:
New intelligent tools – integrated into a system such as Logix AI as an example – are radically transforming the performance and way in which project management offices operate by:
– Enhanced project progress monitoring.
– Ability to predict potential problems and automatically address some minor issues.
– Automated setup and distribution of project reports and feedback collection.
– Developing a process to select the best project management methodology (for each project).
– Monitoring compliance with policies and regulations.
– Automating support functions (such as status updates and risk assessments) through virtual assistants.
- Improving and Accelerating Project Identification, Planning, and Reporting:
Risk management is one of the most rapidly developing areas in automated project management. Logix AI uses big data and machine learning to help project managers anticipate risks that might otherwise go unnoticed. Our system can simply suggest actions to mitigate damage, and we aim to develop it to automatically modify plans to avoid certain types of risks.
Similar methods will soon facilitate project identification, planning, and reporting. These tasks are currently time-consuming, repetitive, and often performed manually.
Machine learning and natural language processing techniques within Logix AI will:
– Improve project scope by automating the process of collecting and analyzing user behavior. These techniques will also reveal potential problems such as ambiguities, redundancies, contradictions, and complexities.
– Facilitate scheduling, detailed planning, and resource requirements.
– Real-time data reports will replace current reports (which often take weeks to complete).
– Logix AI tools will delve deeper than is currently possible, presenting project status, gains achieved, and potential cost overruns (all in a clear and objective manner).
- Virtual Project Assistants:
Overnight, ChatGPT changed the world’s understanding of how AI can analyze massive datasets and generate new and immediate insights in plain text. In project management, tools like this will empower “bots” or “virtual assistants”.
The digital assistant learns from past inputs, project planning data, and the overall context to customize interactions and intelligently capture important project information. A user can ask the digital assistant within the Logics AI system for a task like “Schedule task: Have Jassim finish the financial audit next week full-time for the task.”
The assistant might reply, “Based on previous similar tasks assigned to Jassim, it appears he will need two weeks to complete the task, not one as you requested. Should I adjust that?”
- Advanced Testing Systems and Software:
Testing is another fundamental task in most projects, and project managers need to test early and often. Today, it is rare to find a large project without systems and multiple types of software that must be tested before the project starts.
Soon, advanced testing systems that were previously only applicable to specific large-scale projects will become widely available.
Advanced and automated system testing solutions will soon allow for early defect detection and self-correction processes. This will significantly reduce the time spent on tedious testing activities, decrease the number of rework processes, and ultimately deliver easy-to-use and error-free solutions.
- A New Role for the Project Manager:
Many project managers may feel apprehensive about the automation of much of their current work, but the creative ones will learn how to use these tools to their advantage. Project managers will not disappear, but they will need to embrace these changes and leverage new technologies. We currently think of project teams as groups of people, but we may soon think of them as a mix of humans and robots.
With the shift away from administrative work, the project manager of the future will need to develop strong skills, leadership abilities, strategic thinking, and business acumen. They should focus on delivering the expected benefits and aligning them with strategic objectives. The project manager will also need a good understanding of these technologies.
How can you be sure you’re ready to manage projects using artificial intelligence?
Any process to adopt artificial intelligence begins with data, but you shouldn’t neglect to train your employees as well.
Training AI algorithms for project management will require large amounts of project-related data. Your organization may hold large amounts of historical data, but it is likely to be stored in thousands of documents in a variety of file formats spread across different systems. The information may be outdated, may use different classifications, or may contain outliers and gaps. Nearly 80% of the time spent preparing a machine learning algorithm for use is spent collecting and cleaning data, which takes raw, unstructured data and transforms it into organized data that can train a machine learning model.
Without properly available and managed data, your AI transformation will never happen (but no AI transformation will thrive if you don’t also prepare yourself and your team for change). This new generation of tools will not only change the technology used in project management but will also change the way we work on the project entirely. Project managers must:
– Be ready to train their teams to adapt to this shift.
– Increase their focus on human interactions by identifying early on the technological skill gaps of their employees and working to address them.
– In addition to focusing on project outputs, they must focus on building high-performing teams where members receive what they need to allow them to perform at their best.
If you are seriously considering applying artificial intelligence to your projects and project management practices, the following questions will help you evaluate your decision:
– Are you ready to spend some time taking a thorough inventory of all your projects, including the latest status update?
– Can you invest several resources for several months to collect, clean, and organize your project data?
– Have you decided to abandon your old project management habits, such as monthly progress reports?
– Are you ready to invest in training your project management community on this new technology?
– Are they willing to step out of their traditional comfort zones and radically change the way they manage projects?
– Is your organization ready to accept and adopt new technology and relinquish control in decisions with increased risk?
– Are you willing to allow this technology to make mistakes as it learns to deliver better performance for your organization?
– Are the decision-makers in your organization willing to wait several months, or even a year, to start seeing the benefits of automation?
If the answer to all these questions is yes, then you are ready to embark on this pioneering transformation. If you have one or more answers of “no”, then you need to work on turning them into “yes” before moving forward.
Summary:
As we have seen, the application of artificial intelligence in project management will bring significant benefits, not only in automating administrative and repetitive tasks, but more importantly, integrating AI and other innovative technologies into Logix AI system will help your organization, its leaders, and project managers choose, define, and execute projects more successfully.
The CEO in our story was in your same position now. We encourage you to take the first steps towards this positive vision for the future of project management now.
