Artificial Intelligence (AI) Influence in Project Management

COMMENTARY

By Chanchal Gupta

Pittsburgh, PA, USA

ABSTRACT

Today, Digital transformation is disruptive in every aspect of life. It’s not a wonder to see all the human intensive works are being replaced by robots. Companies are looking for various ways to enhance the performance, accountability, reliability and low-cost options. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way, and in most cases its helpful to solve the current needs of human being. Many industries have focused to build the AI enabled Project Management tools to help project managers to manage their project. Technical enthusiastic are looking ways to automate tedious task of management which is essential for project success. So far, it looks promising and looks like we are going forward to see other major initiatives in this area.

Keywords: Project Management, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Transformation, Agile

INTRODUCTION

Before AI enabled tools, it was nightmare for project managers to document everything and keep project on track. Co-ordination and doing alignment among the stockholders were difficult. Traditional project management require co-ordination, follow up and many meetings to update the stockholders on project status. One project required many resources to manage project. There used to be individual project manager to manage one module of the project. Lots of intervention/involvement needed from the PMO team to keep project on track.

The role of Artificial Intelligence has evolved in the recent past. Artificial Intelligence enabled tools coming handy for project managers to manage people and projects, it helping to keep the projects on time, on budget, and people on task. These tools are single source of truth and allowing you to manage, Resources, Timeline, Dependencies, Cost and send remainders to responsible parties as required to complete the task. It’s helping in various ways to mitigate the project risks. AI has enabled the project resources to update their task status, change the status, post questions as required, which has minimized the co-ordination task significantly. Various studies as shown that Project managers spends more than half of their time on administrative tasks such as dealing with check-ins and managing updates.

Does it mean AI will replace Project managers (PM)? I don’t think so. There are various ways AI can help reduce the project managers task for record keeping and sending reminders, updating status, and notifying stack holders. There are other tasks, like, influencing, negotiating and encouraging to work to achieve the common goal cannot be ignored. Work experience, human influence and encouragement plays a vital role in project success.

Advantages of using AI tools for Project Management

Integration: AI automation tools have enabled opportunity to integrate multiple platform tools for reporting and status tracking of the whole project. By using these tools, we can look the resource allocations, current status of task, and send notification if any risk occurs. It also helps us to send reminders to respective team members to mitigate risk. We can even integrate the project management tools to the source controls, so it can be tracked in real time.

Documentation: Driving projects requires lots of documentation. AI tools helps us to draft document templates, collect data from various systems and helps us to create documentations for successful projects. It also keeps some repetitive documentation handy to use as needed.

Reporting: Project management tools made reporting easy, we can check current status of the work on fly. As soon as we complete our task, it shows up in the report and we don’t have to spend additional time to make reports. We can also customize reports based on individual needs.

Forecasting: We can use AI tools for the resource forecasting, budget, risk and allocation. Again, it gives us opportunity to use resources at optimum capacity.  Ultimately it adds up to the company growth and profit sharing.

Predictive Analysis: AI tools enables us to create the future models, based on our learnings. Data is King to leverage AI. Data helps us to create right models. More the merrier. So, when we are working in the current projects, these tools are collecting all these data to make tool smarter and will help us in the long run to make decisions. It will enable us with data backup to propose the project plans based on our past projects.

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How to cite this article: Gupta, C. (2020). Artificial Intelligence (AI) Influence in Project Management; PM World Journal, Vol. IX, Issue II, February. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/pmwj90-Feb2020-Gupta-artificial-intelligence-influence-in-project-management.pdf

About the Author

Chanchal Gupta, MBA

Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Chanchal Gupta is a Senior Digital Technical Project Manager who has served as as project management expert and leader in the software development since 2007. He now works as a Manager, Digital deployment and Vendor Management for a Pharmaceutical company and responsible for managing digital projects and operations. Chanchal is highly knowledgeable in software development, requirements analysis, digital transformation projects, cloud computing, architecture, database design, and excel and at creating and implementing technical and operational plans and strategies.

Chanchal Gupta can be contacted at chanchalpgupta@gmail.com