Project managers have always valued tools that save them time and help them become better professionals. From the well-known document templates for starting a project, status reports, risk register, change log, etc., to more sophisticated tools to manage resource capacity, simulate “what if” scenarios, calculate the probability of finishing on time and under budget, etc. Good project professionals have always been supposed to have these hard-skills. For example, in many job interviews, candidates were asked if they are proficient in Microsoft Project, and those who used Excel to schedule and control dates were not well regarded.
Project work has changed. Requirements are usually not clear enough, and project scope has to be progressively elaborated. Controlling changes, time and cost is less important than value delivery and meeting business goals. Managers need to make informed real-time decisions, anticipating issues while there are still options to correct project performance, and they don’t have time to read comprehensive documentation from dozens or hundreds of projects. Just one person to manage the whole project is not effective: collaboration is needed because the best solutions may come from one of many stakeholders.
Nowadays, project managers increase their productivity by using tools to be more effective in three areas: personal, team, and organization. As we move up from person to organization, hard skills become less important, and communication, interpersonal, soft skills, or power skills, become more important. In this hyperconnected digital society, hard and soft skills are enhanced by technology. Applying technology to projects is becoming increasingly important. Project managers will not be replaced by artificial intelligence, but project managers who master tools may replace those who do not.
You may not be replaced by AI as a project professional. Other professionals who are more proficient in technology may take over.
Last March, Microsoft unveiled 365 Copilot, the new version of Microsoft Office powered by GPT-4, with the promise that it will revolutionize knowledge work. We will be able to ask Word to draft a document, PowerPoint to prepare a presentation, Excel to analyze some figures, Outlook to respond to emails, Teams to summarize the decisions made in the meeting, etc., considering the specific worker’s context within the organization, corporate policies, information confidentiality, etc.
Every day there are more and more projects needing quick effective decision making from a big number of decentralized active stakeholders. Stakeholders create, access, and share big amounts of data, from any device, everywhere, any time. We can see a trend in project management “socialization” producing more and more project related data in the cloud, getting to the levels required by AI.
How will project teams work in an AI world? Dreaming is free. Let’s imagine…