With the advent of modern technologies like AI & ML, their applications are largely being discussed & predicted in various domains & business functions. AI is a technology that helps in forecasting the future by recognizing the pattern of the humongous amount of available datasets. According to one of the surveys by PMI, it is estimated that 81% of organizations are impacted by AI technologies in one way or the other. Today I would like to outline how AI’s ability to interpret events, unfold future predictions & take automated decisions can largely affect the Project management field, their practices, their laid-down framework, and their tools & softwares.

These days, project managers face a lot of challenges while managing complex projects, where there are multi-disciplinary teams to handle along with a number of variables to take care of. Often we’ve experienced projects falling short of either of their boundary parameters: - Schedule, Budget & Quality, thereby missing their end goals. This is where Artificial intelligence can come to their rescue & can be very handy in managing projects across various domains. It helps make the process smoother, robust & efficient.

Intelligent assistant to the project management: AI can assist project managers in a lot of administrative tasks like ensuring the project data is updated on a real-time basis, regular follow-ups with the team, generating periodic status reports, etc. It can also do effective project scheduling by scanning through the relevant data related to the resource availability, estimated budget & timelines, the WBS and provide suggestions to PMs on areas where fast-tracking/crashing is possible. It can do the monitoring part & flag risks/issues it may foresee based on its predictive algorithms. It can also give timely reminders to project managers to perform critical tasks or attend project meetings. AI can act as an intelligent assistant that can take care of these tedious & monotonous tasks so that PMs can focus on empowering their employees, empathizing with them, work on the management strategy & bridging the gap between project outcomes and strategic objectives. It saves considerable time for the project manager & their efforts by staying assured of nothing overlooked since bots are less likely to err as much as humans do. According to one of the Gartner reports in 2021, incorporating AI tools in Project Management will help generate $2.9 trillion in business value. To further improve its overall efficiency, AI systems can be integrated with the project management tools like Jira, MS Project, Slack, etc.

Extracting Business Insights: With an ongoing business uncertainty, it is quite challenging to determine the market trend & chart out the growth trajectory an organization needs to tread along. Hence, in order to unearth the business insights & address all the possible issues surrounding the business, AI algorithms help extract the relevant data from the massive pool of data available & perform analysis on that, to derive the relevant project objectives that the team should be working on. These extracted actionable insights help organizations craft their strategy which would resonate with their project objectives.

Predicting Project Outcomes: With their Machine learning algorithms, AI systems can learn the patterns of past projects & alert project managers when they find a similar type of change or any challenge posing risks to the ongoing project. AI algorithms can predict the project outcome due to these changes/shifts, providing the visibility for project managers to take necessary proactive steps to keep the project on track & in alignment with its goals. Using the historical data & past learnings to accurately predict the future outcome of the project, AI systems let project managers only focus on taking certain key decisions affecting project deliveries. As a project manager, it is not always possible to assess the potential impact of any action taken in the project, although they have a risk register that is constantly monitored to mitigate its impact with the possible risk responses. AI systems can predict the risks & their potential impact throughout the course of the project and provide corrective action as a possible risk mitigation strategy. This is one form of risk modeling performed on the project based on changes in project resources or plans. By observing employees’ behavior, their performance & their working habits, AI systems can optimize resource assignment to the critical tasks. It can also predict if there is any impact on the project schedule & suggest alternatives like using the slacks of certain tasks.

Managing remote working projects effectively: Managing distributed teams is challenge project managers are coping up in recent times. AI can play a vital role in managing teams cutting across various geographies & time zones. Issues related to communication & having a shared understanding can be ironed out through effective online tools coupled with AI algorithms. The unexpected changes in the project progress are highly natural in a remote team setup and so AI systems should be implemented to take care of the same. It helps assess the team’s performance by benchmarking them with their KPIs, even in such remote working scenarios. With this, an overall team’s performance can be assessed to gauge if they are in alignment with the expected project’s goals.

There are controversies gathering steam on AI replacing human’s work as they would be taking up most of the work which humans are doing. However, these arguments do not hold any merit as AI would be acting as an assistant and is a work augmenting tool so that humans can apply their creativity & imagination on other tasks demanding high cognitive ability. Project Managers would be taking care of those activities that need higher emotional intelligence, delegating mundane & repetitive tasks to the bots. Utilizing AI systems only entails an advanced way of working, thereby bringing efficiency in project management & completion.

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