Automation and Project Management

A casual conversation with an old colleague sparked chain of thoughts.

They were of the opinion that IT project/Program management is repetitive job of assigning, monitoring and controlling, can and will be automated and hence has no future.

This black and white thinking got me mulling about the profession, here are my thoughts

There are 3 aspects of project management that will be impacted by AI and automation 

• Data collection and reporting:  This aspect has come of an age with Automation, 100% of quantitative data gathering  can and will be automated, data sources such as Project management tools, bug repositories, headcount, budget information are/will be widely available via dashboards, and not Project Manager's prized possession any more. This does free up lot of bandwidth and allow project manager to invest time in "value add" or perish
• Risk Management: data gathered thru automation will help identify trends and risks much earlier in execution. This has profound impact on risk management, not every risk or deviation has equal impact on project,  Qualitative risk analysis will come to fore and project manager judgement call will help reduce noise in system. Project managers will need to be more competent in landscape to be able to make such calls.
• Stakeholder Management : Ability to have "live" data driven discussions is the I am watching out for personally, This hopefully will address elephant in room and will allow more room for objective discussions, mitigation strategies and effectiveness of mitigation "as it happens".

 With above, Project Managers have never before opportunity to use automation and AI as tools to improve the project success rates.