The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Project Management

What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Project Management? 

To begin with, let's ask what is the Artificial Intelligence (AI)? 

"AI is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. Intelligent beings are those that can adapt to changing circumstances.", as stated by " Encyclopedia Britannica”. 

AI provides unparalleled power to perform complex computations and make decisions far beyond the computation and processing capabilities of human beings. 

The question is, how AI is impacting project management (PM)? 

Managing a project is not only making a great plan and sticking to it, but also be good at forecasting the inter-dependencies within your project and external changes and anticipating the unpredictable outcome. 

Through my experience, risk management often does not receive the attention it deserves, despite the wide-reaching impact it has on projects’ success. It is generally driven by subjective assumptions and chance. Therefore, AI can be a good asset to overcome these challenges by simulating the project environment to facilitate objective risk assessments and prioritization. AI technology can be useful to identify trigger events, severity and impact score to the identified risks and the elaboration of an optimized risk response plan by the end. Moreover, with a robot-assisted risk management, project manager can have more capacities to monitor risk status and perform a real time analysis of project data. By using AI, the knowledge area of Risk management will be redefined. 

In addition to the fact that AI is being helpful by removing risk in the execution and monitor the uncertainty, I think AI will be a good fit to the dilemma of emergence and people management. The complexity in PM and especially in IT projects comes from the large number of stakeholders with their varying needs and dynamic human thinking and behaviors which lead to frequent change requests and by the way the complexity of having a fixed plan. Hence, AI thanks to its predictive methods, will resolve this conundrum, it can support the project Manager to match the right resource with the right role and acquire the best suited project team. For example, machine learning enables predictive analytics and can support project Manager in dealing with resources attitudes and steering the project given to certain parameters related to resource maturity, resources skills and motivation... 

It allows to the project manager to identify the best team for the project, and by the way the optimized plan which serve project managers to have extra time to focus on other critical success factors of their projects such as ensuring quality of deliverables, communication to stakeholders and change management. 

Finally, engaging AI in the process of project management permits to create an ecosystem for knowledge Management. In my daily activities as PMO, I have noticed that the major problem of IT projects is employee turnover. When an employee leaves a company, she or he takes a discreet amount of nontransferable understanding of the role assigned. It is in such a situation that Artificial Intelligence comes to our rescue. AI will contribute to foster the workplace behavior and centralize worker knowledge in order to improve consistency, quality, and to prevent “reinventing the wheel”. AI could boost the performance of project manager and his team by removing the bottlenecks and keeping the workflow smooth when change arises. 

The face of project management will change sooner by all the capabilities offered by AI which will step project managers up a gear. The impact will be very significant in the variety of PM knowledge areas, from integration to stakeholders management. The key to succeed on this journey is to be excited about AI in project management, be open to it and do not fear its impact.