The power of artificial intelligence in project management
Artificial intelligence is already used in plenty of different industries such as manufacturing, technology, healthcare to increase efficiency, productivity and performance. In this article we will explain how artificial intelligence will help project managers to deliver their projects on time and on budget, and take wise decisions during conception, planning, execution of the project and help monitor the right data at the right moment.
Project managers let's team up with AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Having that said, isn't it easy to bring a project back on track as your management requires it to be? Just limit scope, improve the schedule and decrease the cost and you are fine. Ok, it is not that easy.
Of course in real life these constraints are linked and it is hard to improve one constraint without impacting the others. If you try to improve the schedule to respect the deadline for example, you need more resources which cost more money. There is no perfect solution and there is no miracle which could take away that pain. But at least you can get some help to take the right decision from your pal called AI (artificial intelligence).
Ok, I now you still ask yourself why? 3 constraints should be easy to handle. Yes, but there are also many parameters which impact the possibility to respect the constraints. What are these parameters?
Well, in projects you have resources which can perform not always perfect, be motivated or not or even fail, you can have unexpected incidences which will ruin your schedule, you can have deliverables running late and many more. AI is there to help you.
AI can keep an eye on all your different parameters for you and allert you if something is not going as expected, it can optimise for you parameters to improve schedule - Imagine you finishing the project before deadline - and it can ( almost) look into the future and predict a certain future state based on given results.
You might think that's creepy that artificial intelligence, but thinking of it as shown in Hollywood films such as Terminator is definitely wrong. In fact, putting a straight line through 2 data points and predicting the place of the third is already some kind of AI known as machine learning. Wow, you wouldn't have thought that! There are many kinds of AI easy and complex ones.
The beauty of AI and how the job is done
Here is a concrete example of how AI is working. Based on given data a model is developed and the model is then used to predict a certain state. You can train the model in different ways: If input and output are given then it is called supervised learning. Instead, if only the input is known than it is called unsupervised learning.
Advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence in project management
As you can imagine the predicted state is as good or bad as the model which is as good or bad as the data you have provided. Missing or wrong data will lead to bad prediction like in the weather forecast you are watching every day and which is not always right. But coming back to advantages of AI.
Artificial intelligence in the daily life of a project manager
Having heard already of KPIs. Maybe your boss is always speaking about it in context with you and you ask yourself what the heck. Here is the 1 M. $ answer for your next annual interview: KPI means "key performance indicator". And it can represent the performance of your work over time. COOL!
Guess what - AI can help to find the right meaningful KPI for you or your boss in order to increase performance. AI can compare and combine a lot of these project parameters and keep track of a lot of data a human could not do, in order to identify risk and threats as well as weaknesses in the system.