3 Tips for Leveraging AI to Support Project Management
Using AI in project management can enhance efficiency, decision-making, and overall project success. However, these tools are still in the ‘walk’ stage of the crawl-walk-run-fly metaphor; and should be used with caution and must be fact checked to avoid the dreaded hallucinations we’ve all heard about. In future posts, I’ll address the ethics of using AI tools and help you choose the right tool for the job; but for today, let’s look at several ways you can leverage AI to support your project:
Project Scheduling. Project schedule is the primary tool for the PM to get off to a good start with a new project. Within the schedule you can also take into account resource allocation and work load balancing. Let’s take a look at how AI can be leveraged to build out your initial project schedule.
Consider a 4 year project that involves quarterly deliverables, annual reports as well as interim deliverables, supported by 15 FTEs and 5 Part Time staff; and 3 subcontractors with different levels of experience, different PTO plans, and located at four locations across three time zones. Sure, you could start by trying to lay this all out by yourself or looking for a template that you can modify to fit your project–or better yet–why not let AI take the first swing? Inputting this info into an AI tool can easily help you build out your schedule at a high level and is much better then starting from scratch or using a template. AI can help you ‘think’ of potential areas you might have overlooked and help you identify and resolve potential conflicts.
AI can also assist in optimizing resource allocation by considering team members skills, availability, and project requirements. And, AI algorithms can help balance workloads across team members to prevent burnout and ensure efficient use of resources.
Communication Enhancement. Every PM knows that clear communications are essential to successful projects. How many of us have had projects go sideways because of miscommunication? That's why I always ensure and double check that my communication channels are clear and understood with all team members and with the client. Two ways that AI can help with building better communications is through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and chatbots.
NLP is a subset of AI that enhances communication interactions when computers are learning human languages. NLP helps computers to understand, interpret, and generate language in ways that are meaningful to the user and contextually relevant to the situation. The PM can use NLP to analyze project-related communications; identify key information; and even detect potential conflicts or issues in team communications.
Most of us are familiar with chatbots. If you’re like me, your first interaction with bots wasn't great or was laughable and frustrating. Chatbots have come a long way in the last few years, thanks to improved AI. To enhance communication, improve response time, and reduce communications errors; consider using chatbots to automate your FAQ and provide instant responses to common project-related queries and facilitate smoother communication within the team. Having a chatbot that uses a pre-approved FAQ as an authoritative source can greatly reduce transmission errors and misunderstandings among teammates and quickly answer common questions without taking time away from the PM to answer repetitive questions.
Document Management. In a complicated project, document management can be an unwieldy task that can overwhelm even the most well organized PM. However, you can use AI to help manage the labyrinthine task of document management.
TLDR seems to have overwhelmed our society as we generate more and more content and can never seem to find the time to finish reading that important document. However, we can use AI to summarize content in lengthy or complex documents, pulling out the most pertinent information. This can make it easier for you and your team to focus on key information quickly. For instance, your Contract Manager will be interested in the terms and conditions of the contract and can ask AI to summarize those aspects. While your Financial Manager will want to keep track of the budget and your Tech Team is interested in the technical requirements and deliverables they are required to provide. Training your team to use AI to pull out these important aspects is a great way to improve productivity and remove distractions.
In addition, AI algorithms can categorize, organize, and store project documents, making it easier to locate and retrieve relevant information.Try asking an AI tool to build your file structure and then sort relevant documents into the various file folders. You can even use AI to sort your email making sure you focus on the most important emails at the start and end of every day. And when you're done with an email, AI can archive it for you into the appropriate folder.
When implementing AI in project management, it's crucial to consider the specific needs of your project and organization, and your budget. Will the cost of implementing AI outweigh the benefits? Additionally, ensure that the AI solutions are allowed by your client and be transparent about your use of AI. Also, make sure your AI solutions align with your project management methodology and are easily integrated into existing workflows.
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Next blog post, coming soon.
