How Project Leaders Are Using AI

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Artificial intelligence is turning a corner from futuristic to familiar. That means it’s the right moment for project leaders to explore how AI can help them lead projects more efficiently.

MILIE TAING

Everything is changing. AI is everywhere, even in [your] toothbrush. So there is no chance that project management will not have AI. It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about enhancing them. It’s about getting the right data, and it’s about explanation, education. And this journey needs to start as early as possible.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

As more organizations and teams find uses for artificial intelligence, people are getting a handle on how this initially intimidating technology will and won’t affect their work. We’re learning the things that it does well, such as spot trends and opportunities buried deep within massive data sets. We’re also learning its shortcomings—for example, unless they’re fed large quantities of well-scrubbed data, lots of AI algorithms will fail to generate useful insights.

So that’s the challenge and opportunity for project leaders: creating the conditions and finding the applications in which AI can help them deliver value. And there’s some urgency to make it happen, with about one-third of respondents in PMI’s 2021 Pulse of the Profession^® survey saying enterprise-wide adoption of AI-driven tools is a high priority.

Today we’ll examine AI’s utility within a project context, first in a conversation with Milie Taing, founder and CEO of Lili.ai in Paris. Lili.ai is an AI tool that generates insights by analyzing project documentation, including team communication. I asked Milie how project leaders can put AI to work now, and also how AI will affect project leadership in the years ahead.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What’s the current impact of AI on project management? How much value is this technology adding to projects right now?

MILIE TAING

There [are] multiple ways that we can use the AI. The first one is really to help [with] predictions. There are some use cases about enhancing the projection, the forecast for the plannings, for instance. There are also some AI chatbots so that engineers can ask questions in [a] natural way, and the AI finds the right answer. But what I [am] the most excited about is really the ability to learn from a project to another, because obviously, projects have a start and have an end, and what’s very interesting is when you can capitalize [on] the knowledge between projects. And that’s really something that only an AI can do because of the fact that humans come and go in different projects but the AI stays. So it can really learn from one project throughout the life of a project, but also from older projects at the same time.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s a good spot to dig in because in some ways, this seems like an argument against AI in projects, just because, like you said, projects have a beginning and an end, and algorithms get smarter as they get older or more experienced. And so the end date of a project can seem like, ‘I want an AI application that I can use in perpetuity,’ which you’re hinting at that with the ability to extend the value beyond projects. Teams aren’t always built to do that, to sort of hand knowledge forward to the next project team and so forth. So how does that work?

MILIE TAING

Absolutely. So if an AI is only built for one project, that will make it difficult to make it useful. But often, for instance, what we do is that we get a big database of projects, and then we can pre-train the algorithm. So day one, the algorithm is already very efficient. And the more we use it, the more it becomes more efficient. And that’s the beauty of machine learning, is that it can really start to deliver value, and it can increase over time.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Speaking of adding value over time, how do you see project leaders and their use of AI changing over the next few years?

MILIE TAING

When we started six or seven years ago, AI was a funny joke in the sense that nobody in [the] project management space was thinking about it. Three years ago, we could see that there was a start of a demand for artificial intelligence. And where we are now for the last one year and something, people are actually really curious, and they have a budget to try AI solution[s].

So what I believe that is upcoming is the industrialization, so everybody having the AI. And then right after, I think that we’ll be working in terms of [an] ecosystem. We’ll be able to go beyond one company having AI and really rethinking the way that the ecosystem of projects is working right now. And that’s the most exciting part.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s talk now about what this does for project leaders. So obviously, right now there are some applications where this is happening full speed ahead and others where it’s not. But assuming that, over time, nearly every team begins to find some application of AI, how does that change the job of project leader? And what training or skill does a next generation-equipped project leader need to have in order to lead effectively in a team where AI is playing an important role?

MILIE TAING

First, let’s go back to how a project is working right now. You have some people in the project management team that are coordinating [with] some other people: engineers, IT people or whatsoever. Those people are communicating all day long. So there’s so much information everywhere that there’s no way that humans are able to cope with this amount of real-time information. So that’s the kind of moment where you really need to figure out a new way to do things. And currently, everybody’s relying on some tools where people exchange information, and the limit of that is that it’s the humans that are pushing data into the system, but the system is not pushing things back to the humans.

So the role of the AI is really, from my perspective, to capitalize, to help detect risk and to help work in more real time, so not having this delay in detecting that there’s a problem and finding new, innovative ways to solve it. So that’s really how I believe that the AI is helping to create an enhanced value chain where everybody’s working together, and where the information is really helping people to discover the problem early and to solve it early on.

So that was the answer to the first part. And in terms of the second part, what we see right now is that use cases are being discovered. For instance, us at Lili, part of the team is project people. Part of the team are IT people. And that’s how we can work together to make the technology happen. And more and more, I believe that this is something that we’ll see everywhere—where project team members that have this ability to understand the data, to understand the data technology and to be able to give the right guidelines to the IT people, then those are the ones that will be very, very valuable. Because the AI gives a result, but the IT team is not necessarily able to know if this is the right or the wrong answer. To know if it’s the right or the wrong answer, they rely on the business matter experts. The project team, if they understand what is AI, if they understand the limits of AI and if they are able to understand the minimum in terms of technology, they can communicate well with the tech people, then we arrive really in a win-win situation.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

How will AI change the way that project management functions or the value that projects are expected to generate as it matures?

MILIE TAING

Well, I believe that it’s really about covering the blind angles that we currently have and we all know that we’re having. So things like we all know that reporting is very different than reality. We all know that it’s impossible to find any information many months or many years after. We also know that people are changing jobs more than before, so it’s difficult to rely only on human memory. We need to find a way to make sense of all the information that is floating around in the project management space. We also know that often, the project team is extremely busy. They need to be able to work on the most important thing at the right moment. It’s very important that you have some sort of external assistance to help you know where it might explode. So, the AI can be very helpful.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What would you say to project leaders who are struggling to regard AI as an opportunity rather than a threat?

MILIE TAING

The question is not necessarily about replacing something that [a] human does very well with something that a machine can do. It’s more about the opportunity to cover those blind spots that we cannot do and that are actually preventing us from delivering the kind and the size of project that we want.

Projects are beautiful, transformative things that are helping us to grow as a society, and they are very important, so we want to create more confidence for all stakeholders so that everyone feels confident in launching a project. And the more we are able to run those projects smoothly, the more everybody will be confident in launching new projects. And that’s, I think, something that AI will really be able to help [with].

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT

So that’s the potential of AI to improve projects and empower project leaders. But how is AI serving real-world projects right now? That’s what Projectified^®’s Hannah LaBelle asked Syed Ahsan Mustaqeem, a senior engineer at Pakistan Petroleum Limited in Karachi. The 2021 Future 50 leader says AI is already proving useful in several dimensions of his teams’ work.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

HANNAH LABELLE

How are you using AI or AI-driven tools in your project leadership?

SYED AHSAN MUSTAQEEM

Advanced technologies in AI such as robotic process automation and cognitive computing, pattern-making, have been transforming how we are managing projects on a day-to-day basis. We have adopted certain tools like document automation. In document automation, we use optical character recognition software to convert a physical document into a project charter or a work order or a scope of work. Then we have automated project plan generators, which create project plans from project metadata. It ensures a standardization of names and categorization and reduces the steps for project initiation. Then we have another tool, which is [a] notification engine. It develops dynamic business rules for project notifications. It schedules alerts for project health changes, late tasks, and it prompts action from [the] project manager or the team members. Then we have project meeting automation, which schedules meetings based on the availability of the project team members. It also records and transposes the minutes on meetings and captures action items.

HANNAH LABELLE

How have these tools changed your leadership style and how you’re implementing projects?

SYED AHSAN MUSTAQEEM

In creating task statuses to generating weekly status reports, calculating the budget implications of increasing the scope and time, and performing risk modeling are all functions that AI have helped me in day-to-day project management. There are some areas that I would like to talk about in detail. The first is automating the repetitive and tedious tasks that I used to spend a lot of time [on] and using that time in the problem-solving aspects of project management.

The other area that AI has helped me a lot is using historical data to perform calculations and predictions, and AI has significantly improved the accuracy of the results of those predictions.

Third key area is risk modeling analysis based on changes of the scope, availability of resources, the reduction of budget, etc. So using AI in risk modeling has impacted the project performance a lot, and it has also improved the project performance to a large extent since we can predict the risks and we can take the actions early.

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s talk more about risk analysis. How does using AI help project leaders as they look for potential threats or opportunities?

SYED AHSAN MUSTAQEEM

Based on the changes that are on the scope, resources, time or anything, AI has significantly improved the risk modeling. This risk-based modeling is especially useful as agile project management methods are continuing to dominate the way the projects are run. There are always going to be unforeseen changes, and AI will be able to tell us the expected impacts based on how similar changes impacted previous projects.

HANNAH LABELLE

So how is AI changing where you’re putting most of your efforts? Looking at technical versus interpersonal, how has it shifted your focus as a project leader?

SYED AHSAN MUSTAQEEM

I believe that the project manager still needs to develop the skills in areas where the technical skills fall short. Technology management will help the business-as-usual tasks, but it also relies on managers’ ability to inspire the team, to communicate with the stakeholders, to negotiate with the partners and to build the team’s confidence, which is very important. Companies are already placing greater value on managers with the soft skills, and believe me, with AI and automation coming into play, the softer skills have been an area which needs to be developed to a larger extent. I would rate collaboration as the number one skill that is needed. For number two, I would say that problem-solving skills [are] very important. During the course of projects, we come across different problems, and problem-solving is one of the lifesaving skills for the project manager.

One of the burning questions nowadays is that will project managers be replaced by AI in the end? Although AI is helping the project managers to make better resource allocations, to delegate the tasks, manage risk while viewing the project holistically and adjusting it accordingly, during its execution, it cannot manage the project on its own. So there will be need of project managers, and the project management professionals will always exist, and AI will not replace the project managers, but project managers will be more educated in the digital tools. They will be well-versed in AI, and they will have soft skills to manage the projects.

HANNAH LABELLE

What benefit or value do you see AI delivering to project leaders moving forward?

SYED AHSAN MUSTAQEEM

I think that many people think of AI simply in terms of robots doing the work of humans, but it’s less sinister than that. The goal of AI in project management is, I believe, not to get rid of the scheduler, planner or project manager, but instead to free up those people to do more value-driven work, and leaving the more repeatable, programmable functions to machine learning tools. It’s a way to change how time is used to allow our most valuable resources, which are people, to spend more time doing what they do best.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Artificial intelligence has huge potential to benefit project leaders—by automating menial tasks, uncovering trends, generating insights and spotting unexpected opportunities—and risks. Getting there requires a worthwhile investment in learning how AI works and how it can work for your projects.

NARRATOR

Thanks for listening to Projectified^®. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show. And leave a rating or review—we’d love your feedback. To hear more episodes of Projectified^®, visit Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, Spotify or SoundCloud. Or head to PMI.org/podcast.