Between the arguments of Mark Zuckerberg & Elon Musk, between the enthusiastic & doom-sayers, one thing is sure; AI is here to stay & will impact each of our lives-personal & professional. The question is; will we be able to constructively use AI to our more extensive & sustained benefits, or will it grow into an uncontrolled phenomenon dictating our lives? That’s something to watch for in the future. However, there is no doubt that it will be a part of our lives moving forward. There has been a lot of debate and discussions on how AI will impact the way we work in general, including how we manage the project. Will it replace the project managers in the future? Will it make the role redundant? What skills will today’s project managers need to survive the rise of AI? This article discusses the AI’s impact on project management on a time scale to help understand future possibilities.
Let’s think about the AI – Project Management convergence in three time-frames; Short term, medium-term & long-term. The reason to do that is that we still haven’t figured out AI completely. It’s advancing at a rapid pace, but there are still lots of if & buts in actual implementation & adoption. So, let’s first see the short term scenario;
Table of Contents
Short Term (Possibly from now to next couple of years)
The AI has already started making inroads into the PM space. There are a lot of tools that have integrated AI capabilities. Here is a list of a few such tools;
Redbooth – With Cisco Spark & api.ai, has a chatbot to facilitate reporting & daily scrums.
Stratejos -A virtual project assistant to automate a lot of project management tasks
Rescoper – Scheduling, the risk of slippage
ClickUp – Task assignments, schedule risks
Turtle/Gigster – Resource identification & matching
The common threading between these tools reflects the fundamental characteristics of AI. AI derives its power from data & patterns. Things that have a pattern can be automated easily. The current breed of AI tools reflects this. Schedule, resource loading, resource assignments all follow a pattern. And hence, these areas are obvious candidates for AI-based automation. And in their current form, they assume the role of a virtual assistant for project managers. They will increasingly take the burden off the project managers on these tasks. They will be able to predict the best match resources for appropriate tasks, they will be able to assist in scheduling, cost budgeting & risk management related to these three areas (resources, schedule & costs), they will proactively raise flags, alerts & reminders based on certain conditions & they will, of course, assist in communication-related tasks through chatbots & other forms of communication.
In the shorter time frame, they won’t really pose any challenges to PMs in terms of job availability & demand. They will instead prove to be capable assistants of project managers, and if the PMs can really harvest their power, even a friend.
Medium Term (two to five years)
As the AI & AI-based tools mature, they will evolve into more capable tools. The size of data gathered will be exhaustive by this time, and hence, the capabilities of AI tools will increase in terms of what they can do and how accurately they can do that. The primary areas would still remain the same as those in the short term, but the insights derived from the AI tools & the amount of work they do will increase multi-fold to the accuracy of those insights & actions. Most of the scheduling, budgeting, resource & communication management, and risk management will be done using AI, and PMs will have much more time to work on other things.
This free time will enable PMs to do much more than they used to do earlier. The project completion will be faster, and even during the project, PMs would have sufficient time at their disposal to either contribute to other areas of work or handle more projects. In that sense, the opportunities available to PMs will reduce in terms of quantity. But the project success rates may increase. At the least, the everyday challenges will no longer be the cause of risks to the project.
This is the time when good project managers will need to focus more on the business side. They will need to be the drivers of business value rather than the task executors that many of them are now. The projects’ success will finally start getting calculated on the value derived rather than the time & cost parameters as they do now. The Project Management role, in that sense, would need to start merging with Product Manager roles.
Longer Terms (Five years onwards)
Now before we move forward, let us confess! Predicting anything in the longer range is a considerable risk given the fast pace of change. It is also tricky because Project Management as a function doesn’t work in isolation. The AI will also change the landscape of other parts, and it is bound to have its impact on project management as such. The longer-term thoughts here in that context need to be considered a direction rather than a prediction. This is the general direction that project management will be moving to if all other factors maintain the same evolution pace that they are following today. We certainly know that these predictions are rather bound to fail; however, we are sufficiently confident that the direction will remain what we think.
In the longer run, the evolution of AI will make project management as we know it today extinct. Does that mean, though, that there would be no need for Project Managers? Certainly no. Project Managers (or any human being for that matter) possess capabilities that go far beyond the capabilities that AI would have, at least as envisaged today. There are certain areas that AI can’t address easily. There are situations that only human beings can address effectively. And that’s where we as project managers will evolve.
Creative & Complex Problem Solving
Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash
The routine, mechanical tasks will be taken care of by the AI tools. But businesses & projects will face newer, unique & more complex problems. And they would vary with the project & business domain. This essentially means that there would be fewer & fewer known solutions available to project managers to rely upon. They will need to look for new directions, newer ways to respond to newer challenges, often by looking into a different domain or area of life that directly correlates with the problem area at hand.
Enhanced Value Proposition
We talked about the merge between project & product management when we were thinking about the medium-term outlook. That integration will extend to business management as well. The success of a project manager will depend upon what additional value they can bring to the table. Future KPIs for project managers will prominently feature the business outcomes rather than being restricted to the traditional triangle of schedule, cost & scope.
Emotional Intelligence & Empathy
The creative problem solving & enhanced value proposition both have their foundations in empathy. The larger transformation that project management will bring about can only be executed and implemented if project managers can motivate peers & team members towards enhanced challenges. Emotional intelligence & empath are the two foundational pillars for leadership expected for complex & creative problem-solving. Project managers who can transform themselves into such a leader will provide the enhanced value proposition expected from project managers.
This essentially means that a project manager’s focus should shift to softer skills if they want to survive in an AI world. They would need to know schedules, cost & risk management, they would need to know how those are done, but the focus would need to shift to softer aspects of the work & life. They would need to see the larger picture & calibrate the project management efforts towards that. For those who will do that, AI will prove to be an immense asset rather than a formidable foe.
Featured Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash