Project Management In The Time of Artificial Intelligence
As defined by the Project Management Institute, the project management “is the practice of using knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to complete a series of tasks to deliver value and achieve a desired outcome”. The project management is about managing a series of structured tasks, activities, and deliverables that are carefully executed to achieve a desired outcome, managing temporary efforts to create value through unique products, services, and processes. And with recent advances of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and push of AI into project management even from organizations that have traditionally safeguarding project management Artificial Intelligence in Project Management | PMI), what can possibly go wrong? Let’s explore!
Let explore a quite possible situation in a near future where a CEO of a large corporation checks his corporation strategic initiatives status utilizing new app that utilizes AI for the project management. The smooth and fondly seductive app voice informs a CEO about changes that need attention, potential issues and risks, decision making and eventually providing some solutions scenarios. Among other things, the AI app tells a CEO that business-critical portfolio is behind the schedule and advises applying agile methodology to speed up the portfolio stream. Bingo, the AI proposes a magic bullet! All human project managers, we are doomed, do throw your certificate into a garbage, the doom day has come!
Businesspeople can be easily tricked into thinking that by applying AI to project management it will improve the success ratio of projects and save sizeable number of investments. Even the master deceiver, the Garner, is pushing the change, indicating that in the next 6 years, almost 80% of project are going to be run by AI and powered by big data. If I would believe all lies they spread, I would be fool to renew my professional project manager license, right? Even as I type this article, the AI spelling and grammar tool in MS Word is advising me I should insert coma after word lies. Not so fast!
AI feels so magically on the paper, that is a fact. When millions of people encountered ChatGPT, it felt, in some contexts, and especially upon first contact, as though it could actually participate in something like conversation. What many users suggested felt truly magical. The most significant consequence of a mystical, inevitable account of AI — fostered by clever demos and doomsaying CEOs alike — is that it negates the sort of valid and rigorous criticism that might make it better for the people on whom it will be thrown upon. Even if these early AI encounters didn’t feel like magic, they often felt, at least, like very good magic tricks — and like magic tricks, they were disorienting. And that is the essence I am trying to convey in this article, - AI magic is a trickery. In 2020, researchers Alexander Campolo and Kate Crawford termed this dynamic enchanted determinism, which they define as follows:
“Paradoxically, when the disenchanted predictions and classifications of deep learning work as hoped, we see a profusion of optimistic discourse that characterizes these systems as magical, appealing to mysterious forces and superhuman power.”
Alexander Campolo and Kate Crawford
And that is a trap. Many breakthroughs in science and technology, however stunning they might first appear, reveal something about how the world works. Technological re-enchantment is fragile and never lasts long, particularly in the field of project management. Though these AI evangelists melt us PMs down that project managers will not be going away, but they will need to embrace these changes and take advantage of the new technologies, I believe that for profit ideology will prevail as it did on removing friendly cashiers from stores and replacing them with stupid scanning machines.
Project management is about innovation, creativity, collaboration, organization, communication, chatting and sharing a coffee with the team, delivering value, it is an art applied by human project managers. I would like to know how AI is going to walk into the Starbuck’s and order coffee for the team. How is AI bot going to resolve team conflict, is it going to taser all culprits? It may take decades until AI can better monitor the project, plan predictively, engage clients (hopefully not turned into AI bots themselves), continuously improve process or develop adaptive leadership. All these concepts have been developed by human project and portfolio managers throughout decades is systemic work and cannot be just delegate to AI bots because CEO have seen a demo promising revenue benefits from replacing humans. Or it can.
And this is really the saddest thing about AI transition and replacement of people with robots and bot chats. I don’t see the future of project management as a perfect blend of AI and human ingenuity, but a rather bleak perspective turning these AI digital assistants into project drivers. I don’t see a shift away for PMs from task management and repetitive tasks and towards strategic planning, it’s another propaganda trickery.
"I do fear for the future of Project Management!"
Sinisa Djurkic
