5 Ways AI Assists Project Managers

Even though we live in a lean and agile world, we still need project managers. They are the ones who ensure success or failure. Someone has to be in charge of the non-software elements and have a view of the project as a whole. Since forever, we’ve dealt with challenges concerning keeping projects on time, on budget, and, last but not least, people on time.

So no, organizations can’t function properly without project managers. As you can imagine, the life of a project manager isn’t easy. You plan resources, handle finances, and organize the necessary business documents. At the end of the day, you want to know that you did a good job.

Being a project manager is a fun and rewarding job – for the most part. If you want to ensure the best outcome in this ever-changing area of work, consider leveraging artificial intelligence. An AI-powered system, not to mention automation, can help you with everything from scheduling to assessing the patterns of a work team. Just think about it. It’s not enough to make a plan in advance and stick to it. Change can and it will impact your project, so the outcomes are unpredictable.

The best thing to do is to use AI to automate the most important tasks.

1. Avoiding Project Failure Thanks to Predictive Analytics

Failure happens even when it comes to the simplest, straightforward projects. This is due to the nature of operational work. The more complex the project is the more chance of failure. Lack of visibility, gaps in communication, and overloaded resources are just some of the reasons why projects fail.

To avoid failure, the project manager has to plan, execute, and action well. Predictive analytics plays an important role in project management. This is a term you might be familiar with. What you don’t know is that artificial intelligence enables you to oversee complex analytics.

Imagine This Scenario:

You’re in charge of a developer team that is responsible for fixing errors. Thanks to predictive analytics, you know exactly when you’re overloaded with bug tickets and plan your next move. Make sure that you’re equipped with predictive analytics. An AI-powered system will keep an eye on all the moving parts of the project and make predictions based on what it’s seeing.

You can monitor the way the project is advancing and anticipate what will happen in future time. The computers crunch the high volumes of complex, unstructured data, and obtain meaningful insights.

2. Improving the Decision-Making Process

Artificial intelligence techniques are starting to gain predominance in decision-making. Project managers use in-depth data analysis to make difficult decisions. As a matter of fact, they let AI systems make the decisions for them and they just simply approve. If you don’t know what AI-driven decision-making looks like, it looks something like this:

1. Big data
2. Summarized data
3. Human judgment
4. Business decisions

What artificial intelligence does is create an intelligent process that is based on rules and logic. Given that in project management it’s necessary to make decisions on a daily basis, it makes sense to automate decision-making. AI will deliver rationality and create value for your project/projects. You can eliminate common flaws in decision-making, such as:

• Logical fallacy
• False assumptions
• Unreliable nature of memory
• Biases

The choices you make and the actions you take have a significant impact on the well-being of others, in addition to future prospects, it’s normal to take greater care. Sometimes, AI is capable of making better decisions than people. It’s a reality that we have to deal with. Prepare for artificial intelligence before it’s too late.

3. Developing Effective Communication, Which Leads to Better Projects

If the project manager is able to develop effective communication with the stakeholder, they can win more projects. It’s important to perfect this skill taking into consideration that you spend about 90% of your time communicating.

With artificial intelligence, you can slide through the process of writing and communicating. Actually, it’s already making a visible impact in the workplace, improving the success rate of presentations and anticipating interactions when it comes to the target audience. Let’s focus more on the professional use of AI.

Regardless of the size of the project, you have to share to-dos, files, schedules, and messages. Imagine what it would be like to write a message that’s going to be read by hundreds of co-workers. If you have an AI-powered system, you can control the tone of the message and give your message the right wording.

“You should take time to reflect upon the purpose of the document and determine what the best way is to express the message you want to convey. An AI assistant will help you write better, actionable messages” – explains Sandra Winegar, Lead Business Communication Specialist at Subjecto and contributor to The New York Times.

The point is that when you have a powerful system in place you don’t have to worry about failure due to communication issues. The project manager of the future relies on artificial intelligence as far as verbal and non-verbal communication is concerned. Get an AI assistant, why don’t you? It will help you see beyond the bounds of human imagination and produce business transformation.

4. Highly Reliable Budgets and Roadmaps

If you don’t budget, it’s impossible for you to predict unnecessary expenditures and allocate resources properly. You must estimate the costs for the necessary efforts or activities in project management. Using artificial intelligence, you can figure out where increases or decreases can be made that will affect budgeting and, of course, cost allocations. Human intervention isn’t enough, unfortunately. So, take the activity and automate it.

What about the project roadmap? Well, it has to be graphical and clearly highlight the project’s goals. As a project manager, it’s your responsibility to lead the team and align everyone on the activity/activities in question. Have some form of artificial intelligence in place. Otherwise, it will be difficult if not impossible to scale high-value, large-scale projects. This is what you need to do:

• Discover AI use cases
• Make an automation plan
• Enable AI apprenticeship for anyone who is interested

It will be a bumpy road. If you don’t use budget and forecast as tools to monitor initiatives, you’ll get stuck in the process. Use artificial intelligence during project planning and execution to connect the pieces of the puzzle. You’ll have real-time visibility into the project progress. The result is that you can make better decisions and control the risks. You can retrieve parametric information and use it when necessary.

5. Cutting Down on The Number of Project Assistants

Complex or highly critical projects have an assistant to help with management duties and oversight. Ideally, you should have an assistant for every area of the project. This isn’t feasible. To be more precise, you can’t employ that many project assistants. Well, thanks to AI, you don’t have to because you have your very own assistant that takes care of estimates, budgets, and sprint management.

You can communicate with the AI-powered assistant using natural language which is immediately transformed into actions. Here are just some examples of tasks that AI can do for you:

• Notify you when estimates are missing
• Notify you when a task takes too long
• Notify you when an individual team member is overloaded
• Notify you about project revenue and profit

The bottom line is that artificial intelligence will change project management for the better. Personal assistants are a real luxury, so you should better rely on computer technology. Make sure to have an AI assistant on your phone, tablet, or computer. As the project grows or becomes more complex, you’ll need all the help you can get.

To conclude, project management is about to get a lot easier thanks to artificial intelligence. Until 2030, data collection, tracking, and reporting will be done exclusively by computers. From a business standpoint, deploying artificial intelligence makes complete sense. Learn AI and machine learning. They may be new technologies but they have already proven to be useful. So, what do you say?

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Estelle Liotard is a Senior Writer at TopEssayWriting and an Editor at ClassyEssay, respectively. In addition, Estelle is a frequent contributor at BeGraded where she continues to hone her writing and digital publishing skills. She is an experienced content creator and a writer who excels in AI-related topics with an emphasis on its practical business applications. In her spare time, Estelle enjoys quiet afternoons on her balcony and cooking.