What if I told you that Project Management is easy and intelligent software will replace you very soon?

It sounds unbelievable, right?

The fear of losing our jobs to Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been restricted to so-called routine roles in transport, front office and coffee shops.

But how could AI ever replace complex roles such as Project Management? Would your project team take orders from an AI Project Manager? Would your stakeholders accept a status update from a machine?

Isn't Project Management all about building relationships and leading teams to success, the kind of things at which humans excel. How can AI demonstrate Emotional Intelligence without emotions?

I found out the answers to these questions and more by speaking to those at the cutting edge of AI Project Management technology.

A recent LinkedIn Learning article laid out the Project Management areas ripe for automation:

Requirements Collection

Schedule/Budget Creation and Monitoring

Quality Control

Resource Planing and Monitoring

Risk Analysis and Response Planning

How much of your typical work week do you spend on the above tasks? Do you enjoy them, or are they the necessary routine tasks required to deliver a project successfully?

I'd welcome the automation of the above, it would free up my time to concentrate on the more enjoyable work, leading the team and managing stakeholders to achieve project success.

It also laid out the areas that AI will struggle with:

Leadership

Diplomacy/Negotiating

Public Speaking

Emotional Intelligence

Communication

The things humans do well. These are the tasks we should enjoy the most. Who wants to be staring at a budget spreadsheet for hours when you could be coaching your team and building relationships with your stakeholders?

My curiosity led me to two companies at the cutting edge of AI Project Management. Based on different sides of the planet but sharing the same goal, I got a fascinating insight to where the technology is heading.

Stratejos

First up is stratejos, a Sydney-based company with a passion for using AI to help Project Managers become more productive.

The stratejos smart assistant integrates with common project management tools such as JIRA, Slack and Hipchat.

Once connected stratejos will track progress to predict what will happen or determine what went wrong on your project. It will also warn of upcoming risks and even follow up with your team if a task or action hasn't been completed.

To get some more insight and understand how far along AI Project Management actually is, I spoke with Scott Middleton, the creator of stratejos.

Jason: Can you describe what the stratejos smart assistant does?

Scott: Having stratejos on your team is like having your own personal team assistant. It helps you manage your projects by:

automating project reporting

providing insights you didn't have

identifying risks and uncertainty

coaching your team on better practices.

Jason : What made you decide to build the smart assistant?

Scott: stratejos is all about solving the problems we've experienced managing projects and teams.

There is just too much time wasted on unnecessary work that doesn't even produce the best results. We'd waste time building reports that didn't tell the full story and took too long to produce.

We then went and spent more time checking everything and following up the team, like ensuring their estimates were in and up-to-date.

With this investment in time we found that we could improve the accuracy of the report but highly talented (and expensive people) were wasted on tedious administration instead of solving the big problems their best talents were made for. And often they just didn't have the time for this kind of administration.

So we decided to set out on a mission to rid the world of these issues. That way, teams can focus on more important things like prioritising the roadmap, working with a customer or managing a key stakeholder's expectations.

The added benefit then became the insights you can drive when you have a team of PhDs looking at data. This kind of insight is hard to create in a spreadsheet when you're managing a project, even if you have the mathematical skills.

Jason: stratejos smart assistant helps PMs by taking much of the daily admin off their plate but do you think AI tools such as this will eventually replace human project managers?

Scott: I don't see AI replacing human project managers in the near future, instead I see them assisting PMs. We are so far away from singularity (at least another 20-30 years). AI just can't deal with a question like "what are Sally's expectations?" or "what feature do we build next?"

Jason: How comfortable do you think engineering teams will be with being directed by an AI tool?

Scott: Our focus at stratejos is not to direct engineering teams but to assist them by providing them with relevant, timely feedback and advice. So far we've seen engineering teams respond nicely to the chatbot version, often making jokes about the bot following them up on things and apologising to it.

Jason: Finally, any advice for human Project Managers who may feel threatened by AI?

Scott: Don't be threatened, embrace it. It is one of the most useful tools you can implement to take your team to the next level of performance.

Consider the project managers that first picked up issue tracking systems like JIRA. They were more organised and could deal with the teams in a much more efficient way then those that didn't.

Jason: Thanks Scott.

Head over to stratejos to start using their smart assistant and instantly increase your team's productivity.

Mindsight

Mindsight is the creation of California-based Richard Chan and Eddy Reyes. This AI tool scans your code repository, integrates with your bug trackers and other PM tools to collate data. It uses this data to help you accurately estimate and deliver projects.

I found out more over a Slack chat with Richard Chan.

Jason: Do you see the Mindsight AI eventually becoming 'intelligent' enough to replace more of a Project Managers work?

Richard: Our view of this is to make sure to utilize all the technology to be able to handle tasks that humans aren't great at, which is repetitive data collection and analysis, tracking all data created within a project such as "different projects each developer has worked on, their experience level, their tendencies, and other repetitive actions over time in a developer would undertake in their time at an organization".

With all these different data points, utilizing some forms of ML & AI could extrapolate certain aspects of a project such as: Overall projection of each developer's "work rate", their ability to tackle certain features based on their comfort with certain technology, and auto-generate the optimal team based on experience and history to tackle a new "project".

A project manager's role is highly complex, the need to communicate to the team, and be able to coach can not be replaced by a "bot or AI".

I know many people believe that AI would replace every working person's role in the economy, but with my experience of how AI actually works, I don't believe that to be the case.

Jason: That's interesting. With the data on an engineers work rate, presumably that leads to more accurate work estimates than can be provided by the engineer themselves and feeds into a more robust project schedule?

Richard: Exactly! One of our major goals is to build a robust analysis of developers in their specific role in their organizations is to build "Baselines" with actual data.

An analogy we hear a lot from our Proof of Concepts is that "Well, this task we are about to hand you isn't as hard as that project which had 7 story points, but it's definitely harder than this other one which was 3 points, so we're going to say it's 5 points.

And you can't blame the team, because spending a lot of time trying to nail these fine points down is time consuming, when the project needs to get going.

So by constantly monitoring what your developers are working on, and tracking all the logic that is needed to finish certain tasks, and calculate the potential for bugs to be existing in your current coding task by looking at your history, we can present a base estimation with actual monitored numbers and logic.

Jason: Thanks Richard.

Head over to Mindsight to sign-up for their upcoming private Beta.

Final Thoughts

AI, in the medium term at least, will become another tool in the Project Managers toolkit, something used to help deliver successful projects on-time and on-budget.

We've been talking about AI in Project Management since the 1980's and while it's still not mainstream the companies I spoke to above are aiming to bring the technology to the forefront of Project Management over the coming years.

Even Microsoft has recently launched their own tool.

The best approach for Project Managers is to embrace AI technology rather than fear it. If it makes you a better Project Manager then it gives you an edge in an already competitive industry.

If I know that an AI tool 'has my back' by taking care of routine work effectively and quickly, then I can focus on coaching, leadership and communication. The areas where I can add most value as a PM.

I ultimately want to get things done and freeing up time otherwise spent on routine tasks enables me to accomplish more. This can only be a good thing.

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