Artificial Intelligence in Project Management Tools
As IA has already transformed the digital advertising industry, we believe it can also plan projects, elaborate reports, assign tasks, automate notifications and recommendations, evaluate people’s performance, discover issues, analyze trends, and so on. However, it is still too early to talk about artificial intelligence in the field of professional project management. In order for software to assist us in planning baselines, tracking progress, suggesting actions, anticipating issues, evaluating performance, etc., it is essential to have a historical database of projects within the organization’s context, on the organization’s private servers.
Process-Less Project Management
Managers don’t buy project management. They approve projects but don’t assign anyone to oversee the big picture, anticipate problems, make forecasts, be accountable, and ultimately, take responsibility for achieving success. They see that the project team self-manages through meetings, which they sometimes attend for information and other times to address issues on the fly. A project professional would know how to do it better, but since we have a reputation as bureaucrats (documents, processes, workflows, and more meetings), they prefer crises, that is, reacting by improvising when problems arise and it’s too late.
Value Driven Project Management
While a project is on execution, the project professional makes decisions to optimize value delivery, which will come during the operational stage—well after the project has been closed. Value delivery is straightforward in agile projects, as management relies on continuous interactions with stakeholders who validate increments toward the final result. In predictive projects, it is possible for value to be delivered after a failed project, or vice versa: the project succeeds but no value is delivered. Through role-based collaboration, PMOs can delegate many project management activities, having more time to anticipate issues and deliver value.
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools (in Projects)
Process-driven project management has been effective until the 21th century. However, today’s projects require people collaboration for many compelling reasons: 1) Requirements are usually not clear enough, and project scope has to be progressively elaborated; 2) Controlling changes, time and cost is less important than value delivery and meeting the business goals; 3) Managers need to make informed real-time decisions, anticipating issues while there are still options to correct project performance, and they don’t have time to read comprehensive documentation from dozens or hundreds of projects; 4) Just one person to manage the whole project is not effective: collaboration is needed because the best solutions may come from one of many stakeholders.
Projects in the Cloud
Most professionals are always connected. Knowledge workers are used to collaborating on objects in the cloud: they alternate their laptop, tablet, or mobile phone, to work concurrently on the same version of the document, spreadsheet, presentation, article, web design, software code, prototype, etc. No need to download, install, send, merging changes, etc. All of them working together on the same version of the truth. In the project economy, it is also time to digitize management, knowledge and interactions between people working on projects, programs, and portfolios.
Is your PMO producing Reports or delivering Value?
Most PMOs are seen as internal cost centers adding bureaucracy to projects. PMPeople helps people collaborate on project management professionally, in the cloud, using different roles. PMOs can distribute many management activities, having more time for anticipating problems and delivering value. With PMPeople, the PMO can grow from being a cost center to lead the company in the Project Economy.
Startups need Professional Project Management
Startups need good ideas, but they can only succeed if they are good in execution, while turning ideas into reality. This means they need to manage projects professionally, avoiding bureaucracy, value driven, working as self-organizing teams of people collaborating proactively. Thanks to technology available nowadays, these people can access their projects online, use specific professional project management roles.
In the Project Economy, everyone has a voice
In the Project Economy, people can collaborate managing projects professionally, with project status reports, changes, risks, milestones, baselines, etc. PMPeople stands for “people collaborating on project management”. PMPeople is a freemium project portfolio management product. Organizations in the Project Economy can easily go digital with PMPeople. Get your projects professionally managed by people collaborating using different roles.
PMPeople to Control Agile Projects
1) Centralize professional project management in PMPeople: stakeholders engagement, risks, status reports, time sheets and expenses, etc. 2) decompose the project into work packages, meaning agile releases; 3) Connect work package #0 (the project itself) to Asana list for epics; 4) Connect each release to Asana list for user stories; 5) Managers do not need Asana: they use PMPeople to track epics and stories; 6) Team Members do not need PMPeople: they use Asana to follow their ceremonies and manage their artifacts.
Setting the PMO up in 1 week
Organizations in the project economy cannot wait 6 months to have a PMO up and running. Thanks to our tool PMPeople, PMO activation does not have to be a long expensive project anymore. All the technology can be set up in 1 week so that you can focus on the PMO function. In this short period, now is technically possible to have many people collaborating on project management, using different roles.