A Contrarian's Perspective to Using AI in Project Management

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Artificial Intelligence   Strategy  

Do you like using new tools? I do—especially for challenging problems that take time to solve.

When I was a software developer, my company had a problem—what was the last version of the file? Who had changed it, and for what reason? When we knew that information, we could decide what to do about the changes we needed to make.

We used the “MRU” convention: most recently updated, with our name or initials and a brief description of the changes.

Now, we have version control tools. Those tools make it easy to see the changes, who made them, and why.

We also had more challenging problems, such as how to step through the code to examine the inputs, outputs, and states. We used debuggers, print statements, and assertions. Now, we have IDEs (integrated development environments) that do all of that for us.

Tools reduce those challenging problems and increase our productivity, which is the point of new technology.

While I love the idea of more productivity, let me ask this question: Where are the challenging problems in project management? Could artificial intelligence help solve those problems?

Starting the Project Problems: What to Do?
When I work with project teams, we have trouble getting these answers so we can start well:

• What does done mean for this project?
• What’s important to the sponsors, so we know the tradeoffs we …

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