Project Management

The Biggest Barrier to AI in Project Management

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

What’s the biggest barrier to artificial intelligence improving project management? Is it that the technology isn’t yet ready to deliver what it sometimes promises? Is it that the technology isn’t yet trusted enough to be allowed to have the impact that it could have? Is it that organizations don’t know how to optimize the way they use AI to have the biggest impact?

In part, “yes” to all of those questions. But I don’t believe that any of them represent the biggest problem that needs to be overcome. That problem is far more fundamental: data.

To be effective, AI needs to have access to a complete set of integrated project data that it can use to “learn” what has happened in the past—and leverage to develop its forecasts, recommendations and so on. And in many organizations, the data that’s available just doesn’t allow that to happen—or at least not in an effective and consistent way.

The problems
Organizational project data problems are numerous. I regularly see all of the following issues:

  • Disconnected data across different departmental areas: Either different business areas and functions use different project management tools, or they use different instances of the same tool. That means that they have a good set of data for any given department, but they don’t have the ability …

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