Hold Your Horses: PREPARE for Responsible AI Use in Project Management

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

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Topics: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize project management; it can assist with data analysis, automate routine tasks, and predict project trends.

However, as a veteran project manager (read “slightly cynical older person”), I am concerned AI will cause a tsunami of project failures before improving the state of the practice.

People tend to be lazy, and a fool with a tool is still a fool. Worse yet, a fool with a tool that produces well-written, convincing project deliverables is a very dangerous fool.

Attempting to Solve the Wrong Problem
Producing project charters faster (or communications plans, risk management plans, etc.) is not the right goal. Project management does not have a typing speed problem.

Unfortunately, AI vendors and people looking to implement AI tools with only a superficial view of what project managers do tend to pick these visible outputs as places to implement AI. In doing so, they miss the collaboration, analysis and coordination that must occur before these visible outputs can be accurately created. They only see the outwardly visible part of the PM iceberg.

It is very easy to use AI to generate these visible deliverables by providing some high-level project information in the prompt. Unfortunately, these will be a poor foundation to start from without undertaking all the under-the-surface work. To begin …

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