#PMIEMEA18 – Day 3 : #FutureDefiners :Trust your team, lead with agility, befriend the machine and be human

 

Trust your team, lead with agility, befriend the machine and be human sums up my day 3 in one sentence.

My first session was on Delivering value in consulting projects – The Agile Way: Maciej Kaniewski took us through the journey of a life cycle of consulting projects. His take on delivering value in consulting project – the agile way?

1. Be in touch with reality, be that Octopus when dealing with customers
2. Harmonize the project management and business analysis
3. Fast forward with agility

Maciej Kaniewski presented the Agile manifesto for Consulting projects as follows

So how do we measure value from consulting projects? Through outcomes, feedback, observations, measurements and decisions. 

And what about the value to the consultant? It is the experience and the learnings.

He ends with a quote from Janis Joplin Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.

Now that I was all armed with tips for success in consulting projects I wonder “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could predict our cost overruns for our projects ?” Werner Meyer session on Beyond Humans: Using Machine Learning to Calculate Contingency for Systemic Risks introduced us to machine learning and how it can help us to improve our chances of success.  An amazing story of Man Vs Machine, where machines learns from historical data and predict the systemic risk overrun. So does this mean our jobs would be at risk? Per Werner Meyer there is a low probability for construction managers and IT managers like me. What a relief!

Later that afternoon I attended a panel discussion on Leading effective virtual teams: Fiona Charonnat, Hagit Landman, Sunday Faronbi and Ibrahim Dani.  Some tips for successfully leading virtual teams :

1. Get to know your team even before the project
2. Understand the culture of others if working in a multi-cultural team
3. Care for your team member as an individual and not as a team
4. Be flexible
5. Set expectations, agree and repeat again and again

The grand finale was the closing key note on  Developing Creative Approaches to Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace in the Times of Accelerated Digitalisation  Inma Martinez . Ms. Martinez took us through the journey of HPC to Exascale - Tianhe-3, a supercomputer which is capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billions and billions of calculations per second, from AR augmented reality to VR virtual reality to SR sensorial reality. So what does this mean for us human beings ? Will we be replaced by machines ?  Ms Martinez says “ Machines will always be machines, they can never outperform the human brain. Tacit knowledge cannot be put into words. That is why humans will remain relevant: ”  She adds on to say

1. Machines would do the heavy lifting like crunching the numbers
2. Use that data to pin- point a cancerous cell, or mental health
3. Data can transform our living to smart urban living e.g as in Boston, MA
4. And with all these time at our hands we will have time to be human

That wraps up #PMIEMEA18 in Berlin, the next edition of #PMIEMEA19 would be in Dublin, Ireland. Maybe we will we have some robot participants next year ? What do you think?