The Money Files

Research amongst Microsoft Copilot users highlights that on average they are saving 14 minutes a day (1.2 hours per week) by using Copilot, which is an AI-add in. Some users reported saving over 30 minutes a day, and using the time gained for focus work or additional meetings (*gulp*).

If you’re wondering how GenAI is going to change the way you work, Copilot is an example of something quite easy to use that speeds up completing your daily tasks. For example, you can draft a new presentation from a prompt or summarise an email thread or chat thread. I can see how this would help you catch up on meetings too as you can ask it questions based on a meeting transcript, or get a recap of the whole meeting.

I think that nothing really beats the aha moments in a meeting where you are working with others and finding a way forward, but there are also plenty of meetings that should have been an email. And I don’t know about you, but my diary is often double-booked with invites, and it’s hard to find time to squeeze more calls in, especially with senior leaders. Summarising a missed meeting can save people 32 minutes, which you could fill with another meeting, or take a lunch break, or write that project proposal that’s been sitting on your desk for a week.

Fourteen minutes per day does not sound like much, but it’s worth having, if the overall burden of admin work is reduced, freeing up time for us to do more project leadership and less creating slides, typing minutes or searching for files (the study said users were 29% faster in a series of tasks including searching, writing and summarising information).

The most important thing that I took away from the survey is that it doesn’t take less effort – it also feels like it takes less effort. The mental load of work is substantial. There are tasks to juggle, unending To Do items, stakeholders to keep engaged and lots more that we hold in our heads every day. Sometimes I end the day with decision fatigue. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off and the mental energy expended throughout the day has been exhausting.

If I can feel like I’m doing less burdensome work and more value-add work, that has to benefit my mental health and my enjoyment of the job.

Personally, I think this kind of GenAI has more practical use for project leaders than the ChatGPT-style interfaces that are available, including PMI’s own Infinity. I checked that out too, and it’s good for learning. I asked it to work out some potential risks for an example project for me, and it did a pretty good job of coming up with some basic risks I could include in a risk log as a starting point for discussion. A huge benefit of Infinity over my ‘normal’ ChatGPT account is that it provides the sources, so you can be confident you’re getting reliable, trusted information, which is very important if you’re building out work products based on the guidance.

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I can see a workplace in the not-too-distant future where we’ve got a pop up GenAI tool on the desktop to support everyday tasks, and a ChatGPT-style interface for research and more in-depth (or even quick) questions. What do you think about the way GenAI is influencing how work tools are built and the features on offer to you? Let me know in the comments!

PMI has released a new 2022 jobs report, which provides some insights into how the profession is looking around the globe. It’s not terrible, which chimes with my own experience here in the UK. I often mentor project managers who are looking for jobs and after interview practice or a CV review, and the market feels pretty good.

But anecdotal feedback aside, what do the numbers say about the future of the jobs market? Here are my key takeaways from the situation in Europe according the PMI survey.

Issues with supply chain

I know of projects that are on hold at the moment due to supply chain issues. My projects are being affected by longer lead times. Even buying a sofa is affected by long lead times: we have been told our sofa will arrive in 16 weeks and we can’t order an armchair because there is no fabric in stock.

So project managers might feel like the job situation isn’t too bad at the moment, but projects are certainly not progressing at the pace they used to. According to the PMI study, the supply chain issues have contributed to an inflation spike of 5%, which is going to affect salaries and put people under more pressure as the cost of living rises.

Demand for IT professionals

The report says that IT is the area to focus on if you are job hunting. The talent gap in this sector is huge, and there is a lot of tech funding around. Plus our ways of working since the pandemic began have massively changed – along with our customers’ expectations of what they can do online. That’s changed the requirements for many long-term projects and no doubt boosted the need for more IT project managers.

Hybrid working

If you are a European project manager who wants to live the hybrid life, watch out for what your employer expects. My takeaway from the PMI survey is that employers want more of us back in the office – and we don’t want to go. Only 28% of employers believe that the model of work they are offering is aligned to their employees’ preferences.

Employees want more hybrid and remote; employers want more bums on seats in the office. I’m not sure how we reconcile that to be honest. However, it is worth spending some time thinking about how you can make hybrid work for your project team. Nearly 60% of people report that remote and hybrid work options result in increased job satisfaction, and that has to be good for project team morale.

However, only 34% believe that remote options lead to greater productivity. Perhaps there is a backlash against only seeing your colleagues as a tiny head on MS Teams. I think that hybrid certainly has a place, and I know of project managers who have turned down roles that were not hybrid or remote-friendly.

Overall though, the outlook for work in the project sector in Europe seems optimistic. There is still a lot of concern about job security and the cost of living – although I can only speak for what I see here – but globally money is being made available to reinvent and innovate where we can.

If you want to succeed amidst the current global economic situation and all the uncertainties that brings, it would be good to focus on adaptability, change, flexibility and resilience as there are all the signs that these skills are going to be in demand for many years to come.

Data is a differentiator. Companies that can capture what customers buy, like, and use can interrogate that data to provide insights that help them stay ahead of the curve. Big data is the term given to the storage and analysis of workplace data for the purpose of creating meaningful management information.

The data from collaboration and project management tools is a subset of all this data. Real-time project analytics can add huge value to streamlining project management processes and in identifying early warning signs for projects.

Being able to parse a discussion thread from your collaboration tool and single out potential risks and issues could change the role of the project manager in the future. Furthermore, natural language searches will make it easier to include narrative discussions, meeting minutes, and more in the data analysis, saving hours of time when investigating or predicting problems. All of this data could be used to predict the future success (or otherwise) of projects.

There is already work happening in this sphere: The PMO Flashmob here in the UK held a session recently looking at the role of AI in the project office and project management domain. While I didn’t attend, they did publish some interesting Inside PMO report on the topic.

There’s also been a discussion around RPA – robotic processing automation (in other words, using algorithms to process info instead of humans – it’s not ‘real’ robots sitting at a desk next to you doing PMO work). There is a lot of scope for development in this space, freeing up knowledge workers to – you know – actually use their brains for stuff and building relationships to help get projects done.

Data presentation techniques

Allied to the big data revolution is the rise of data presentation techniques, because the trouble with all that data is that it is very difficult to understand. There is a trend toward simple, clean designs for websites and tools with high usability and a very visual impact. The growth of social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, plus the sudden, recent spike in the number of infographics doing the rounds on sharing sites shows that users are gravitating toward images.

This is relevant to project management collaboration tools because project managers have to adapt the way they communicate to suit the needs of stakeholders. If the needs of stakeholders are evolving to include a requirement for more visuals, then project managers will need to move away from text-based project reports to a more engaging way of sharing status updates.

Visual data presentation is not new to project management—after all, that’s really what a Gantt chart is. Kanban, too, is a visual project management approach and many agile teams work with visual plans. We could well see the visual preference for presenting data manifesting itself in more tools that use images and visual workflows in conjunction with traditional Gantt charts.

This article includes a few points that were made in my PMI book: Collaboration Tools for Project Managers. Given what we’ve been going through and seeing so far this year, it felt appropriate to try to pick out some comments on tech for teams and where that might be taking us – because it seems to me that virtual working is here to stay.

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This article is part three of my look into project risk management, and today we are continuing our look into trends and emerging practices, as determined by the PMBOK® Guide – Sixth Edition.

Read part 1 here: An introduction to risk management

Read part 2 here: Trends and Emerging Practices in Project Risk Management (Part A)

There are three risk-related trends that bear investigation. Last time I looked at non-event risks and today we’re covering project resilience and integrated risk management.

Project resilience

You know about personal resilience, right? I’ve seen a lot written about personal resilience, in particular to do with how we can support ourselves and our families through difficult times. A lot of factors go into personal resilience, from preparedness to mindset.

Projects can be resilient too.

The idea of project resilience relates to unknowable-unknowns – those things we never saw coming and couldn’t have prepared for (have there been any of those lately??). These are called emergent risks: risks you can only identify once they have happened. If your project is resilient, those issues are less problematic because you can deal with them. You can’t stop them, but your project can cope. Or at least, cope better than if you had made no effort to build resilience in the team at all.

Build resilience on your project through:

• Having the right level of budget and schedule contingency
• Maintaining a risk budget for the risks that you do know about
• Working with flexible processes that let you shift quickly if necessary and deal with change
• Empowering the team to make the right decisions, and trusting them to get on with it
• Reviewing the project regularly to spot early warning signs that something might be going wrong or coming
• Getting input from stakeholders for clarification to minimise the chance of scope or strategy being the cause of emergent risks.

Resilient projects are more likely to be able to weather the storm and bounce back, because they have space and process to do so. In other words, the better managed your project, the more likely it is that you are going to be able to recover from any curveballs thrown your way.

Integrated risk management

Integrated risk management is simply making sure all the risks from the project are integrated into a bigger picture. For example, your project could be part of a programme. On the last programme I ran, we consolidated risk from all the projects so we could assess the overall health of the programme, and that overall position was reported at the programme board monthly.

Integrated risk management processes mean that risk is owned and managed by the right people in the organisation, at the right level. So as a programme manager, I wasn’t reporting up every single risk those projects had, but the important ones. There is a level of professional judgement applied to back up the risk assessment process, so that the significant risks are escalated to the level they need to be known at.

Beyond projects and programmes, integrated risk management also looks at how project-level risk relates to the portfolio as a whole. This information is useful because it helps executives get a clear picture about the level of risk the business is taking with regards to delivering change. If too much change is going on, they might consider that too risky, and slow down or postpone some projects until other initiatives have completed.

Enterprise risk is the next level. You may have a corporate risk manager: their job is to aggregate risk from all over the business. They’ll be looking for input from each department but also projects and programmes, and the entire portfolio, and considering how that works with and affects operational risk too.

Basically, integrated risk management is the overall corporate governance structures and framework for managing enterprise risk. As a project manager, you need to know how you fit into that, but the whole thing isn’t your responsibility. You should carry on managing risk as you do, making sure the people who need to know about significant project risks, know.

Next time: I’ll look at tailoring risk management for your environment, because a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work.

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This is the end of my deep dive into the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, and what it covers about Project Schedule Management. I’ve looked in detail at the major changes between the Fifth Edition and the current version.

One of the biggest changes in the Sixth Edition is the inclusion of information on trends and emerging practices, tailoring and Agile. This is long overdue and it’s helpful to have some specific guidance around how we can adapt the sometimes dizzying amount of information in the PMBOK® Guide to our own organisations.

To recap, here is the rest of the Project Schedule Management deep dive series:

Plan Schedule Management

Define Activities

Sequence Activities

Estimate Activity Durations

Develop Schedule

Control Schedule

OK? Let’s take a look at what you need to know about adapting this process for your environment.

Trends and Emerging Practices

Scheduling techniques have pretty much stayed the same for many years, but there are some new thought processes at work. We have to be able to manage in a competitive environment where everything seems to be needed much more quickly. There’s a business advantage to being able to compress schedules and deliver things in a shorter timeframe, so the emerging practices covered in the PMBOK® Guide relate to those.

Iterative Scheduling

First we have iterative scheduling with a backlog. This is a common way of managing work in an Agile environment and supports rolling wave planning. In other words, you have a big bucket of requirements (user stories) that are prioritised as you come to the end of a time box, for delivery in the next time box. This works really well when you can or need to be flexible about what features get released when.

The major benefit is that the customer gets to see real progress on an iterative basis. This is great for building loyalty, delivering benefits more quickly and ensuring user adoption over time.

However, when there are lots of dependencies between tasks or requirements, it can become difficult to manage.

On-demand Scheduling

On-demand scheduling is based on the theory of constraints. It limits the work in progress for a team so that you can balance demand against what the team is capable of doing. As someone who is not a fan of multitasking (although I do it every day), limiting WIP is a great idea.

Kanban is where you will see this approach in use most commonly. In practice it works because instead of building a schedule based on requirements, you plan around the team’s availability and they take work from the queue to work on it immediately.

This is a good approach in environments where you have people doing a mixture of BAU and project work, and their project work does not have hard deadlines. I have no project experience of on-demand scheduling, aside from using something similar for my own To Do lists, so share your experiences in the comments below – I’d love to hear more.

Tailoring

The PMBOK® Guide talks about the need to tailor the approach to scheduling because every project is different. For your project, think about:

The life cycle: what life cycle are you using for your project and is it the best approach for getting to a detailed schedule?

Resource availability: You might have to switch up how you manage the schedule because of difficulties securing the resources you need.

The project itself: Big, complex projects need a different approach to scheduling to a small, easy project. There might be constraints within the project environment that lead you down one scheduling path compared to another, for example being required to use earned value as a stipulation of a particular contract, or using a particular scheduling software tool because that is what the client uses. That leads us to:

Tech support: What tools are available to you? If you don’t have access to modelling tools, for example, it’s not appropriate to build your schedule on the basis that you can use them. If you don’t have virtual Kanban boards and yet your team is virtual, then perhaps a scheduling approach that relies on specific software isn’t the best way to go.

Considerations for Agile

Adaptive project methods are those that use short delivery cycles. You do the work, review the outputs and make changes as necessary before the next delivery cycle kicks off. We’re seeing more and more projects use agile approaches like this because they work.

However, in my experience, and that of the many project managers I mentor, a lot of companies have project teams doing agile and project teams who don’t use agile. Sometimes we use Agile and non-Agile techniques on the same project (for different aspects of the same project). There’s a recognition now that this is OK. If it works and you get results, then it’s OK.

The PMBOK® Guide talks about hybrid approaches and being able to combine scheduling techniques from different approaches to get where you need to get. As a project manager, you have to make or support decisions around the tools and approaches you are going to use, and it helps to have some experience of these. If you find yourself suddenly managing an Agile project with no prior experience, you’ll be fine, but get familiar with the approaches as quickly as you can!

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