Project Management

Leadership in Project Management

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This blog is meant to elaborate around leadership in the context of project management and discuss questions like What is leadership? What kind of leadership does project management need? Which role do values and ethics play in PM leadership? Examples of good practices in leadership. How to become a PM leader? My comments in this blog represent my own personal view and do not constitute any statement or information on behalf of PMI or the PMI Board of Directors.

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Artificial Intelligence and Project Leadership

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How would a bunch of intelligent machines make stuff happen? 
Far fetched? Utopia? Do not think so.

How are military drones eliminating targets? Search - select - execute - confirm.
It is a time limited endeavor to achieve a unique result = a project.
There still may be some human decision makers involved today, or not. I do not know.

How are banks making decisions about - say - credit risks. They look for parameters from all kind of sources, big data, own databases, request data from other sources, calculate the risk, decide.
It is a time limited endeavor to achieve a unique result = a project.
There are probably no humans involved anymore. 

The three sides of PMI’s talent triangle are 
- technical PM (the processes, tools & techniques), 
- the business acumen (making business decisions and setting strategies) and 
- leadership. 


Let’s have look how these sides are being ’supported’ by intelligent machines, imagine a time-frame of 5-20 years:

Technical PM is prone to be taken over by systems, a process can be put into a workflow, results can be digitized and lesson learned can be used for self improvements. Who is calculating a critical path manually today? Could a system trigger work authorizations, check deliverables, analyze deviations from the plan? Yup.

Business acumen is meant to make business decisions, set strategies and objectives, observe the environment and respond to changes. Business decision ’support’ is here since decades, morphing into big data and analysis. Insurance companies, tax authorities, energy suppliers make decisions automatically without human intervention. Death of the white collar worker? Yup.

So, this leaves to the third side: 
Is there still leadership required for these kind of projects?
Do we still need emotional intelligence, conflict management, team building etc. when machines are making decisions and machines are implementing projects? 

Very interested in your thoughts.

Posted on: August 11, 2016 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)
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