Will the widespread adoption of prompt engineering commoditize project management skills, or can it help PMs differentiate themselves and command higher value?
Director, Learning Design & Development| PMIAsheville, NC, United States
Hi PMI Community! I’m Sarah Philbrick, and I work as a Product Manager at PMI with a focus on our learning offerings. As we go on this skill-building journey together, I’m excited to engage in meaningful conversations, explore trending topics, and learn from each other.
Reflecting on one such topic, GenAI and prompt engineering, I am interested to hear your perspective on commoditization vs. differentiation.
Will the widespread adoption of prompt engineering commoditize project management skills, or can it help PMs differentiate themselves and command higher value?
Henry LealProject Manager| Integrated Project SolutionsGeorgia, United States
At this point, commoditizing project managers' skill is not an option. Even dough can be probed AI to be reachable and widespread use you must have a Project manager to refine, edit and create the expected result and judgment based on the project manager's experience. That being said, having prompt engineering experience will boost a project manager's expertise, differentiate themselves, and command higher value. Saving Changes...
Eyad HasanProject Director| IDEMIADubai, United Arab Emirates
In my opinion, Generative AI tools will empower project managers to engage and focus on resolving issues and mitigate risks proactively. PMs will have all the time to monitor the project performance metrics. PMs should highly consider utilizing both AI and BI tools for their benefit Saving Changes...
Cyril EmbilProject Manager/Scrum Master| AetnaNaugatuck, Ct, United States
In the short to medium term, I think the increased use of prompt engineering by PMs will help them to work more efficiently, differentiating themselves thereby commanding higher values. However, as AI becomes a more common and vital tool in project management, PMs must learn and adapt to the changing environment. Saving Changes...
I think the adoption of prompt engineering will partially commoditize project management skills in the near future and help people not trained in project management in a traditional sense complete high level PM tasks without the help of a project management professional. A project manager can definitely add more values to their daily tasks and increase their work efficiency by learning to properly use LLMs. For more sophisticated tasks such as those that needs to interact with human beings like stakeholder management, with the current state of AI, we still need people trained in project management with experience to complete them. However, as the development of LLM and AI in general advances, the line between machine and human will blur even more especially with the addition of machine vision and robotics. Saving Changes...
I have been using a few gen AI tools, specifically chatbots, data analytics tools to simplify my work in day-to-day PM role. They work great for prompts like summarization, comparison and some level of data mining, but there are many use case scenarios where one can't totally rely on the AI tool to get the final solution. For e.g. I tried mining a spreadsheet and convert certain texts into shorter characters required to visually represent my data into a line/bar chart. While the chatbot wasn't able to give me the final graph, it saved me several minutes in getting an excel formula with examples, that I was able to use to convert the big spreadsheet into more sensical data table, and moreover it gave me steps to quickly create the line chart that I eventually wanted. All that within 10min.
So, I see potential in increasing productivity!
As you have mentioned, there is the humsn part that AI can't fill. AI doesn't have emotions and cannot hink beyond the data that it is been fed and trained with. So the role of a project manager cannot be over emphasize in validating the results and improving it Saving Changes...
The concern is very valid, Sarah. However, GenAI is here to assist the project/program/portfolio managers to deliver the projects more efficiently and to the highest standard. No tool or technology can ever replace the emotional intelligence and human cognitive skills, which are great skills possessed by PMs. It's upto the PMs how they leverage this as an opportunity to drive greater business impact rather than fearing that PMs might lose their jobs ! Saving Changes...
Hello PMI community! This is Mohamad Abbas from Lebanon.
I believe that AI tools and prompt engineering will have a great, inevitable role on our work as project managers amidst the fast, unprecedented adoption of these tools and technology across various disciplines.
I would rather learn how to leverage from such a powerful, and impactful tool instead of defending the traditional way of PM. These new tools could be great assistants to us in our daily work routines and could support us in many of the tasks where data analytics and AI could perform well at. This would help us perform better at our projects, deliver better, and progress in our careers as well-equipped PM's. Saving Changes...
Murthy SNHead - Service Excellence, Transformation| Ernst & YoungBangalore, Karnataka, India
My gut feel is that PMs can surely command more respect and request for guidance from project teams due to their ability to work and direct a variety of projects across many domains and functions cutting across. They are in a position to understand each and every function, stakeholder, every risk and opportunity to be able to create better and sharper prompts. At the end of the day, this is a super skill and one gets better by practising writing the prompts repeatedly and refining them. Hence I feel this ability to write better prompts helps differentiate PM from others and command higher value. Saving Changes...
Shelley MatsonVice President of Programs| NextGen RF DesignBaltimore, MD, United States
I find generative AI to help me flesh out ideas and quickly create reports, summaries, etc. It allows me to focus on more complex tasks within program management. No matter what, there needs to be oversight and evaluation of AI that can only be done by an experienced PM. Saving Changes...
With the new generation of generative AI portfolio/program/project manager and business analyst role "are dead" at least in the way they were originally defined. I think a good source to understand that are the two courses on generative AI delivered for free by the PMI, mainly if you see the 3 layer model.
I think LLM can play important role for modeling, suggest solutions and offer road maps but NOT replace the base role of portfolio/program/project manager and business analyst.. still they on path to make directives and decision support based on the different variables within projects environment. Saving Changes...
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