Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
Before I start discussing Artificial Intelligence in Project Management, I would like to discuss Artificial Intelligence in general. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Is it a science? Is it a new technology? Last but not least, is it MAGIC? It certainly seems that way when you look at some of the applications on your SMART phone. For Example, one week after I bought my phone, it knew where I live and where I work. In the morning of workdays, it started giving me notifications about the traffic conditions on my way to work. In the afternoon, it gives me a notification about the traffic conditions on my way home. How did MY PHONE know where I live and work and how did it know what days and times I went to work and left for home? It must have learned all that by itself. That is some kind of intelligence, isn’t it? So now, I come to the definition of Artificial Intelligence. The most convincing definition that I found is (by Patrick Henry Winston): “Artificial Intelligence is a machine’s ability to Perceive, Reason and Act”. There are many different types of Artificial Intelligence including machine learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, vision and image recognition, pattern recognition, expert systems, planning, optimization and last but not least robotics. In my opinion, Artificial Intelligence is a Science that uses the latest Technology to create MAGIC. There are many questions in my mind? The first one is “How can AI be used in PM?” Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
So, how is Artificial Intelligence used in the Project Management field? As I explained earlier, Artificial Intelligence is a science that utilizes existing technology (computers, smart phones, robots, etc.) to perform certain tasks that require human-like intelligence (the magic). But what is the science behind the magic? Artificial Intelligence is based on algorithms that tell computers and other machines how to think and act intelligently. There are many tools and techniques used in Artificial Intelligence. I will try to touch upon some of the AI tools that can be useful in Project Management. Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
More tomorrow Saving Changes...
Drew CraigSr. Agile & Product Coach| VanguardPhiladelphia, Pa, United States
First suggestion ... write this up as a blog series. Additionally, if you create as a blog series, we as readers can subscribe via RSS feed.
Very interesting. I will be a reader. Saving Changes...
It would be amazing!
Just imagine you are entering a new risk in the risk registry and your PM tool automatically suggests you a series of risks entered previously in the tool and their mitigation, provides you with lessons learned from previous projects, recommends you an expert on the field (e.g. another project manager), refers you to a colleague to article available in the internet on that topic... Or even notifies you when the risk is about to happen based on some patterns calculated for projects similar to yours.
This said, I see this far away:
- At the Organisation level (at least from my experience): The PM tool does not allow to enter the information in a way that can be exploited (metadata + data e.g. by category/topics, using keywords), the information is entered in an heterogenous manner (just compare lessons learned from one project to another), and there is not the AI layer to make use of the data (in most cases, there are not even reporting tools/business intelligence to allow to download a report and exploit the data offline and manually)
- Globally: There is not a central repository for project data available worldwide and there is not the AI layer to exploit this data Saving Changes...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
This is a very interesting subject and can be subject to lots of debate. I can't call the results as "Magic" but Id call it Outcome as it is based on information fed into the system.
You might be able to apply artificial intelligence in Estimating but it will be limited. We have to remember that every project in a sense is unique.
If you have any examples in mind for the use of AI in PM then please share them with us. Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
Dear Rami:
The results appear like Magic and that's why I call it magic. Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
As promised yesterday, here is some more information about AI tools and techniques:
The first of the most common AI tools is Knowledge Based Expert Systems or KBES that tries to capture the knowledge of experts in a series of If-then statements that allow the computer to answer expert-level questions.
The second common tool is Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) which is a machine learning approach that models the human brain. ANNs demonstrate the ability to learn, recall, and generalize from training patterns or data (numeric, non-numeric or both).
The third AI tool is Genetic Algorithms (GAs) which are iterative search methods that mimic the natural biological evolution process and/or the social behavior of species. GAs utilize the natural evolution processes of selection, mutation and cross-over to arrive at near- optimum solutions to large-scale optimization problems, for which traditional mathematical search techniques may fail. Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
These AIs tools and techniques (and others) have already been used in several applications in the Project Management Field. But on a small scale. As Maria Isabel mentions, there is a lot of data about projects but they are scattered and not connected. However we can use organizational data to recognize patterns and predict some parameters as I will describe tomorrow. Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
Dear Andrew Craig. I actually tried to start this as a blog but did not find the right link. So I started it as a discussion. Saving Changes...
Khaled HamdyProjects Advisor to the Director General| Roads and Transport AuthorityDubai, United Arab Emirates
Dear Rami:
I will share some examples starting tomorrow. However, I would like to clarify the point about the ability of AI to deal with the fact that each project is unique.
How do we (humans) deal with the uniqueness of each new project? We draw on our experience with several previous projects that have some degree of similarity with the new "supposedly unique" project. We recognize patterns and similarities. That is what AI can do with varying degrees of accuracy. Actually that accuracy can improve with each new project it handles (machine learning).
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1 reply by Rami Kaibni
Jan 30, 2017 12:47 PM
Rami Kaibni
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I totally agree with this Khaled but can this be really applicable when it comes to a computerized application ?
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