Föreläsningspreimär: AI för projektledare

Äntligen har vi projektledare fått ett nytt verktyg som har potential att förändra många delar av vårt arbete, kanske i grunden? Jag tänker såklart på generativ AI (t.ex. ChatGPT). Spännande? Läskigt? Va?

En färsk undersökning (https://get.pmairevolution.com/report01) visar att majoriteten av oss projektledare (75%) är övertygade om att AI kommer förbättra vår förmåga att driva projekt. Samtidigt har vi självinsikt och 62% säger sig sakna tillräckliga kunskaper för att skörda framtidens läckerheter.

I ett försök att reda ut vad som händer och få igång tankarna har jag satt samman en praktisk inspirationsföreläsning kring AI och Projektledning med tre huvudblock

1. Varför så mycket prat om AI just nu?
2. Hur kan AI-verktygen påverka vår vardag? Kommer jag bli av med mitt jobb?
3. Vad kan du göra för att hänga med utan att bli paralyserad av allt som händer?

Växlar mellan nuet, konkreta tips och framtidsscenarios baserade på tillämpning av ny forskning.

I helgen var det smygpremiär med åhörare. Kul!

Låter det intressant?

3 praktiska AI-tips för projektledare

Det är lätt att bli stressad av allt som skrivs om AI , “AI kommer 10x din produktivitet” och själv har man inte startat. Jag har samlat tips på hur ChatGPT (Bard, Bing Chat eller Claude fungerar också ) kan hjälpa dig som projektledare idag, förhoppningsvis kan det ge inspiration att komma igång.

Här är tre områden där jag har haft stor hjälp av AI, tar också med exempel på promptar som ett frö, men testa själv - är du osäker kan du alltid fråga ChatGPT om tips. Promptarna skrivna på engelska, som jag oftast skriver på, men svenska går också bra.

Lärande

Som projektledare, särskilt konsult, kastas man ofta in i nya områden, ena projektet kan handla om IT-infrastruktur och andra om app-utveckling, eller dataanalys. Oftast har man experter i teamet som driver utvecklingen men för kommunikationen är det viktigt att skaffa sig en basförståelse.

När man vill utforska nya ämnen är ChatGPT en utmärkt coach, man kan ställa samma fråga 10 gånger utan att känna sig dum. Om ChatGPT själv ska servera information fritt ur minnet, d.v.s. man bistår inte med en text, är det viktigt att vara uppmärksam på “hallucinationer”, d.v.s. ChatGPT levererar felaktiga svar med hög självsäkerhet, dubbelkolla alltid.

Exempel på promptar:

✏️. För generell förståelse: I want you to act as an introductory guide to the subject of Insert Subject Here. Provide me with a concise overview, main principles, and why it's relevant today.

✏️. För Praktiska tillämpningar: I want you to act as a practical expert in Insert Subject Here

✏️. För framtida perspektiv: I want you to act as a futurist for Insert Subject Here. Describe current trends, potential future developments, and how they might impact society or industry.

När väl diskussionen är i gång, ställ uppföljningsfrågor, be ChatGPT att förklara enklare, o.s.v.

Summera texter

För att fullt kunna fokusera under möten kan det ibland vara bra att inte behöva bara ta korta stödanteckningar eller inga alls. ChatGPT är utmärkt på att sammanfatta.

Dom flesta mötesverktyg kan spela in det som sägs och transkribera med mycket hög kvalitet. Utifrån transkriptionen kan sammanfattning enkelt göras för utskick.

ChatGPT tenderar att hallucinera mindre när man ber den sammanfatta ett givet material än när man ställer öppna frågor.

Exempel på promptar:

✏️. I want you to act as a project manager. Review the meeting transcription, highlight the main discussions points, and organize decisions and tasks in a table with owners and timelines.

Självklart kan all text, t.ex. rapporter, e-mail kedjor, kontrakt, etc. summeras och dissekeras på liknande sätt.

Ett vanligt problem är att texten man vill ha sammanfattat är för lång, två lösningar

💡 Text splitter: Input files and long text into ChatGPT - Optimus Development (op-development.com)

💡Ladda upp hela filer: Om ChatGPT plus används kan hela filer enkelt laddas upp.

Förbättra skriven kommunikation

Ibland måste formuleringen bli rätt, du ska skicka ett viktigt mail till styrgruppen eller någon i teamet. Då kan ChatGPT hjälpa till med formuleringen och ge återkoppling på det du skrivit.

Du kan antingen använda en punktlista eller en draft på vad du vill ha sagt och följande promptar för att få återkoppling:

✏️. Du ska ge kritisk återkoppling per mail och vill veta hur mottagaren upplever svaret: I want you to act as the recipient of my email providing critical feedback. Evaluate the wording and expressions used, and share how it might be perceived. Help me identify areas that could be softened or clarified.

✏️. Du måste leverera jobbiga nyheter: I want you to act as the receiver of this email containing difficult news. Assess the language and structure, and explain how it might affect you emotionally. Suggest any changes to make it more compassionate.

✏️. Du vill säkerställa att Actions är tydliga: I want you to act as a team member receiving my email with action items. Evaluate how clear the instructions are, and suggest formatting or wording changes to ensure the required actions are unmistakable.

Mycket information! Välj nu ut ett exempel och en prompt och testa! Nyfiken vad väljer du?

Will AI take our jobs?

Let’s try to untangle this controversial subject and speculate about the future of work.

As a starting point we can look at the words of two great thinkers:

AI will take all our jobs and few new ones will be created

Susskind, D. (2020). A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Metropolitan Books

AI is redefining “routine” tasks and taking over both manual and cognitive jobs, posing a risk to up to half of all jobs; while it can create unforeseen tasks and jobs, there’s no guarantee of sufficient job replacement, necessitating a revamp in education and training to focus on fostering creativity, emotional intelligence, and lifelong learning.

AI will take current jobs but create better new ones

Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast

The introduction of AI may cause job turnover, but it ultimately leads to more jobs and higher wages, as AI-driven efficiencies lower prices and spur new demand, creating new enterprises; however, there’s a need for individuals to adapt and acquire new skills, often aided by AI, to thrive in these changing circumstances.

The billion-dollar question is of course whether AI will create more jobs that it takes. I will refrain from taking a stance here, but instead focus on the arguments Susskind and Andreessen have in common and what you can do to improve your chances in both scenarios.

AI will take over tasks, not jobs

Your job consists of several tasks and the AI automation process targets tasks not the full job.

AI will start automating tasks that are repetitive, predictable, and require low cognitive engagement. But it will not stop there, we already today see AI taking on tasks that need creativity, problem-solving and considerable cognitive engagement, like data analysis, report writing and generating photos/illustrations (AI pretty good with creativity see Automating creativity — by Ethan Mollick — One Useful Thing).

Leaving social interaction and deep thinking to us humans. As AI advances, it will automate more advanced tasks, leading to changes in job-roles. We already see how e.g., Microsoft is trying to improve AI capability for social interaction to another level with project Rumi (Project Rumi — Microsoft Research)

What about my job?

• If your job consists of a few similar tasks, then your entire role is likely to be automated by AI in the near future.
• If your job involves a variety of different tasks and social interactions, then your role is likely to continue existing, but being re-defined since AI will take over much of your routine tasks. Note: today, writing a report is considered a routine task!

A full day of deep thinking?

The complex stuff, deep thinking, is left to us humans — this is a different beast compared to tackling routine tasks.

Our capacity for deep thinking is limited, doing cognitively “easy” tasks makes it possible for us to do 8–10 hour work days. In a future where AI assists us with all the easy tasks, our workday must be optimized for deep thinking and look quite different.

Deep thinkers such as Yuval Harari and Warren Buffet are known for spending a lot of time meditating and reading. I’m not sure if my manager would be happy with me spending 4 hours meditating and reading each workday…But our brains are not wired for 8 hours of constant complex thoughts.

We must throw away many of the current conceptions when structuring the new workdays, if we do it the right way, the future might turn out bright.

Start preparing now!

It’s crucial now, more than ever, for us to set the strategy and tactics for:

• Embracing Lifelong Learning: We must spend more time studying for each unit of output, each day is a day for learning.
• Developing Non-Automatable Skills: Skills like critical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence. The term non-automatable skills are highly dynamic and we must be agile.
• Adapt and Be Flexible: The work landscape is changing, and we need to be prepared and open to change. This might mean changing our career paths or adopting new ways of working.

Conclusion

Will there be work for everyone? There will be fewer “easy” tasks to perform, forcing us to re-define jobs. AI won’t steal our jobs, but it will change them, requiring us to adapt and evolve more and quicker. We have a big chance of turning this into something positive for all of us.

AI in Project Management: A Community Perspective

Last week I posted on AI and Project Management, it sparked an amazing amount of attention, by my standards it “went viral” 🥳

For you who read it, thank you for your engagement through reactions and comments 🙌 I’m overwhelmed of all your positive energy 😊

Your insights, opinions, and thoughtful reflections enriched the conversation and inspired me to devote more of my time to understanding, navigating, and helping with this paradigm shift.

Reading all of your comments many times, it felt like a snapshot of how the community thinks about AI right now and worth a its own summary.

Here it is - the comments viewed from a few perspectives 😀

🌟 How do you feel about AI?

The general sentiment in the comments was overwhelmingly positive to AI! A sentiment analysis of the comments revealed:

• Positive: 41 comments
• Negative: 2 comments
• Neutral: 9 comments

Everyone has buckled up and looking forward to enjoying the ride!

📈 Expected Positive Aspects of AI in Project Management

The comments highlighted several promising aspects:

• Efficiency Improvement: Automating tasks to save time.
• Enhanced Forecasting: Utilizing data for better planning.
• Innovation: Exploring new applications and solutions.

Curious, what will you use all the saved time for?

❗ Concerns Regarding AI in Project Management

Some concerns were raised:

• Limited Transformative Impact? Need to see qualitative improvements.
• Uncertainties: Realization of actual benefits and impact.

There is a lot of talking going on and you (and me) want to see hard facts! Does it really kill those admin tasks?

💡 Good Ideas and Tips found in the comments

📚Reading and exploring

• "Mastering The Dynamics of Innovation" by James Utterback
• "Understanding Practical Project Management" (Haufe, 2023), by Peter Taylor
• https://www.routledge.com/AI-and-the-Project-Manager-How-the-Rise-of-Artificial-Intelligence-Will/Taylor/p/book/9781032006574
• https://DolphinGPT.ai
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joejustice_3-prompts-to-use-chatbots-for-learning-activity-7094065009424543744-e1MD?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

🙌 Communities

• https://www.meetup.com/London-Project-Data-and-Analytics-meetup/

🛠️ Tools / apps to try

• Keto Software
• Taskade
• Sembly AI

🔮 Something to think about…

Gary Lloyd lifted a perspective worth pondering about.

“Doing the wrong thing efficiently is not just a waste—it's a missed opportunity. As AI transforms project management, we must look beyond mere process controls and automation.”

How do we do it right? What lies beyond automating the current way of working? What is the true paradigm shift?

Conclusion

We are positive, excited, curious and optimistic about the transformative potential of AI.

What is your next step on this journey? What would you like help with?

Looking forward continue sharing thoughts and experiences with you! 🌟

Current status of AI in project management

Project management is complex, it will not be solved by AI in a big bang, but instead in several task level improvements. You will have AI drafting the project plan saving you 30% of the work, you suddenly realize that note taking, and distribution of action items is automatic now, and so on. In this way AI will transform much of the knowledge work as we know it today, task by task.

How will this happen? What can AI assist with? How to start?

I took a deep dive in the current understanding on how AI will transform project management.

Let’s start by looking which AI capabilities making it suitable for project management:

1. Data analysis: AI can analyze large amounts of data quickly, opening up for improved forecasting of timelines, budget, resource allocation, potential risks, and even project success probabilities. As long as the data is available.
2. Automation of repetitive tasks: AI is perfect for automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as data entry, schedule updates, and progress reporting. This will also help reducing human errors.
3. Create and summarize text: AI is great at text generation and can be used for creating draft project documentation, assisting with communication and understanding complex contracts. This might be the first thing to try.

Leveraging these capabilities will improve the efficiency, leading to less project management overhead with improved quality. Looking at the project triangle we usually say this is impossible: lower cost, shorter project time and higher quality. Great promises.

But there are some obstacles to overcome…

Challenges of AI in Project Management:

1. Resistance to Adoption: There might be resistance to embracing AI among project managers and members, it could be seen as a threat not an opportunity. Also, for companies to take the IT investment, up-skilling and adopting processes, will require giving it high priority.
2. Data Privacy and Security: With increasing AI reliance, ensuring the safety of project data processed by AI is crucial. If not solved, this will block roll out.
3. Risk of Over-Automation: There's a potential risk of over-relying on AI and overlooking human insight and judgement. This will be a dynamic challenge since the sweet spot between human or an AI will change as AI improves its capabilities.
4. Integration Issues: Seamlessly integrating AI tools with existing project management methods and systems can be technically challenging, especially giving access to company data.

Change mangers will have a busy time moving forward 🥳

How to get started?

First of all, start now. As Prof. Ethan Mollick suggests in a worklab podcast, take “the top 20 percent most creative people in your company, require they all use AI for a week, and give a million-dollar prize to whoever comes up with the best way to automate parts of their job while promising you’re not going to fire anyone as a result of this.”

That is, work from the ground up, put the tools in the hands of the users (project managers) and let them tinker, explore and share learnings.

You can start now without any risk and at an exceptionally low cost…

Microsoft Bing Chat Enterprise is a safe and solid way to get started, it gives you access to an AI-powered chat (GPT-4) with high Microsoft standards for data protection. This can be used for text-based tasks, such as drafting reports and streamlining communication.

Or set up a “AI-lab” with computers outside your IT infrastructure only allowing to use publicly available data. This will open for hundreds of tools. I would suggest keeping it simple and go for a ChatGPT Plus subscription, this gives access to plug-ins and the code-interpreter which can be used for working with data. Create business cases and go for a full-scale implementation if it looks good.

If you want to - go all in and fine tune your own language model.

When including your company data into the language model it opens a whole other level of benefits. For example, you could ask it to summarize the lesson learned from all similar projects into guidelines for the current project or create a project plan based on previous work and have it writing it according to the company language guidelines.

This is much more advanced and expensive compared to using pre-trained models, such as Google Bard, ChatGPT or Llama 2.

One way to explore including own data in the language models might be reaching out to service providers such as Sanalabs or Glean.

How to learn more

For learning more about how to leverage AI for project management check out:

• Ricardo Vargas offers insightful courses such as the AI-Driven Project Management Masterclass and additional content on LinkedIn.
• Peter Taylor has written multiple books on this topic.
• Michael Kaplan, explores these topics and shares his findings on LinkedIn.

Have you started using generative AI for your professional work yet? which tasks does it help with? I’m curious to hear what you have been up to 😃

Generative AI: My hopes for the Rest of 2023

 I’m gearing up for an exciting autumn as work resumes post summer break! Last year, Generative AI hit the public sphere and has been gaining momentum ever since. The tempo is furious.

A lot of push

Big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple are investing heavily in generative AI, each with unique strategies. This push will result in broader adoption of generative AI, it you will hopefully encounter it this fall. In parallel, we're also seeing the major management firms providing strategy guides for AI, indicating a strategic shift.

With this backdrop, the autumn will be something extra!

Here's what I'm excited about for the rest of 2023:

1. AI from Non-Techies: I look forward to understanding how AI is explored and implemented by non-tech professionals. How are HR, line managers, CFOs, and even philosophers thinking about and leveraging this technology? More use-cases and less foundational model comparisons.

2. Enterprise adoption: Will we see broad enterprise adoption of generative? We already have an enterprise version of BingChat and a price tag on M365 Copilot. Will there be an explosion of enterprise solutions hitting the market? What are the consequence in terms of:

Productivity Boost: How is AI affecting productivity across different sectors? What are the concrete use cases, and time savings? How do we spend that “extra time”?

Job Market Response: What is the response to automation? Will we see a flood of new jobs already now or will there be a gap? A recent Netflix job posting for a machine learning platform product manager shows the role AI will play in content creation, likely reducing the need for human writers. How will such changes impact the job market?

AI-Integrated Business Processes: Are we going to see business processes, such as project management, being redesigned with generative AI at their core? How will a day for a project manager look like if 50% of the management is handled by AI

Up-skilling: How to train millions of employees to leverage the tools?

3. AI solving global problems: How is AI solving engineering problems? If AlphaGo could surprise a whole world by the “37th move”, could AI surprise us by new solutions to engineering problems?

Climate Change: How is AI helping us to win the fight against global warming? What are the concrete examples of AI-generated ideas helping combat climate change?

Cure for diseases: We have seen Alphafold starting to be used in protein research, but what else is happening in the life-science space?

Lot’s of questions, and hopefully lot’s of answers in the months to come. Excited for the journey!

What are you most excited for?