Leading the Future With AI in a Brand New Era of Project Management at SKILup Days 2024

Hi everybody. Welcome to Leading the Future with AI in a brand new era of project management. Um, you might be surprised that this is a topic that we're talking about in the sense of brand new era, because to be honest, AI has been around for quite some time already, but it's just now starting to come into the public eye and people are starting to be super interested in what is going on and people are starting using it.

Colleagues are using it, competitors are using it. So do we need to use it too, maybe? And if I'm a project manager in ai, will it change my job?

It will. And let's look at it. So, hi, I'm U Lopez or Ruth.

You can say I'm an agile coach and a psychological consultant and a senior advisor for People cert. And today we will be tackling AI and project management together. So let's have a look at what it's all about.

So what can AI really do? Because to be honest, a lot of people think that it's way more magic than it actually is right now, or at least as it is for the general public right now. I'm sure if you are at Google or anywhere else where the AI is being developed, you can do some pretty amazing stuff that everybody doesn't know about it yet.

But right now, this is it. So this is a, um, drawing from the PMI report of 2023, and it shows roughly what the AI does, what a machine. So they call the ai, what the machine can do and what the human has to still do and where there is an overlap.

So we can see, let me pull up my laser pointer. So as you can see, this graph is divided. There are three main areas, uh, divided into like three pinkish colors.

And you can see down here is the low task complexity. And that is where the machines or the ais can really, really do their job and be amazing at what they do. So it has a lot to do with lessons learned summaries, notes, summaries, report generation.

It's a lot of data crunching to be honest. So there's not a lot yet that the machines do all by themselves. So that's good.

We, project managers are still in our jobs. We know we won't be replaced anytime soon by ai. By ai, so that's a good thing.

However, AI can make your life exceedingly easier if you are using it. So what can AI help us with? We call this assisting.

So assisting means that it'll produce some sort of data for us. We will review the data, we will give it more context. Can you change this and that into a graph?

Can you make this and that into a, uh, into a table for instance? Can you visualize this? Can you get me more details on this?

And that, that is what it does. Very often we do this in a chat bot type of thing. You've probably heard of chat GPT, I guess.

So that's, that's the thing that that is happening right now. And very often that means we're looking at some types of data sets, like costs, schedules, maybe. Um, we will look at, um, risks for instance and cost benefit, and then we will have the AI look it over, give us a brief analysis, give us some risks, give us some mitigation strategies, and then we will have to look it over again and actually think strategically about this.

Does this really match my project? Does it not? Um, is this something that the AI very creatively came up with, but it doesn't match what we are doing.

Uh, it doesn't match our target audience and so on. So we will start narrowing down the data that we're getting. And in this back and forth is how we will be doing a lot of analysis of data.

So putting in data, working with the AI to get the right context, and then taking the results and slamming it onto a PowerPoint like I do it basically. So that is, that is what is being done. That's the assistance level.

Obviously there is what we're really looking forward to. I throw in a couple of reports into the AI and it produces me a complete strategy. That would be great, right?

Doesn't do that yet, sadly. So everything that has to do with project decision making, like the real case with the numbers, with the money we have with the target audience, we have what would be smart still a job for the project manager. Um, or when we're talking about business case, so where we're talking about reasoning for things, why we do this, what is our mission?

What's the value still stuff that we need to do. AI can help us with making the text prettier that we write, obviously spell checking, stuff like that. But that is more like automated stuff that we, that we are using there.

So as we can see, there is not yet a lot that the AI will do all on their own. It can help us and it can make our lives easier to be honest, because don't we just hate setting up PowerPoints for days and it really makes it easier. So I actually used an AI to produce this slide deck, for instance.

Um, boy did it help me timewise. I got an outline so fast, it was amazing. Did the AI make my, my whole thing?

No, um, couldn't trust it to do that yet on the quality level that we need. So I still had to go in and then change things, put other tags, put pictures, and so on. So this is a very nice use case that you can see right now on screen is what, uh, is the beautiful symbiosis of what a human does with ai, so to say.

So now that we know what it basically can do and that there's not a lot yet that it can do, what are we looking at with ai? So let us have a look at the next slide. What does my job look like in the future?

We have seen that AI will take away some of the routine tasks. So it'll probably do a lot of timetable scheduling. It'll, um, take reports that we write and turn it into, uh, PowerPoints or presentations, and then we still need to check it though and so on.

So there's a lot of that administrative work that is going away. Um, that might be something that makes a PMO very happy or maybe not if it's their whole job. So we need to have a look at we as project managers, if we aren't doing this, what are we doing?

And they very, um, often compare a project manager's job to running after people to be honest. So it's a lot of calling, Hey, how are you doing? Um, how is it going with this and that, will we meet the deadline?

If no, what can we do it? So that part of project manager management just becomes bigger and you have way more time for this. So to be able to harness this, you need to of course know what AI can do and you need to be able to use the AI so that it can help you not do those tasks.

So this would be number one that I would suggest grow your data literacy. And obviously tech is always evolving, so that means you need to stay on top of your knowledge. You need to be able to understand how to talk to a chat GBT or an AI like this, that is what we call prompt engineering.

So it's a structured way of writing, um, the ai, sometimes it, it feels like there's a human on the other side. Trust me, there's not, um, just a machine. So you need to be able to tell them in a very specific way what you need.

Prompt engineering, I like to say it's basically like writing a very precise requirements stuff we don't do anymore, right? With, uh, agile, you know, the stories, but like the olden days, I need you to put in this and that data into this and that format, produce this and this. Give me these many word count, put it in this type of language and so on.

So very specific and is sort of technical writing as well. That is what we call prompt engineering. There are many different ways of doing this.

That's the basics. You need to learn it fast, um, very nicely. However, this is a thing that you will learn by doing.

So, uh, no, no, not being afraid about this. Just jumping into it, try it out on some private stuff first and then have a look at how you can maybe use it in your career. Then obviously you need to have at least some sort of data analytics skill.

So that means you need to understand different types of data because you will need to make the data usable for the ai or at least you need to know what kind of data you can collect and give to the ai. So that is something worth brushing up on. If you don't yet know what types of data there are and how AI deals with that scrubbing data, for instance.

Um, and how data needs to be in the same format all the time. So if I for instance, have a PowerPoint and then I have a Word document and then I have some weird text on SharePoint, we all know it, right? The SharePoint where everything is, that doesn't work.

I can't plug that into the ai. I need the same format. I need tables, I need axles for instance, with data.

So that is the type of data analytics as a project manager you need to at least know about so that you can use this. Um, very obviously. This also means that you need to gather data in the same way.

So probably the same project management technique needs to be used everywhere. I know we don't like to hear it because our project management method is obviously the best, but it does really help streamlining maybe using a common methodology, my favorite Prince two for instance, and using it to have a baseline for all projects, have the same types of documents, the same templates and so on. It'll make a huge difference when you're scrubbing your data for ai.

So what else can we do? We need to do, we need to know tools because obviously right now the most that you can do really is in GPTs and stuff like this, but there are more and more tools coming every day and we need to have our ear to the market basically and understand what tools can help us. And there are not a lot of tools that are free.

Obviously people wanna make money with ai, so we need to know what actually makes sense. Where do I use just the GBT, the chat bot thing or does it really make sense to pour money into this for the business as a business solution? And then we're talking about stuff like data privacy, ethical use of data bias.

So that is something you need to sadly check with your IT department. So knowing the tools is a great start. I'll have some um, some newsletters for you in the end with a nice QR code that you can photograph and have a look at what I and several CEOs in the AI and tech sphere are looking at in the sense of the 10 best newsletters to learn about tools, prompt engineering and analytics.

So have a look at that and you'll be good. But what else? So now that we've covered the data part, we need to be able to embrace learning because it will change, it is rapidly changing right now and it will probably even more rapidly change in the future.

Maybe AI won't even be the same and maybe it doesn't take a long time for AI to be very competent and do stuff that we thought before it couldn't do yet. So in that sense, continuous learning and the growth mindset really needs to be ingrained into your personality. I think this goes for a lot of people and blue and white collar jobs that will be using ai, but as a project manager, it should be your MO anyway already.

Um, obviously also failure and feedback culture because if I have learned something, why not share it with my colleagues and have a talk about what worked, what didn't, and having a good list of lessons and feedback. We know it's invaluable in a project management network as well. So mentoring, networking, sharing with each other, what works, especially within your organization.

There really are no winners or losers in this like IMD data AI specialist. You could do that, but as a project manager and if you want to stay a good project manager, share the heck out of it with your colleagues so you can grow together as a uh, company and your organizational maturity will grow in that as well. So now that I know that I have to learn a lot of stuff and I have grown my literacy on all stuff that is AI and tech, now I have time to actually do what a project manager has to do.

Talking to people, right? Talking to shareholders, talking to stakeholders, having a look at how they're doing. Is everybody happy?

Are we meeting our deadlines? Um, is the customer happy? What is going on with the production?

And so on and so on. And that is what I like to call focus on people focus on people really has two sides of the metal. So there's the, I need to focus on people as a project manager, which means I need to make sure that people in my project are happy, teams are being facilitated.

If I'm not doing it myself and I at least have people for it, um, I need to make sure that stakeholders are happy and obviously no project without change management, right? So we need to be able to embrace change on an organizational level as well and need to be prepared. That stuff will change in your project.

So maybe throw in a little bit of prince too agile there as well. On the other hand, you can only do this if you yourself know how to deal with people. So strengthen your soft skills.

One of the most, I think or biggest, uh, advantages in the job world nowadays. Uh, humans will always be human in. So making that human part of you really, really good and sharp is what will secure you a job in the future.

So your interpersonal skills, how you deal with people like getting a feeling or a read for for a room, emotional intelligence, what we call that strategic thinking. Anything that maybe the AI can't do yet, we need to be really good at. So how do we do that?

Let us have a look at the amount of stuff that the AI is doing. So we know most of the things that AI is doing is automation, right? Task automation is about 70% of what the AI is doing right now.

So making an invite into a calendar thing, um, taking a meeting and transcribing it with notes, automatically taking meeting notes and putting that into to-do lists. That is what what's being done. I think very good examples for this are, are things like Microsoft copilot or any other copilot out there.

It's kind of a, I would say a new age name for um, a virtual sort of assistant that is an ai. So that is what's being done. So that frees up time, right?

For strategic and people work. Um, and that's a lot of what the AI is doing, but still 20% planning work, the AI is not doing that much. 10% of what the AI does is strategy.

So that is still the chunk that we need to do ourselves. So this is also where we should focus. So having good plans, adapting our plans, having good agile planning, and also having a look at how our project strategy fits into the whole big company thing.

Alignment. We all know that if the project doesn't align well, people don't know what it's about. We have no vision and no mission.

There's probably a very high chance of failure. So that part really needs to be secure and that's our job more now so than ever. So let us say that.

Okay, we know there's, what else? What can AI help me with in real time in a project now? Okay, so we also have real time monitoring.

There are probably tools that we would use for this, not A GBT. Obviously there are a ton of project management tools out there that are already incorporating AI into it. You may not even know that they do it yet, but the usual suspects, you know, the Atlassian, um, a lot of the project management tools that you might be using right now have already or will in the very soon future be throwing in ai uh, scripts to be helping with real time monitoring.

So if I'm adding editing something on a ticket here, the card on the other side of the world gets updated. And that is valuable because as we know, as of 2024 thanks to the pandemic and everything, 80% of teams are actually globally distributed. So having that real time, uh, working together on platforms essential, and this is what a lot of the AI will be doing for us.

Um, isn't it great that you don't have to update the board yourself anymore? Then predictive ANA analytics, this is something to do with, for instance, what you know in your task boards. Um, where are we right now?

How much work did we do? Will we meet our deadline with this much work left right? These sorts of projections, the graphs that we see there, workload, uh, work in progress, how much is done?

My fellows, scrummy and Kanban people know what I'm talking about. So all of these metric driven things, that is what the AI will be doing for us as well inside of a project management tool. And then obviously reporting.

There are some project management tools out there, uh, that will already help you with generating automatic reports and sending them to stakeholders as you see fit. Uh, obviously those are paid versions. I'm not gonna endorse certain tool here unless they give me money for it.

So you'll probably have to check with your company and your org what works for you with data protection and so on. But believe me, there are a ton of the tools out there that you can use. And a quick Google search will give you all of the tools that you can ever research anyway.

So have a look at this. If you are looking into enhance your, uh, dashboards for your project, um, and to give people more visual transparency into what's going on in your project right now. So what else is there?

Obviously you need to start preparing your organization for ai. So you might think, hey, that's a job for management. Uh, yes it is.

But as we know, very often it does not yet work that way. And as a project manager, you are at the forefront of a lot of the tech stuff going on. You will be one of the first people to hear it.

You're constantly upskilling yourself. So why not jump into the fray and have a look at how to prepare your organization for ai. Become the consultant of your management, so to say.

Don't tell them what to do but give them ideas on what they could do and sell it to them that will help you in the long run. So you need to be make sure that hopefully there is a culture of innovation established. So that means that as an organization we know lifelong learning, emerging technologies like AI is something that we need to dive into probably in the next one, two years, the latest.

Because until then everybody else will be using it. And if you want to stay relevant in the market nowadays, you need to start using your AI as well so you can free up your time to do the valuable work, valuable work that will actually bring you market shares and happy customers. So make sure that that happens.

If it doesn't, I strongly recommend connecting with a, uh, with groups of peers to try and find out how did they do this culture integration into their company? How hard was it? And it's always easy to go to a manager and say, well, you know, the company over there, the competition, they're doing it.

So maybe we should do it too. If all things fail that very often works. So go and talk to your competition about this as well or your colleagues at least.

Um, network on LinkedIn, on whatever platform you need. Uh, join groups of project managers in AI and talk with them about what is needed and what they're doing right now, obviously in your local area so that it makes sense for you as well. So what next?

You need to be investing and upskilling. That also means that people in your project team should be upskilling. So you need a budget.

I know not every company knows about this yet. Project managers need a budget and they need to be able to give people training and development programs. And if that is not something you can do right now, you need to talk to hr.

So make sure that you get some budget or some people or senior team leads at least can get into these things and have a look at what AI programs are interesting. This might mean that you will have to check out some stuff for yourself first and then then come back to HR and say, okay, so I can really recommend this and that obviously it's also good for your cv so go ahead and do it, but make sure that it happens, that it comes onto the training calendar in your company as well. Then you need to start using AI because the more people start using it, the more feedback there is, the faster you can have to-do lists, how to talk to an AI guidelines for your company, how to chat GPT or risk management and so on.

Having all of those um, really valuable lessons, logs and so on. That is the thing that you need right now. And this means talking about it.

So talking to other teams and being very transparent about yes, we are using it, we're using it to this amount right now. Um, we are just bungling our way through it and having a look what it can do. Um, now it probably does not give us real thing right now, but it will give us real things in probably two or three weeks.

So wanna join our team and have a look at what AI can do for us. That is really where you need to start. So make sure that your company in some way will endorse this training.

Don't train everybody yourself. You are too valuable for that. Make sure it comes on the training calendar and start using it and then tell other people to use it as well.

Keep in mind that you always need to check data privacy for this. So if you have very, very like sensitive proprietary data, how much money you made as a company, that year numbers that shouldn't be out there, maybe don't plug that into chat GPT just yet. And so make sure that you have a a solution for that first.

Again, check with your IT team. They will kill me if I don't tell you this. So make sure that that works.

So you know what you need to know, you need to upskill, you know how to prepare your organization for it. You know what AI can do and what it can do at least on a theoretical level. Let's have a look at some practical stuff 'cause that's what you're here for.

So the easiest thing right now that you can try right away that costs you no money and just a little bit of time is looking for prompts. So somebody who has already written something like something that you can copy and paste and throw it into the GPT of your choice. I personally like to work with chat GPT also because some of the other large language models are not yet available in Europe where I'm based.

So I think entropic released couple of days ago or last week or something. So I'm looking to check that out. But chat GPT is the biggest one.

LAMA isn't here yet and so on. So have a look at chat GPT, it's easy, it's fast, it works right now. So I have produced for you two types of prompts that you can use to have a look at what the AI can and what it can do on a uh, specific example.

So obviously this is a bit of a bit of a fun, right? Herding Lord knows that sometimes project management feels like herding a bunch of cats. Um, but this is also interesting because these prompts will show you what AI can do and what it can do.

If you want to use this for yourself obviously try to find something else to put into this here. So, uh, just take the blue thing, fluffy cats and put something in that works for your project. Give me a list of the top five topics around project management and AI for instance, and then address these in a webinar title and short description of content.

So it'll produce basically a webinar outline for you and some salesy text. What you can also do with it is for instance all sorts of analytics or assessments. Risk assessment is one of the things that it already does very well.

So go out and try that. I will be showing you two examples of the webinar and of the, so one of the webinar and one of the risk assessment, what it looks like, what you can expect. And as you can see in these uh, generated images, there are some weird stuff going on with the two-headed cat over here and there's something going on over there.

Uh, AI won't take your job just yet, it can't even drop. So don't be alarmed, just go and try it out. But it's very fun to use.

So let's have a look at what happened when I typed in. Give me a list of five topics for fluffy cats and webinar title description. So let's have a look at what it came up with in the sense of risk assessment.

So we're doing a project to herd cats. Isn't every project like that sometimes generate a detailed risk assessment in a table format for this project? That's it.

Didn't tell it anything more. What did it come up with? It actually came up with a pretty good table and if you look at it, I just said a detailed risk assessment and table format and it with a mind of its own or from data that it was trained on basically came up with.

Okay? So there needs to be a risk, a risk description. It needs to have a likelihood, an impact and a mitigation strategy.

That's a pretty good risk register log if I say so myself and it didn't even tell it this. So try to save your time and give the AI some ideas on what to do but not too much in the beginning. Just type away have it do something and then take a look and give it more context.

A will save you so much more time to do it this way instead of coming up with the perfect prompt. And what do I need to write? Oh yeah, the table needs to have this and that.

It's actually pretty smart as you can see. So just try it and start messing with it. Have fun and see what it can do.

So let's have a look at the content of this. 'cause the visuals are pretty good, right? As you can see I've highlighted some stuff, some stuff that is fun and some stuff that will give us some idea of limitations as well.

So it said okay, certainly here's a detailed risk assessment for herding cats. Um, lack of cooperation. Don't I know it?

Uh, cats may not respond to attempts at herding. MM-hmm likelihood 80%. Yes it's very high.

Anybody who owns a cat knows that they probably don't want to do what you tell them, even if they hurt you and they probably hear you all right? The impact of this might be high because if my project is about herding cats and they do not respond to herding, that's like project failure, right? So that's a pretty bad thing.

So what do we do? Particular training sessions would like to see that but okay. Um, methods such as treats.

Yes, that is a good one. So as you can see, you might need to go in there and have a look at some of the stuff it puts out and check if it's relevant or not because some things might match something might. So what else did it come up with?

It's also a bit fun. So let's have a look at it. Health and safety concerns.

Yes, cats may pose health and safety risks to project participants, especially if they become agitated or aggressive. This is very nice for writing for saying they might bite you and you might get some sort of weird disease toxoplasmosis comes to mind. So stuff like this, likelihood 60%, yeah it's a bit of a stop and go depending on what types of cats you have, but this would still have a high impact as the people who are sick.

Not a good thing for the company, right? So implement strict hygiene protocols. Sounds smart.

Provide protective gear such as gloves and face shields. Wow those might be hell caps that he is warning about sometimes mine is. So yeah, he knows what he's talking about.

Then something comes up where I was like wait a second. Cultural differences. Cats may have different cultural backgrounds or or experiences.

Yeah, uh, maybe if this was a project with people, very, very important. But with cats, nah, not so much so. And fostering a culture of respect and understanding, I wanna see that with a cat.

Don't think this works. So as you can see, some things are really good, some things are more like hit and miss. So take it with a grain of salt and always, always check what it's doing.

One last thing, legal and ethical considerations. Yes, animal welfare, very interesting. This is the type of risk that we very often tend to forget.

So actually pretty good, right? I mean there were a couple of more risks as you can see I just made a couple of screenshots that are interesting but it came up with some pretty good varied risks and risk mitigation ideas. Consult with legal.

If you ever heard Katz, please consult with legal first. So good thing. So what does this tell us?

This tells us that large language models or chatbots are very creative but they need good quality control. So you need to definitely have a couple of cycles of checking what they're telling you because not all of it may be relevant and sometimes not all of it is true. So you need to fact check a lot and that is crucial when you're using your ai.

Just not go mindlessly into it and say, well the AI did it, it must be good. They'll fact check things. So this is what AI can do and you've seen some of the things that it doesn't do yet.

So it doesn't do well yet where it's still a bit wonky as well, but pretty nice results, right? I mean for what? 10 minutes sitting in front of the computer typing something, getting a result like this.

This is pretty good. So what if I say I want a bit more than this? Something else In chat GBT, there are a ton of tools that can help you.

As we said before, not all of them are free. So I have a couple of them here for you that are free to try that. I use myself.

For instance, I produced the slide deck with Gamma. There are a couple of, um, tools actually, uh, online browser based tools that you can use. But I like gamma.

I like the stuff it puts out the picture that generates are pretty good. Um, and it's also available in I think a ton of languages. Um, I think the biggest ones are there, uh, English, Spanish, I think maybe even Chinese I've seen.

So this is really great if you need to have quick translations or stuff like that, you need to write in another language and it's very easy to use and it's completely free. You get like a couple of credits per day and they're so big that you can definitely, I don't know, produce maybe five, um, five uh, slide decks with pictures with all created within the same browser window. Very, very good.

Really recommend. What else is there? Glitter glitter io.

It's a very fun name and a very fun logo. Uh, looks a bit like something to do with uh, stars, but it, it's not. So it's a process guide creator.

So I will for instance click through something, talk over it and glitter will be uh, capturing my screen and it will produce step by step process guides with visuals that you can plug into your knowledge database right away and it's very good. So that is something to have a look at. Very interesting for project managers that need to uh, document a lot.

Don't we love documenting? Not really. So you glitter.

What else can you do? Lessons learned reports. Throw your PDFs of lessons learned reports into docu mind and have it extract overarching lessons from them.

So you can have a very fast set up of your project lessons database and you can get your project team skilled up for next projects. Super easy, super interesting. Just starting out as well.

Have an eye on it, try it out, really love it. And then there's a lot of other stuff, but I cannot show you every tool that there is. I think these three are really good for project managers to try out.

com. Uh, it will help you research different types of ais for different types of things that you need to do, not just for project management. There's a ton of stuff for marketing out there for HR as well for finance.

So really have a look at this website and find your own. Um, you can check out tools that might help and you can learn them and it'll show if it's freeware or not or if there's free plans as well. And they only recommend good quality stuff.

It's a sort of a, uh, group of people that are using it and they are telling each other about cool AI tools and it'll have featured tools as well. So have a look and try it out. What else is there to be said?

Go out, try your ai, get proficient with it. Start learning today. How do you do that?

Scan this QR code that I prepared for you and the uh, it will link you to our website that has the 10 best AI newsletter tools as of 2024. I subscribe to these myself. They will give you bite-sized daily AI newsletters.

Um, you don't need to subscribe to all of them. Um, my favorite is TLDR and AI tool report. You will see this if you check the website.

So have a look at this and start upskilling yourself after a certain time. You'll get this feeling that the daily AI news centers are a bit spammy. That is when you have started learning about ai.

Oh, I know this stuff. Ah, yeah, this is not interesting. Start unsubscribing obviously, but have a look at these.

They will really supercharge your learning and they will also give you courses that are actually pretty good that will teach you about what AI is way more on a technical level than I ever could. So check this out and have a look at it. So now we've come to an end.

I've talked you through what AI can, what it can do, what you need to do in your organization to use it, what you yourself need to do, what you can upskill with. I've given you some prompts, some good tools. Now it's up to you.

Thank you very much. Let us start with the q and a part of this webinar and please reach out anytime. Get in touch.

org. org in the membership area. We have some really, really cool webinars as well as white papers on how to use AI and project management.

Check it out. It's really good. Um, it's good value for money to be honest.

And thank you very much for listening. I am very interested to see what is going on in the q and a and for all questions that you might have about AI tool that you might want to use. Um, whatever you have, throw it at me.

I'll be happy to answer.