How the Rise of Artificial Intelligence Will Change Your World
A new book from the author of #1 best-selling book ‘The Lazy Project Manager’
Enabling project managers to adapt to the new technology of artificial intelligence, this first comprehensive book on the topic discusses how AI will reinvent the project world and allow project managers to focus on people.
Studies show that by 2030, 80 percent of project management tasks, such as data collection, reporting, and predictive analysis, will be carried out by AI in a consistent and efficient manner. This book sets out to explore what this will mean for project managers around the world and equips them to embrace this technological advantage for greater project success.
Filled with insights and examples from tech providers and project experts, this book is an invaluable resource for PMO leaders, change executives, project managers, programme managers, and portfolio managers. Anyone who is part of the global community of change and project leadership needs to accept and understand the fast- approaching AI technology, and this book shows how to use it to their advantage.
Project resource management by PMO has changed significantly in the last 20 years. It is no more a mere spreadsheet for allocating resources to the projects and plug the holes. It has evolved into a highly value-driven resource management solution.
A value-driven resource management is designed to help a business reduce project resource cost, increase billable/strategic utilization, beat market volatility and more. It can potentially become a key component of business profitability and sustainability.
This article would help you understand how a value-driven resource management can become a major game-changer for the PMO and become a profit centre for the business.
2. How Value-Driven Resource Management can be a Game Changer for the PMO?
Traditionally a PMO is seen as an administrative group setting up the project management standards and generating management reports. But in the last few years, a PMO has started evolving into a value centre. In this journey, modern resource management has become a key player. It can potentially deliver these values to the business.
Minimize under/over skilled resources on projects: Both over and under-skilled resources increase the cost of the project. A modern resource management solution can help in identifying and allocating the right person with the right level of skill and experience.
Utilize cost-efficient global and local resources: An enterprise-level resource management solution can help you in allocating the right mix of local and global resources to the project. It can reduce resource cost significantly.
Minimize last-minute hiring cost and compromises: With proper resource capacity planning, one can forecast the future resource requirements and be proactive in acquiring the right resources at the right cost ahead of time.
Minimize hiring/firing wastage: Resource forecasting can help in identifying resource shortage ahead of time so that the internal staffs can be retrained or hire consultant or freelancer resources for short durations. It reduces unnecessary wastage due to hiring and firing.
Minimize Project Onboarding and Offboarding Time: An efficient and accurate resource planning and forecasting can help a PMO minimize onboarding and offboarding time.
#2 Increase Billable and Strategic Utilization by 10-20%
Maximizing billable utilization of resources in a professional service business is the key to profitability and sustainability. Similarly, maximizing strategic utilization of the resources is key to achieve the strategic goal of the business.
Improving billable and strategic resource utilization requires deep foresight into the overall utilization of resources. It is challenging work, especially in a matrix organization with a continually changing resource demand. But a modern resource management solution can help you get a real-time foresight into future resource utilization. So that corrective actions can be taken ahead of time.
#3 Futureproof Your Workforce Against Market Volatility
Market volatility in the last few years is continuously impacting the viability of every business. A smart resource capacity planning process can help you forecast a shortage or excesses of the resources and help you take proactive action.
Bridge Resource Shortage Proactively
Retraining existing employees
Smoothening the project workload
Hiring contingent resources ahead of time
Forward Plan and Utilize Excess Resources
Bringing forward future projects
Selling resource time aggressively
Restructuring capacity in different areas
#4 Leverage the Skills of Resources Across Matrix Org. Structure
In a matrix organization structure, it may be challenging to acquire a particular skilled resource in one location compared to others. With an enterprise resource management solution, a PMO can easily identify the person with the right competencies and utilize him/her in any part of the world. At the same time, a high skilled person also can be used to provide training and to a person on the bench.
#5 Improve Employee Communication and Productivity
A value-driven resource management solution provides end-to-end work management along with collaboration to ensure that employees are working productively onsite and remotely. This solution can help a business:
Track status and time spent on both planned and unplanned work
3. Best Practices of Enterprise Resource Management Software
Resource management has evolved a lot during the last few years. Matured businesses have adopted well-developed and defined practices to get the best value out of their enterprise resources. Following are the best practices adopted across the industries.
Enterprise Resource Scheduling: Replace Silos with a Single Plan Replace silos of spreadsheets or home-grown tools with a single real-time resource plan across the whole enterprise. Establish a single source of truth about resource allocations to the projects or non-project work such as BAU, Support, admin, operation, and more.
Workforce Optimization: Allocate Right Resource to the Right Project Identify cost-effective competent resources with a click of a button across a matrixed organization structure so that the right resource can be allocated to the right project at the right time at the right cost.
Resource Utilization Forecasting: Maximize Billable and Strategic Utilisation Get foresight into the future utilization of resources with real-time forecasting and analyze how effective they are. Accordingly, move employees from non-billable work to billable or strategic work. Improvement in effective utilization has a direct impact on the profitability of the business,
Resource Capacity Planning: Minimize Shortfall or Excesses of Resources Forecast shortfall and excesses of resources ahead of time by identifying the gap between resource capacity against demand. Accordingly build strategies to bridge this capacity gap by juggling around project timelines, retrain current employees or hire a contingent workforce.
Pipeline Project Management: Forecast Proactively for Future Projects Forward plan resource requirements for future or pipeline projects. Start identifying and acquiring cost-efficient competent resources ahead of time. Avoid last-minute hiring and reduces the overall cost of the project.
End-to-End Project Forecasting: Gain Real-Time Foresight into the Future Resource supply and demand scenario change fast in almost every business. So, it is critical to have a real-time forecasting capability and get an early warning at every stage of the project life cycle. It helps in early decision making and take corrective actions proactively.
Team Collaboration: Streamline Communication and Reduce Chaos Enable team collaboration with the modern-day solution. It can seamlessly bring remotely distributed team on a single platform. Minimize waiting period and complete task efficiently in a lesser period.
Resource Modelling: Simulate and Improve Decision Making Use what-if analysis to get the best possible project resourcing outcome within the existing constraints. It helps you in moving around the project’s timelines based on priorities and put low-priority projects on hold.
Business Intelligence: Real-Time Multi-Dimensional Data Analysis Get real-time business intelligence for dynamically changing business scenarios. Do multi-dimensional analysis as per the specific requirements of stakeholders and get a granular view of data with configurable filters.
4. How to Select a Resource Management Software
Even though the fundamental principles of resource management may be the same, but every business has a set of unique requirements for the software. It depends upon the industry and type of business. So, selecting the right resource management tool is a complex process that requires a number of careful considerations.
User Interface and User Experience An essential part of software selection is that the end-user of the product likes user interface and can navigate through the system effortlessly without going thru too many clicks.
Manages Complexity of Matrix Organization Structure Matrixed organization structure has multiple reporting lines making resource identification, allocation, utilization very hard. So, the software should be capable of overcoming challenges of such complexities and manage resource efficiently and take care of the needs of different stakeholders.
Needs to be Configurable, Expandability and Scalable The software should be highly configurable to meet the specific needs of the business without compromise so that the business would have a competitive edge against the rivals. The software should also be expandable and scalable as per the growing needs of the business.
Capability to Reduce Resource Cost Resource management software should help your business to do multi-dimensional forecasting so that the business can get real-time business intelligence to improve business performance, profitability, and productivity.
Provides Real-Time Business Intelligence Resource demand changes every minute in real life. So, it is crucial to have real-time business intelligence, i.e. reports, analytics, and dashboards. It enables the management taking decisions based on the latest information
Integrates with Other Legacy Systems Most businesses have already invested in enterprise-level systems. They hold quite a bit of data required by a resource management solution, i.e., resource profile, competencies, project detail, etc. So, the resource management system must integrate seamlessly with existing applications.
Provides High Return on Investment Select a tool that provides a high return on investment in a short time. It should be possible to have a small phase of implementation without lots of investment so that the risk of investment and change management can be minimized.
5. The SAVIOM Solution
SAVIOM provides state of the art tool for supporting value-driven PMO. It has more than 20 years of experience working with high valued global companies around the world. SAVIOM also provides tools for enterprise resource management, professional service automation, and workforce planning software. So, SAVIOM can help your business to establish an efficient system geared towards your specific business challenges.
Elizabeth also offers Project Management Rebels, which is a teaching-led group mentoring programme.
You’ll get the foundational knowledge, the skills to deliver, and the community that so many project managers don’t have in their organisations.
You’ll learn through a combination of live teaching, videos, reading, Q&A sessions and our group of engaged and supportive project managers. We’ve also got exclusive templates and webinars to help you make more of a difference, more quickly.
Three great options from myself are also open to you and your teams:
The Lazy Project Manager: Productive Laziness in Project Management hosted by PMO Leader
Learn about the art of productive laziness with The Lazy Project Manager, understanding what is meant by the ‘productive lazy’ approach to projects (and life) and learn how to apply these lessons ‘to be twice as productive and still leave the office early’.
Based on the Amazon #1 Bestselling Project Management Book by Peter Taylor.
And hosted by PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter (but open to all)
Social Project Team Management
Attendees will learn about the paradigm shift to ‘Social Project Management’ and what the benefits are, as well as the challenges and opportunities, along with some research insights into the power of project team performance.
The workshop will explore a number of key questions in regard to the use of AI in project management, including:
Will AI be the end of the project manager or the opportunity to become even more successful project managers?
Starting by exploring the four levels of AI: Process Automation, Chatbots, Machine Learning and Autonomous project management, and hearing from two of the project technology market leaders in AI, will form a great foundation of understanding
This is followed by the sharing of research for Peter’s new book ‘AI in Project Management’ about what people feel about AI around the world – practitioners, providers, and thought-leaders.
If your project is in need of copy for a newsletter, blog, or social post, your first instinct may be to simply email or direct message someone from your content team with the request. But while content needs may feel like one-off tasks, this approach is a great way to get subpar results and watch things fall through the cracks. So how can project managers assign content writing in the most effective, results-driven way? Read on for our guide to getting your content right.
Selecting Your Topics
First, you need to know your content needs. Sometimes, a project requires content that’s for internal use only. If that’s the case, you’ll still need to help define your assignment and ensure it’s engaging. But if content creation is meant for outside consumption, that’s where a clear strategy will most benefit you in the long-run.
If you’re looking to assign content that will drive users to you, you’ll want to start by deciding on which keywords will bring the right audience. There area few differentkeyword search engines available to help you figure out the best phrases you’ll need your content writer to include in their copy. Incorporating those keywords in the title, meta description, first paragraph of copy and alt text of any images used are some of thebest ways to use key phrases.
Just because keywords are important for optimizing content doesn’t mean they’re the most important when it comes to content marketing assignments. Ultimately, if users are brought to your content via an organic search, but they feel it’s generalized, poorly written, or simply unhelpful, you’ll lose them quickly and possibly permanently. Keyword searches can help you pick overarching topics you will assign to your content writer but take this further by brainstorming unique topics that your writer can go in-depth on. Optimizing the user experience will help keep readers on your page longer, and engage them better with content, which will make your overall efforts much more worthwhile.
Organizing Assignments
Once you have content to assign, you’ll save yourself time and confusion by structuring the way you assign it. Whether you already have acollaborative project management tool, or arelooking to find one that will suit your needs, using this kind of software ensures transparency and clarity when it comes to assignments, team workloads, and deadlines.
Speaking of deadlines, it is critical that you set clear and reasonable deadlines when assigning tasks to content writers. If you are unsure of how long a task might take, you can always work with your writers to better understand how many hours will need to go into research, writing, and editing a piece. You can also look for a project management tool that includes time-tracking so that if you have repeated assignments, you can track how long they take and adjust future deadlines accordingly.
It is also essential that in the assignment phase, you includeall of the necessary context and details a copywriter will need to produce the best content. This includes any keywords you want your writer to use in the piece, the audience the content is meant for, the desired length or word count, and any additional information you know you need the final product to include. The more details you can provide to your writer upfront, the more likely you’ll end up with what you need on the first try.
Optimize for Results
When your copywriter has turned in an assignment, the work isn’t quite over yet. Depending on your organization, either they or you will need toreview the content to ensure it is optimized to the best of your ability. It might help you tocreate a standard checklist for optimization that your team uses to review each piece of content before it is published. This list should include things like confirming keywords are included in the right places within the content, making sure the content is mobile-friendly if that’s a possible platform it will be consumed on, adjusting URL structures, and linking to other relevant internal content where possible. A final review of content for SEO is a great way to make sure that all of the effort that goes into creating a great piece of content has the best chance of being discovered by the right audience.
Planning Ahead
If you’re overseeing a project that needs content produced over a longer period of time, you’ll do yourself many favors by creating a content calendar. Rather than simply addressing and assigning needed content as it comes up in your project timeline, creating a content calendar at the beginning of a project’s lifecycle can help you get ahead, make more strategic decisions about what content you need created, and can allow your writers to be ahead of schedule, making them more flexible if sudden changes are necessary.
Planning ahead also makes it much easier to create a strategy for writing content that links together. Back-linking existing content boosts its credibility and optimization, so building out a content calendar that has continuity while offering unique coverage can really help.
Finally, make sure you are analyzing the success of content as it is published. If you find that certain topics draw in the most readers, look to beef up your content around that topic so you are seen as the expert. Wherever you can learn from your success and duplicate it, you should.
As you find yourself manager content writers across your projects, adopting some of these best practices will help you get the most out of their work, and keep you on schedule, with mindful content choices that play into an overall project strategy.
Bismarie Plasencia is a Digital Marketing Manager at CROOW. CROOW is a project management tool that helps creative teams unite with project managers to get work done faster and more efficiently.
By Invitation Only: AI in Project Management ‘a deeper discussion’ – Tue, 17 Nov 2020 16:00 GMT – message me for details if you lead a lead of 25 or more
Make an introduction to your Head of Projects, Services Lead, PMO Manager, CIO or anyone overseeing your project community and I’ll send a free copy of my new book to you and your manager/director/VP
Well don’t panic, you are certainly not alone, but you should accept that you are part the ‘VUCA’ world today!
V = Volatility: the nature and dynamics of change, and the nature and speed of change forces and change catalysts.
Meaning: Liable to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worse.
In a Forbes article ‘What Does VUCA Really Mean?’ Jeroen Kraaijenbrink writes: ‘Volatility refers to the speed of change in an industry, market or the world in general. It is associated with fluctuations in demand, turbulence and short time to markets and it is well-documented in the literature on industry dynamism. The more volatile the world is, the more and faster things change’.
The key here is speed of change and the variability of that change.
The days of nice 3, 4, 5-year plans are long, long gone, yes, there might be some long-term strategy associated to a vision but not at a detailed planning level. The days of starting a project or program and having a clear view of the business landscape that you have to lead that change across is also long gone. Who knows what might suddenly be needed by the organisation? Change in speed and direction driven by competitors, by the market, by the government, even by the people?
Despite the dictionary meaning of ‘Liable to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worse’ such volatility should not be seen as a bad thing and that it automatically leads to a ‘worse’ situation. Instead that volatility, and associated change, is caused by a real need. It should also be considered that only not keeping pace with the volatile demand is what causes any business situation to worsen.
And so, the question has to be ‘How can we prepare ourselves to move at the speed required and to be flexible in our approach in order to meet volatility with stability?’.
Understanding the dynamics of change is a great start. What is it that makes change happen, what or who initiates this, and who or how can you overlay that change of the current business activities – in a rapid and realistic manner?
Having a change orientated culture and people ready to behave in a collaborative and business agile way is another.
Achieving true stability is probably beyond the possible in the modern business day but accepting a degree of volatility as the ‘norm’ is a very good way to view the world as relatively ‘stable.
Webinar
Join myself and Neil Derbyshire from Clarizen on the morning of 5th December where we will address the 4 main challenges of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) and how working in a business agile mind-set can bring the rewards of stability, certainty, simplicity and clarity to your day-to-day work.
Join this free webinar to learn first-hand how:
1. VUCA can be used as a catalyst to bringing change in your day-to-day world
2. How a business agile mind-set will help bring stability, certainty, simplicity and clarity to your role
3. How technology can help you overcome challenges in a VUCA world
4. What can businesses do today to prepare for challenges in the future
Register your interest today to avoid VUCA now and in the future!
As with most things in life (and business) getting a balance right can prove far more effective, especially in the long run, than having a single focus that ignores other key elements.
The same is true of the PMO.
A balanced approach will definitely pay dividends and will not only ensure that the PMO is as effective and efficient as possible but will also aid the acceptance of the PMO by the rest of the organisation.
For example, if your PMO is created solely with the purpose of being the ‘project police’ then you will be in for a very short run. No doubt the role of policing projects is one part of the PMOs responsibility but not the only part, such an approach may work for a short period of time but it is not sustainable. And if your PMO is focused on firefighting then again it will work for a while but not beyond a certan point as it is demoralising to only work on problem projects and deal with escalating issues. Far better is to prevent the fires from even starting.
One way to achieve such a balance in the PMO is to consider structuring your efforts under what I call the ‘5 Ps’:
P = People
P = Process
P = Promotion
P = Performance
P = Project Management Information System
It may be tempting to just think of the PMO as all about the process, the means to ensure that good project management is achieved through methodology and quality assurance etc but that ignores the people side.
And it may be that your consideration is towards the project management community and your focus is drawn towards the people (projects are all about people after all) and so you direct your efforts as a PMO leader towards training and team building etc but this ignores the project mechanics.
You may also accept the need to build a good tracking and reporting system, supported by an investment in a project management information system, to deliver the visibility of project health and progress towards business goals.
But without the inclusion of a promotional program it could well be the case that all of the good work you, and your team, achieve in the areas of process and people will go unnoticed and unappreciated by both your peers and the executive.
The best PMOs balance all of this to achieve the most effective development of capability, representation of capability and sharing of capability and achievement.
Author:
Peter Taylor is a PMO expert who has built and led five global PMOs across several industries and has advised many other organisations on Change and Project strategy.
He is also the author of the number 1 bestselling project management book ‘The Lazy Project Manager’, along with many other books on project leadership, PMO development, project marketing, project challenges and executive sponsorship.
In the last few years, he has delivered over 350 lectures around the world in over 25 countries and has been described as ‘perhaps the most entertaining and inspiring speaker in the project management world today’.
His mission is to teach as many people as possible that it is achievable to ‘work smarter and not harder’ and to still gain success in the battle of the work/life balance.
Can I borrow you for a sec because I’m stacked? It will be a win-win situation. I have been blue sky thinking and want to keep you in the loop on my thinking outside of the box, as well as picking your brains, I’m just playing devils’ advocate on this teamwork/dreamwork idea. Will it work? Well how long is a piece of string?
Have I lost you? I suspect I have as the above paragraph includes all ten of the most annoying things people say in the office according to a survey of 2,000 people by recruitment website reed.co.uk
Rubbish aren’t they – time for a paradigm shift, we can’t boil the ocean with limited bandwidth but there is low hanging fruit out there so let’s tee it up, circle back, take it offline and do more with less. We need to break the silos to move the needle because it is what it is. What we must do at the end of the day is run it up the flagpole, bite the bullet, peel back the layers of the onion and take it, if push comes to shove, to the bleeding edge. Making sure we are not out of pocket, which is par for the course, let’s get one throat to choke whilst opening the kimono, and synergise as we all drink the Kool Aid. Awesome!
Clearer? I think not, you have no idea what I am on about do you and no surprise. That paragraph included twenty five of the most overused phrases from Business Insider UK. The thing is that they were all once a neat and creative way of expressing a thought or an idea but overuse has made them into at first clichés and then just bloody annoying things that some of our work colleagues roll out regularly on calls and at meetings, presumably because they can’t think of anything intelligent to say instead. Clichés appear to make you connected to what is going on without actually having to have any real understanding or anything of value to contribute. It is like a code that just gets you out of a tricky moment.
Question: ‘What do think of this new approach?’
Answer: ‘You have my buy-in on this particular swim lane, I like the core competency and feel empowered as a result’
Yes, I am back at it again, this time looking at the Forbes most annoying business jargon list.
There are lots of moving parts when you put your best practice ducks in a row and leverage the scalable solution from the burning platform. It is imperative that we drill down and smell the coffee in this one-stop shop because today is the day, all 24/7 of it, and tomorrow, like our children, is our future.
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