The Promise of PMbots

- Anita Dhir, PMP®

An Opportunity or Threat?

Are you excited or fearful that you could have a PMbot as an assistant or as a colleague in the near future? It is very possible that your organization may decide to use a PMBot to run simple projects and assign a human PM to work on more complex projects. It is also possible that organizations may use a hybrid approach. In this scenario, PMs will be supported by PMbots that will manage some of the PM functions. This is a great opportunity. Other project managers may perceive this as a threat as it may result in losing their jobs to PMBOTs.

Current Situation

Projects most often fail due to a breakdown in communication. Factors that contribute to this are:

• Communication barriers that exist due to organizational silos
• PMs frequently display emotional decision making thus resulting in inconsistent decisions
• Lack of consistent follow up
• Organizational risks such as lack of governance

Given the rise of the Internet of Things (IOT), projects are becoming more complex from the technical perspective. Further, the project managers must also gather, analyze, and use huge volumes of project data to make prudent and critical project decisions as well as provide detailed insights for accurate project status and forecast. This limits the project manager's performance.

There is something on the horizon to help the overwhelmed project manager.

HELP IS ON THE WAY

PMBots

A possible collaborative approach between PMbots and project managers is looming in the near future. The PMbots can be efficient and can perform project management analytics (using statistical tools, methods, and algorithms) at a lower cost. This will free up the project managers to focus on non-repetitive and difficult to automate tasks, primarily communication among stakeholders and team management responsibilities.

The biggest promise that the PMbots offer are:

• Consistent & Seamless Communications
• Improved PM Effectiveness
• Improved governance / Knowledge Transfer
• Unbiased, transparent, and timely Decision Making
• Consistent PM Reporting and forecasting
• Efficient and improved resource estimates, allocations, and utilization

This will eliminate the top reasons, as stated above, for project failure namely, inadequate communication. Thus this will be a boon for the future project managers to help them automate the collection and analysis of project information.

What is a PMbot?

Technically a PMbot is an assistant to a PM, a simple PMbot performs repetitive tasks for the project manager, thus freeing up PM time. A simple PMbot is in the form of robotic process automation (RPA). It is the application of technology that allows computer software or a robot to be configured to capture and interpret available data for processing, manipulating, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems.

At a more complex level, a pmbot uses AI machine learning, data analytics, blockchain, and natural language processing (use human-like intelligence) to interpret raw data and learn to make more complex decisions, similar to a project manager.

What does the PMbot do for project managers?

The premise for PMbots is that they provide and support project managers in making better decisions to create more stable projects that stay on track and deliver on time and on budget. The overall intent is that these pmbots can help reduce PM related costs and can reveal insights from huge amounts of unstructured data as well as learn and become efficient in the current PM practices.

Potential PMbot capabilities / Benefits are:

• Planning:
  • Performing risk assessments and planning risk resolution strategies
  • Estimating project schedules and costs
  • Creating resource management plans (resource allocation and utilization and task management)
• Monitoring & Controlling
  • Performing daily/repetitive tasks diligently and efficiently and can be also capable of updating and alerting the project stakeholders about discrepancies or issues
  • Based on collected data, AI based PMbot can warn project managers to take preventive actions regarding heavy resource loads, unexpectedly low outputs, over-capacity or under-capacity. These systems can also give advice about when and in which skills a particular employee should be trained
  • Performing status and performance analysis and generating relevant communication and alerts based on forecasts to get projects back on track.
  • Predict Defects

Conclusion:

PMBots can tackle wider macro-project management related issues that go beyond the basic business goals and work towards the benefit of all. For some project managers this means retraining and becoming comfortable with their new project management resource, a PMBOT. Given the many benefits of PMBots, consider making your new assistant (PMbot) your ally rather than a foe.

Leadership Resolutions for Project Managers

Become the best leader that you can be!

- Anita Dhir, PMP®
- Shobha Manam, PMP®