Curiosity is the Key – Using AI in Project Management
Sometimes it just takes some curiosity and persistence to solve problems. Molly Beran, a project management consultant, was helping a client improve reporting so leadership could better understand how time was being spent and what issues were contributing to project delays. The client was less experienced with project management practices, so they were using simpler point-in-time reporting. Molly knew that over-time reporting would be a more effective metric and provide better context on project status to move things forward. She was able to create needed reports with Microsoft Copilot. While many people wonder how AI is going to “take over” particular tasks for us, Molly used her curiosity and persistence to help AI solve issues and pull the data she needed be more effective with her time and get results that were effective and accurate for her client’s leadership.
Percent Complete – Why It’s Such a Difficult Metric
Percent complete – understanding where you are within a particular task, and the overall project, is one of the most basic metrics in project management, but it’s also one of the hardest to capture accurately. As Molly explains, people are typically “pretty bad estimators” of how long it’s going to take them to complete a task. Many PMs often hear about how a project is started and is 50% done one week, 80% done the next week, 81% the following week. To go from 80% to 100% completion could take as long as the time spent to get to 50%. Essentially, many people don’t realize all of the work that will be included at the start of a task or project, or obstacles such as new initiatives arise, new regulations or requirements are added, or leadership changes direction. Molly’s strategy is to make projects and tasks smaller and more manageable to complete, rather than focusing on a possibly inaccurate number to gauge progress.
Approaching AI in Project Management
Starting your approach to integrating AI into your project management is simple. It’s about reflecting on the challenges you’re having with your data and what you need out of the software to get the results you need and reporting that will help conversations become more strategic. For Molly, it was asking how to track projects in her client’s existing project management software on a much larger scale, without having to set up reports individually for the many projects she was helping oversee. Through multiple iterations, the working solution helps Molly have useful reporting to share with leadership and aggregates the data in a useful way.
To learn about how to implement AI in your project management practices, or tips on how best to utilize AI to help you with reporting, visibility, and solving meaningful problems, listen to our interview with Molly Beran in the latest episode of What’s the Plan? Podcast.
Check out the full episode here: https://www.prosymmetry.com/podcasts/e6-using-ai-in-project-management-solving-real-problems-with-curiosity-and-context-with-molly-beran
For more insightful conversations about real-world conversations about all things project management, resource forecasting, capacity planning and more, subscribe to What’s the Plan? Episodes are available on:
