In a study published on the occasion of the Program & Portfolio Management Summit in June 2020, the study institute Gartner announced that”By 2030, 80% of project management tasks will be eliminated as artificial intelligence takes over traditional project management functions, such as collecting, tracking, and reporting data.“
Gartner specified its forecast by adding that” The market will first focus on offering additional benefits in terms of user experience for project management professionals and, later on, will help them become better planners and managers ”.
Beyond a marketing announcement effect What is the concrete situation in business practices today?
What do our algorithms dream of? ;-) How will innovation management be impacted by technology?
More and more aspects of project management will be achievable by AI. Examples: resource and cost management, reporting dashboards, detection of excesses in the budget or plans,...
In this article we will focus on a concrete dimension, by zooming in on three innovations around uses which we think is relevant.
And spoiler alert! We won't talk Not just very high tech but also of breakdowns in uses. In particular in the second axis of innovation related to the design of current project portfolio management solutions.
Bridging the gap between vision and execution. This is the promise of project portfolio management tools.! Let's take a closer look which can help facilitate this process !
Innovative PPMs no longer want to do everything by themselves!
SaaS integrations and connections have developed recently, and businesses want a project portfolio tool that works with their existing technologies.
Indeed, the various business lines of the company have their favorite daily tools.
Tools like Atlassian JIRA, Wrike, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Asana, and Trello have changed the way project managers plan, assign, and share actions.
Business analytics tools like Power BI and Tableau have made it easy to create dashboards.
Finally, tools such as Slack and Teams have contributed to streamlining some of the communication within organizations. Especially since the pandemic.
Remember, it is useless to manage change on all fronts. The interconnection of tools through APIs will make it possible to reinforce certain well-established uses while taking advantage of a macro view. via a strategic management tool, such as AirSaaS for example. :-)
In this context of “Best of Breed” extended. The use of a Macro solution interconnected to the various tools will offer you the best of different uses. In some cases, we will speak of “umbrella software” to describe this meta positioning.
Be careful, however, with in a way a proliferation of scattered SaaS all over the company, it can be useful Of se pose regularly to formalize a charter of uses targets of your internal SaaS “tooling”. For the moment the known record is that of 224 saas used within Doctolib. Source: Sébastien Louyot - IT Services Director - at Doctolib during episode 37 of the CIO Revolution Podcast produced by AirSaaS
At the portfolio level. Concretely, this approach allows the collection, automation in real time and the synchronization of a platform with your data ecosystem.
Within AirSaaS you can for example:
Teams became themajor tool for internal communication within businesses.
All collaborators of your organization do not have an AirSaaS license and you nevertheless have Do you need to embed key users in your projects?
Once Teams is added to your AirSaaS workspace, you can connect a project to the Teams channel of your choice.
Concretely, once the two applications are “plugged in”, the important posts from this project can be pushed to Teams (standard publication, success points, attention points, decisions and reports). The changes in Statutes of decisions, points of attention, weather and risk as well (only if a message is associated with it).
As part of this Airsaas/Teams integration, you will also have the possibility of retrieving the list of your decisions to be taken and make a decision in a project without leaving Teams. CQFD!
Les Next generation PPM tools therefore allow a better iapplication integration. Integrated or synchronized applications will allow all stakeholders to better join forces on projects, merging interests and permitting what Technological investment is bearing fruit in terms of market shares.
Les integrations are essential because they allow you to automate certain steps And to se get rid of a lot of mistakes that people commit.
Innovative PPMs make businesses want to spend time on the tool!
Inviting businesses, transformation referents to contribute to an ERP, an Excel or Gantt file... it's over. UIs at the top are a must have.
If you want to inspire... Offer an innovative solution on this axis as well. Place this criterion prominently in your choice grid. Again, it's not the functional coverage of the tool that matters... it's its widest adoption! The objective is to facilitate the feedback and circulation of information through various tactics, and in particular by making users want to “garden” their data regularly.
On this theme of minimalism, let's not forget the importance of the mobile!
CNBC reports that 72.6% of people will use phones to access the Internet by 2025.
While digital is becoming “mobile first”. This raises design challenges, such as the creation of light and responsive interfaces adapted to these new uses.
You got it, minimalism in project portfolio management Is trendy !
For example, the rise in power of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) which illustrates this search for sobriety... buzzword of the moment.
Finally, Innovation in the field of user/collaborator experience will also involve the way in which the publisher operates its communication with communities of users. Propose an open space to interact on the various current or future features. Dispose of short videos focused on key uses... all this is not a technological innovation. But bring a Breach of use with an open product approach. For even more ownership of stakeholders. Again, as you will have understood, this discreet criterion must be taken into account. Yes, a PPM can have a top UX and efficient product communication!
An example: the day when a famous ketchup brand proposed to simply turn the bottle upside down and put it on the table... everyone followed suit. But beyond the anecdote, the use of these bottles, better adapted to the context of consumers, has exploded! This is what is at stake in portfolio management innovation: adoption beyond IT, by the rest of the company and its businesses!
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to “an application capable of processing tasks that are, for the time being, performed more satisfactorily by human beings insofar as they involve high-level mental processes such as perceptual learning, memory organization, and critical thinking.” This is how the American scientist Marvin Lee Minsky, considered to be the father of AI, defined this concept in 1956.
While many of these functionalities have been available for years (the concept dates back almost four decades), recent technological advances make it possible to have better tools to assist in managing transformation.
Text generation is theOne of the current trends in machine learning. AI systems that learn by absorbing billions of words extracted from the Internet and generating text in response to various requests.
Concretely, it is here to help users generate content. Because yes, not everyone likes to write or does not always want to take the time.
Text generation technologies are, among other things, based on GPT 3, the Open AI algorithm.
We are here on an AI that will help to grow in competence. For example, tone detection functions in messages can suggest other options to writers.
At AirSaas we offer a automated dashboard, curtailing importantly expenses generals linked to manual reporting. The management team and all stakeholders have the data at their fingertips to make decisions in real time.
This approach allowsAutomate intelligently The collecting information you need to develop your Reporting.
Data collection, analysis and reporting represent a large part of the PPM discipline. AI will improve the results of these tasks, including the ability to analyze data faster than humans and use these results to improve overall performance.
Projects rely on large data sets of structured information. Until recently, data scientists had to “connect the dots” manually. No wonder artificial intelligence is reaching management at the portfolio level.
Let's also mention the alerting usecase when something is in danger of going wrong in the project. For example The alert of automatic interdependencies.
After collection, automating reporting submissions is also a “nice to have” feature.
Of course, all this does not replace a project or management committee... We are not saying that. However, when properly used, these various automations allow project managers to free up time... And as a bonus... no one will be able to say “I didn't know!”
We have just analyzed three of the technological innovations and uses that are shaking up project portfolio management.
The promises of AI as a pilot assistant are in the process of being fulfilled.
However, let's not forget that The biggest change is human. And that's another story that we will offer you in a future article on the Transfo Pro blog!
However, as a teaser, we are ending this article on An opening to two macro trends Organizational to consider today in the design of your transformation strategy.
The decentralization of computing is under way. Business-led computing — where employees, not IT, decide what technology to use — promises to make workers more productive, respond more quickly to market conditions, and increase job satisfaction. Businesses can prepare for this trend by adopting policies to govern and secure technology acquired through a decentralized purchasing process rather than a command & control process that ignores shadow it and ongoing decentralization.
The idea is to focus on the transformation of the organization from “Projects” to “Products”, because projects are always late, while products are being released all the time.
Many organizations have “flirted” with the PPM. They tried formal numerical or measured evaluations for project selection and prioritization and then quickly dismissed them as being rigid, time-consuming, or providing erroneous results.
The PPM “à papa” is gradually giving way to a new generation PPM tool with lean portfolio management with its value streams that seem to be the next “big thing” or a super trend in portfolio management. Value streams are big “teams” - able to form, organize, and apparently make better portfolio decisions in a race to deliver more value more quickly.
