Saving time in project administration

A lot of what is being automated by AI in project management is better called project administration. This is not to lessen the value that AI-based tools are adding, but calling out the reality of what a lot of project managers spend a large proportion of their time on, which takes time away from making contributions in which they can really shine and inspire their team members to shine individually and in the overall team's project delivery.

Anyone who has scheduled a project knows how mind-bending it can be, especially for what is a relatively well-defined task. There are just so many niggling details to keep in mind, and capturing these in a date-bound plan is hard. Even with MS Project and other standard project management tools, knowing how long tasks will take and linking the dependencies is intricate. It isn't complex in a fascinating way but in a tedious way, although that's a generalisation and really depends on what you find tedious.

Then linking this to completion of the tasks and working on the impact of particular tasks being late. Often in the first month, there already are tasks that are late by a week. We might think well we can absorb that delay, as we have so many months remaining in our schedule. But that first lost week can have a real cascading impact, and it's too easy to ignore this in the early stages of a project when you might feel you have oodles of time remaining. Being able to recalculate all your delivery dates based on that first week of slippage helps avoid kidding ourselves or turning a blind eye, and ensures we take notice immediately.

Another area is the time people spend on the project or more importantly how much of their time is spent on other work. A team member may be allocated 20 per cent or 40 per cent to the project. However due to the demands from their other responsibilities, they might only be spending 10 per cent - rather than the expected 20 per cent - on the project. Of course it's quality that matters not quantity. But if 90 per cent of a team member's time is spend on another project, then this may also mean more of their attention and quality thinking time is elsewhere also. Visibility into these metrics can enable a project manager to reduce the stress on team members by having a realistic understanding of the team member's day, and not a rose-coloured view based on their expectation.

Forecasts vs actuals - this is a major time sink for project managers and assistant project managers. What is in fact a relatively spreadsheet operation for a small project is an enormous undertaking when there are 20 or more project team members. Better tools can readily show the actual costs and compare with forecasts. Currently, the tools that many companies have are inadequate, and so project managers have a largely manual customised process they built for themselves which they run each month. This is often additional to and in parallel with the formal project management software they are required to use but which doesn't have all the functions they need to deliver the reporting and tracking they need for their project forecast and actual spend.

These are just some of the "routine" "administrative" tasks that are anything but routine. Better project management tools, including those equipped with AI features to account for the wide range of formats in which information is received, will be a welcome uplift to allow project managers to spend more time managing people and projects for better project outcomes.