Project managers who ignore AI are out of the game

Mikolas, thanks for having me. Yes. So a partner at Plan Action, yes, consulting firm. been in business for eleven years now and happy to join with you today to discuss you know, very interesting topics.

Yes, we are a traditional consulting services firm. So we service customers, provide a lot of project management, solution architecturing, and also business analysis analysis. So what we do essentially is we're onboarded with customer projects and we will mostly act on the customers' behalf, managing their projects, creating solution architecture. And that's what we may mostly do. and also what we've been doing for the past let's say about a year, we've launched an AI division. And that's so that AI division brings an extra tool set to our to our projects and it enables us to add AI into the projects that we are involved with.

Absolutely. So we use AI in both strategy and also execution. So in terms of strategy, so when we start a project, so we do what we call, I mean, ERP selections or software selections. So we leverage AI in that process. The way we do this is it accelerates the selection by proposing multiple I mean the sorry it proposing the requirements and the customers we would then socialize these these requirements with the customers and then have a more thorough list of requirements and then we will afterwards take these these requirements and validate them using AI against what the main solution providers were and it provides us a scoring model relatively quickly. However, we can't leave AI to do all of the work because some of the work is not purely objective. It's subjective. You want to know which software will be a better fit for you, which team will also be a better fit. AI will not help you select the best fit. You need to actually see the people. So that's why it's a it's an accelerator, but it doesn't do all of the work.

it our industry is under tremendous change with AI. So as I've explained just prior on the selection process, we also for some of the customers that that are transitioning from legacy systems that were custom built. So our AI division has developed a set of tools that we are able to go in and analyze the code and produce documentation. So our tool produces technical documentation that is mostly required to recode the application eventually, but also we'll do a functional documentation. So this documentation can be used by our business analyst to discuss with the customer and explain to them, okay, this is what your system exactly does. It opens up the conversation to, okay, what do you want your system to keep doing? What more do you want your system to do? And what don't you want it to do? So this is the the layer that we use to engage customers. A lot of discussions with the business at the customer site. We also have a documentation that's produced that is at high level. And this type of documentation will be more geared towards upper management and architects. It will provide the customer insight as to what dependencies are between. this application and the other applications. So this concludes the strategy part. So in ERP selection, we accelerate using AI based on requirements. And then when you we have custom built software, we use our tools to fully analyze and then that gives us a head start. So we essentially have more requirements prior to starting the project. With as opposed to traditionally when you start a project, you kind of go with high-level requirements and then end up doing a fit and gap. But by then you've purchased the software, you've selected your integrator, and then you discover gaps much later in the process. So by using our AI tools, we're able to get the work, the fit and gap work, bring it forward when the project is relatively small. And so the customer is able to make a better decision. Now this is game changer in our industry. It essentially takes project work back into feasibility. And that really is what we're seeing today in our industry.

Absolutely, thank you for the question. in project delivery, actually there is currently a revolution. And so I I kept saying, you know, a project manager that used AI last year was cutting edge. This year it's kind of the norm. And next year, if you're not using it, you're out of the game.

Yes. So I'll I'll do a bit more unpacking into the delivery side. So currently what our project managers do, we're using AI extensively in the project management. Now you were asking me, are there some metrics or there are some accelerators? Right now it's we're relatively new to this. So we know it's faster. We know we get more information. How how fast and what the metrics are, it's too it's too soon to tell, but we know we're accelerating project. And only accelerating is we're also using these tools to get better insight. So I'll I'll give you an example. you know, teams, Zoom now have transcriptions. You automate them. So this is possible because of AI. These transcriptions go into co-pilot or or whatever tool. And and and they will do a s the the the the AI tool will do a summary and meet in minutes. Project managers, a lot of their task is to generate meeting minutes and it is extremely time consuming. So when you have AI doing this for you, you save a tremendous amount of time. This these then then these tools are they're there. We have tools then that we use that you know socialize the meeting minutes and then You get everyone going in, maybe the eye did not get exactly what I was wanting to say, so they can correct it. So then you have a corrected meeting minutes within a few hours of the meeting occurring. That is game changer because it's accelerating quickly, just generating the meeting minutes. That's one aspect.

Absolutely. So what AI enables us to do is to consolidate a large volume of documentation. Because projects tend to generate a lot of documents and sometimes it's redundant, sometimes it it's not necessarily I mean it it changed and it's no longer useful. So we're using AI to consolidate the notes and then With our experience, we'll know where to dig deeper. So AI will point us in the right direction. AI will not make the decision for us, but will point our project managers into the right direction and they will be doing some digging into where the problem areas are. It it is really AI in terms of summarizing documents is really helping project managers and and and you know people who are doing are people who are doing project recovery.

Yeah, we we will do discovery using AI, but mostly is when customers engage with us, they we go in and and ensure that their tooling is properly set up to use or to the full I mean to use all of AI. many of our customers are in the Microsoft environment, so we have experts coming in and ensuring that All of the Microsoft Office 365 suite is set up so that it can use and leverage AI most efficiently. And you know, Copilot is one of the main tools. I mean, it's obviously the the the tool that Microsoft uses, but there's some a few tweaks that are are needed within Copilot in order for the organization to leverage AI To its most capabilities in Office 365. One of the examples that we have is you know there is before co-work and after co-work. So Claude, Anthropic Claude introduced co-work as part of their tooling. This is really, really a game changer when interacting with with with systems. Microsoft recently incorporated co-work into its tooling, into Copilot. And therefore that's one of the the things we'll be looking out for is getting co-work set up within the customer's environment in order to fully leverage what it can do. So essentially is our experts from our AI division are brought in the project at so they're they're brought at the customer site to fully configure the Office three sixty five environment in order to leverage AI. We also have team members that are proficient within the Google ecosystem. Some of our customers also use the Google ecosystem and therefore there's some setups required there and we have people that are also proficient in the Google space.

Absolutely. one of the things that AI has enabled us is to have eyes everywhere on the project. So the project manager typically doesn't go to every meeting. Obviously, he goes to certain steering week committees, governance meetings, but cannot be in every workshop. What happens in these workshop is some people will some of the stakeholders will add requirements, you know, the scope requirement Now with AI is everything is transcribed into the minutes. Then we have in the background tools that are scanning for new requirements to be discovered. If a new requirement is discovered, then it comes up into the requirements matrix traceability. And the project manager gets a warning saying, hey, new requirement here. That is something that was not possible because PMs can't be everywhere. And therefore, once this comes up, brings up to the stakeholders and say, look, we have a new requirement. Is this something that we need to work on, or is this something that we can ignore? Traditionally, in project management, when a new requirement would would come up, it might take a week, a week and a half, maybe two weeks before someone realized. Hey, this is a new requirement and it requires a change request. Now, within hours, it pops up onto the project manager's dashboard and says, Okay, do we need do we have a new requirement? If so, we need a change request. So we are much quicker to react to this. That's the f number one. The number two is the insights. we are learning AI as it's evolving. What we were doing last year with AI, what we're doing this year, and we'll be doing next year is different. Now, this year, what what came on board is you can ask AI or tell AI this is where we're going. And AI will look into all of the documentation that's being created, all the meeting minutes that are being created, and we'll do an assessment saying, Okay, you want your project to go to point B but actually when we're looking at what the team is actually doing is is you're not going to point B. You're not going in the right direction. You need to correct the course. And that is really game changer. This is something that technically if a human being was reading everything and and and digging to everything could be able to find this out. But AI just does it at a speed that is such so much faster that it makes it possible. So AI will provide insight to the project manager saying, is your project heading in the right direction? And then as he's doing course corrections, he can ask AI again, are we getting back on track? And that is something that we were not able to do in previous year in project management.

maybe looking few in the future, you know, a Gentec AI i is starting to be more mature and we may see agents being assigned to projects. that that's would be coming in in the next few months potentially. So you would have like a physical human people assigned to the project and also get have agents. And and right now where when we're when we're assigning tasks, sometimes you're in a meeting, work meeting and you say, okay, Mikolas, do this, and then what will happen is automatically Copat will look at, okay, you know the project manager assigned a task Mikolas. So it'll show up in a Microsoft planner automatically much in a way that you know you could assign work to an agent so you tell the agent go do some research on this or let's say you have a new tool that is potentially could be used to meet one of the requirements a technical tool you can ask the agent okay go do some research on on this tool and and you know give me an assessment of the fit to meet these requirements. And and you know the tool will go out or the agent will go out. you know the based on the custom the the supplier's documentation will do an assessment and will come back with an opinion or a recommendation. Obviously you still need a human to validate that you know the documentation that was out by the supplier is accurate because sometimes it's it's not the technical documentation that you get it's it's the marketing and you know marketing documentation tends to over tends to be a bit more exaggerated but definitely the agent could do some work on this front so that's where we may see popping up in the next few months already you've seen facilitators, those tend to only take notes, but eventually they'll be full-fledged agents staffing projects. So you'll you'll have a pr a team of six people, you know five that are that are actual humans and one that being a an agent.

So our goals is obviously double the business within the next 12 months. and and the way we're doing this is as I told you before, we have the strategic part where we help launch projects. So from we have an idea to actually creating a project. So that's part of the when we're using the software selection and also modernization software. So either way, if you're if you're starting with requirements and wanting to go into new software or we are you're starting with an existing legacy application coded in legacy code. I mean we go way back to looking at assembler, cobalt, Java, and so all of these languages we are able to produce documentation. So that's part of the strategic part. And then and and the execution part, then we are training our project managers every quarter because they need refreshers. AI is evolving rapidly. I know we were giving a course early this year, and we went back to you know provide the course in early September and we realized you know we had to adjust a lot of the material. And so it's a it's a constant evolution. I think you know, training our PMs will have to be done on a quarterly basis because there's something new that comes on board that can help. And and obviously it's We're we're doing this because it reduces the risk. And again, I know in project project mode is not the most efficient d delivery method because there's always first of a kind, there's always new things. You know, it's people that haven't worked together before. So by using AI in in that space. we're able to reduce the risk because we're we're reducing the uncertainty and we're reducing the the unknowns, we're reducing the some of the human factor by using empirical you know empirical data to really identify what really drives value and what brings the project forward. So We're gonna keep helping our customers or or We're gonna keep sorry, we're gonna keep helping our customers you know start projects more efficiently and deliver them efficiently.

Absolutely. Well, we have our website still we're using a website and we're on so the probably the link will be in the description of of the video, planaction dot com. we're also very present on on social media, mostly LinkedIn, because that's that's where most of the our customers are. That's where we do most of our business. so you can reach out directly to me on LinkedIn or to to my organization. We have a corporate page on LinkedIn.

Thank you for having me, Colas.