Technology can change the face of your project management office (PMO) and bring about positive disruption. We’re going to explore three ways you can use artificial intelligence (AI) to disrupt the projects in your PMO.

AI has become a familiar fixture in normal life with personal assistants like Siri and self-driving cars on the road. There are plenty of applications in the business world as well, and you harness the power of AI to improve your PMO and project outcomes.

We’ve looked at disrupting the role of your project managers, giving them more time to be leaders and strategic thinkers. AI is a way of making this happen, so we’ll explore:

  • Using AI to improve risk assessments
  • Improving resourcing and scheduling with AI tools
  • Producing better reports with AI

And what benefits these technologies can bring about for your PMO.

1.      AI and risk assessment and monitoring

Managing and mitigating risk is an important role of project managers and your office. When your PMO sets up data points and data monitoring, you will have a wealth of data to work with.

This data can be used to spot risks, such as potential budget overspends or when a schedule may be going off-track. Having an AI tool monitoring the data reporting can flag these types of issues much faster than human analysis and intervention.

You will save time and resources gathering and analysing this data when you use AI. It’s a case of using machine learning to understand the data and have alerts set up.

From here, the project manager can use their time finding solutions to reduce the risk and get the project on-target again.

2.      AI and resources and scheduling

You can use data points about the length of time a task takes to improve your resource allocation and project scheduling. Machine learning can spot trends in schedules and failures and give benchmarks for how long activities take.

It can also help you prepare in advance to bring in new people and skills by using predictive algorithms to see when new staff are needed.

Even more, priority and scheduling decisions can become data led. It may be hard for your PMO to decide which project to give priority and where to allocate resources. Having data about the predicted effectiveness and outcomes of a project can resolve conflicts and improve decision-making.

Instead of spending hours poring over schedules, having AI recommendations for a project schedule will make the job of a project manager strategic rather than operational.

3.      AI and data reporting

Along with planning and monitoring internally, AI can improve the reporting your PMO needs to do regularly.

Generally, projects will report data to the PMO, and your office will send reports to its sponsor and the C-suite. The data collection can take time to gather and produce analysis on topics such as the budget, the value derived from tools being used, and whether resources are delivering value for money.

Having constant data collection fed into an AI engine means you can have fewer people working on the tasks. You can produce a real-time dashboard that will help your PMO track each project regularly, and all other stakeholders can check in without the need for lengthy reports.

How can AI disrupt a PMO?

Your PMO is already a data-rich environment, but it’s constricted by the resources you have at hand. Artificial intelligence means you can feed the data into a computer and let it figure out the insights that you and your project managers can use.

This will help trends come to the fore quicker and improve the overall execution of your projects. Data-led decisions will lead to more successful projects when you use AI to disrupt the projects within your PMO.