The project charter page is one of the" Big Three" project documents, along with the project plan and requirement document. It serves as the source of truth, summarizing the project's key artifacts and answering the questions of the project's why, what, how, and when questions.  As part of PMO best practices, we would create a project chart page from day one and keep it updated at all times during project operation.  

The content includes the project scope, benefits, timeline, team, stakeholders, and risks. The following is the best practice for creating and maintaining a project chapter page:  

• All summary pages are owned and reviewed by the portfolio manager before publishing. 
• A consistent project name is needed across all project pages/documentation. 
• Clear project scope should include in-scope, out-of-scope, and assumptions.
• All the resources need a % allocation, and the assignment should be updated as required every week. 
• All stakeholders need to be added, and we need to confirm that the user has access to the document. We would require all stakeholders to access the project summary page unless exception approval is given.
• All major project milestones need to be listed and tracked with "Not Started," "Completed," or "In Progress." '
• For the communication plan, please include the answers to the following questions: 
  • How often will you update the external stakeholders, project owners, and team members?
  • Who receives the report?
  • Who needs to be aware and informed about the project?
  • Which tool is to be used for the distribution of the message?
  • Where is project information stored?
  • Add risk and assumptions.
• ​RAID in project management stands for risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies. ​

The best practice requires creating a project charter before project planning and the kick-off meeting, which is shared with all stakeholders. Reviewing the page regularly (at least weekly) is essential to ensure all the information is up-to-date and accurate. ​  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has impacted many areas of work and daily life, and project management is no exception. AI will change how we manage projects. Let's delve into this topic today.

What does it mean to apply AI to project management? 
AI can take over the administrative tasks in project management, such as planning, tracking, and reporting, allowing project managers to focus more on communication, influence, and leadership. This includes selecting projects for mobilization, generating project plans, prioritizing tasks, allocating resources, resolving dependency issues, tracking project status, and forecasting potential risks. AI is attractive because it is faster, can assess more data points, and stays more rational than humans to prevent biases and cognitive limitations.

With AI, project managers have more time to build relationships with stakeholders, manage more projects, and perform strategic tasks!

Can you be specific on the areas in which AI should be applied?
Project managers can use AI to augment skills and boost efficiency and strategic decision-making. These areas include:

• Innovation: AI can contribute to brainstorming sessions for new ideas and extensive knowledge exploration. It can also source information for project inception research, including industry standard, market trend, sourcing information and solution options. 
• Prioritization: AI serves as a reliable support system, analyzing the requirements, customer feedback sentiments, and market conditions to ensure project strategic alignment for prioritization.
• Launching Readiness Check: AI can evaluate project readiness for mobilization. For example, AI can determine the possibility of success, resource readiness, technology, and support conditions. We can calculate the resource skills to ensure that they are ready to perform the necessary tasks in the project with all the required support and resource readiness. It is also a great tool to review industry standards and trends again. 
• Time Forecasting: AI can forecast the project timeline based on task and resource evaluations.
• Risk Prediction and Mitigation: AI can predict potential risks based on the existing conditions and suggest risk mitigation plans.
• Portfolio Evaluation: AI can evaluate the portfolio's project value, status, and execution capability. It can also simulate the results of serious, high-risk decisions.

​
Are we there yet? How far? 
AI in project management is still in its early stages. While ChatGPT can generate a project plan with a comprehensive list of tasks and assign them to the right team, it needs more intelligence analysis to ensure project operation success. This includes dependency analysis, risk analysis, and proper task assessment.

However, using ChatGPT to generate project communications, plan meeting agendas, and summarize meeting minutes in real time is ready for prime time. For example, Grammarly can be used to check grammar and spelling errors and make word choices. The service is reliable and produces consistent quality results.

How can we adopt AI in our organization?
This is the most critical question to answer right now. We must adopt AI immediately to stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive. The challenge is that there needs to be ready-to-use ML mode and data to start training AI. The most critical missing piece is data. High-quality data would enable AI to learn in the right direction.

To adopt AI in project management, we must take the following actions:

• Change how we work on projects to ensure clean and ready-to-use project data for machine learning (ML). The data should include tasks, resources, time, priority, values, strategic alignment indication, dependencies, risks, skill set requirements, success factors, status with key performance indicators, stakeholders, and project charter summaries.
• Create tools to generate project plans with predefined structures and milestones for data collection.
• Define metadata for essential project elements, including tasks, resources, risks, priority, and strategic alignment. Collect data and assist machines in learning and improving their understanding of these elements.
• Provide reports to obtain insights for supervised ML training. 

It is crucial for any organization to strategically and urgently adopt AI in project management. The first step to preparing project data for AI analytics is implementing change management in their creation and maintenance.

Project managers need to put in quite some effort to build good relationships with developers and stakeholders. In summary, project managers need to:

• Provide meaningful assistance to developers, such as helping with tasks and time management and solving communication issues.
• Facilitate stakeholder communications through project requirements, plans, and status reports.

Let's explore signs indicating something is wrong with project managers' engagement.

Being a poor listener doesn't necessarily mean we don't listen, but more that people's actual needs are not heard. Understanding people's real intentions, challenges, and the help they need before taking suggestions or actions. Being a "poor listener" could be the first alert that the communication channel is broken. Sometimes, project managers need to proactively consider the developers ' situation purely when updating the plan or documentation, which can cause friction.

Lack of organization or planning is a disadvantage for any project manager because their primary responsibility is to help the team organize communication, tasks, schedules, and priorities. It's essentially the time management skill that every project manager has to prioritize. Comments about a lack of organization come from constantly not clearly defining the task scope and timeline or shifting schedules and priorities. Maintaining a stable project execution pace is critical to avoid falling into this trap.

Micromanagement can be translated as "project managers are essentially dictators telling people what to do and chasing results." Project managers are indeed responsible for deliverables, assigning tasks, and chasing results. However, after providing reasons to help people buy into our actions, it's crucial to step back and let the team take ownership. This approach fosters a sense of trust and empowers the team to take initiative. It's essential to avoid too many meetings as they could be distractions.

Poor communication means not conveying the message at the right time, in the correct format, or with the right content. This requires understanding the context and the audience and adjusting our communication and what to communicate. Here, we have to pay attention to team building.

This summary can be a checklist for project managers to reflect on.

PMOs must navigate different negotiation scenarios to achieve successful outcomes. Here are some strategies that can be used in common situations and the strategy for solving the problem through influencing.

New PMO Engagement When starting a new PMO, the strategy should be building trust first. The three critical elements in the trust triangle could be the focus: capability, empathy, and values. This can be achieved by taking on challenging tasks to demonstrate expertise, pitching new project initiatives to management, showcasing values through small wins, and engaging in in-depth discovery conversations.

New Portfolio Planning Before kicking off portfolio planning, the strategy should start with understanding the client's needs and gradually engage with them. The key is to ask questions such as:

• What would you like PMO to do for your organization?
• Tell me more about why you need this service.
• What are the reasons behind your request?

Mirroring and paraphrasing can also be used to understand the client's requirements better.

Project Managers Report to Dev Managers There will be resistance to moving PMs to PMO leaders. To resolve the issue, it should start with understanding the key factors driving the rejection: (1) The Dev Manager thought they could do the job. (2) Adding the PMO leader into the conversation could steal the thunder of successful projects. To influence, PMO leaders can start by showing the RACI matrix to demonstrate that project management responsibility asking questions:

• Do you like to spend time guiding the PMs daily, including planning engagement, reviewing the performance, and prioritizing the following actions?
• Would you like to be held accountable for operation efficiency?

Customers Not Engaging with PMO. The strategy is to start the request gate review, where the PMO leader hosts the project planning meeting, setting up the agenda to listen to all the requests and expectations. The PMO leader then decides the commitments and plans for the project. The review ensures consistent prioritization and optimization.

Project Managers not interested in PMO  The strategy is to start regular planning with project managers to ensure processes are consistently followed and optimized to show benefits. 

Conclusion Effective negotiations are essential for a Project Management Office (PMO) to successfully navigate various engagement scenarios. Adaptability is vital, from building trust to addressing resistance through inquiry and restructuring reporting lines. By utilizing these strategies, the PMO can ensure its crucial role in delivering high-quality project management services and become essential contributors to organizational success.