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Fresh Perspectives and Latest Industry Updates Every Week—Updates for Smart Project Managers

​Project Management Office (PMO) Blog 

PMO:   Setup | Change Management| Case Studies | AI | Leadership
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PMO | AI/ML Use Cases for Efficiency and Productivity

10/17/2024

 
Today, we continue to explore AI/ML and recommend the AWS AI use cases exploration website. The website provides many used cases where you can filter based on your interests. 

For example, we explored and summarized the cases of AI improving efficiency and productivity. 
  • Finding information quickly: AI/ML can help us quickly locate content or data through chatbot, searching, or data analysis. The information is more ritual to us now regardless of the continent and the language in which it is written. If you are performing research for market insights, analyzing customer sentiment, or even searching for regulations, think about using AI to source the result first.
  • Creating report: polishing with AI/ML, we should worry less about how to present our result rather than what we want to put in because AI can generate nicely format, data representation, and well-written reports for us.
  • Code degeneration: coding is a tool that everyone can use because AI can write code for us. We need to describe what we want, which can also be extended to images and videos.
If you have other use cases in mind that we may have missed in our analysis of productivity and efficiency optimization, we'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and let's continue the conversation.
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PMO | How to Get Started with GenAI in Project Management - The PMI Approach

10/16/2024

 
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According to PMI's talent triangle, project managers will embrace AI in terms of skills, business accruement, and ways of working to prepare for the era of AI. 
  • Business Acumen: Deep understanding of AI's market potential, ROI, ethical concerns, and strategic business alignment. Understanding AI should include knowing its trends, competitive landscape, regulatory considerations, and industry opportunities. Most importantly,  the understanding should cover the challenges, changes, and impacts of the project from GenAI.
  • Ways of Working: Embracing AI means more than just understanding it. It's about using AI  tools to simplify your work, such as using GenAI to assist with email and project document creation, sourcing information, and analyzing project performance. These tools can significantly enhance efficiency and productivity, allowing project managers to focus on more strategic tasks.
  • Power Skills: Strong technical literacy, problem-solving, communication, ethical awareness, change management, and resource/time management. Obtain skills for data analytics and prompt engineering to use and support GenAI projects.
By balancing these elements, a project manager can successfully navigate the complexities of generative AI projects, driving innovation and achieving desired business outcomes.
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PMO|Get Ready to Manage AI/ML Projects

10/15/2024

 
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As ML/AI and Generative AI projects become top priority initiatives in many organizations, PMOs and project managers are facing increasing demands to manage them effectively. This article will analyze the nature of such projects, what PMs must know, and what distinguishes them from non-AI/ML  projects. 
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Use OKR to Plan.When planning ML/AI projects, it's important to acknowledge that there is often less certainty due to the need for technology research and experimentation. Unlike traditional projects, ML/AI projects have less predictable outcomes and require constant trial and error. Therefore, it's essential to allow flexibility in the timeline and scope of the model training process, data quality, and algorithm performance tuning. In such cases, using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) approach can help focus on the results rather than the process. Managing stakeholder expectations is crucial, as AI/ML projects may take a long or iterative approach. Clearly communicating and engaging stakeholders when defining OKRs can help gain their buy-in, convey the project's values, and help them understand that it may take time to realize the benefits fully.
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Put Data First. ML/AI projects are heavily data-driven, meaning that the quality and quantity of data directly impact the project's success. Managing these projects requires a deep understanding of data sources, data collection, preprocessing, and data quality. As a project manager, you'll need to coordinate with data engineers and scientists to ensure the correct data is available at the right time.

Bridge the Communication Gap. ML/AI projects often require collaboration across multiple disciplines, including data science, machine learning, software development, and domain experts. As a project manager, you will need to bridge the gap between these technical and non-technical teams, ensuring clear communication and that all parties understand the project goals and requirements.

Tracke AI Metrics. In ML/AI projects, success is often measured by model performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and others, which can be complex to understand. Project managers must familiarize themselves with these evaluation criteria and know how they align with business objectives. You will need to track these metrics throughout the project and adjust timelines or resources as needed.

Create Cycles with Continous Iterations. ML/AI projects typically follow an iterative development process involving cycles of model training, testing, and refining. This contrasts with the more linear nature of traditional projects. As a project manager, you'll need to manage this continuous iteration while ensuring that deadlines and milestones are met, even if outcomes need to be clarified.

Control the Risks. AI ethics, including the risk of bias in models, is a significant concern in ML/AI projects. As a project manager, you must ensure that the team addresses ethical considerations, such as preventing bias in the data and models and considering the societal impacts of the AI solution. Regulatory compliance and fairness should be part of your project's objectives.

Pay Attention to Resources and Costs. Unlike traditional software projects, ML/AI projects require significant computational resources, especially for model training and large datasets. As a project manager, you'll need to manage cloud infrastructure or specialized hardware resources like GPUs to ensure that computational requirements are met without exceeding budget constraints.

Plan after Deployment. Deploying ML/AI models into production presents unique challenges compared to traditional software deployment. Models need to be monitored post-deployment for performance decay over time due to changing data patterns. You'll need to work closely with engineers to plan for continuous monitoring, updates, and maintenance to ensure the model remains effective.

Closely track Risks. Due to uncertainties in data, algorithms, and experiment outcomes, ML/AI projects involve more risk and variability. Managing these risks requires an adaptive and proactive risk management approach, including contingency plans and continuous reassessment of project viability.

Stay Compliant with Regulations. AI projects must often comply with regulations regarding data privacy, especially when using sensitive or personal data (e.g., GDPR). As a project manager, ensuring the project complies with these legal requirements and that the AI models are transparent and explainable is important.

In summary, in ML/AI project management, the project manager must be adaptable, comfortable with uncertainty, and knowledgeable about data science and machine learning processes. The role involves managing timelines and resources, ensuring data quality, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, and addressing ethical concerns. It's a more complex, iterative process than traditional project management, requiring a strategic balance between experimentation, resource management, and business alignment.

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PMO |  Monthly Job Analysis - AI/ML Product Management

10/13/2024

 
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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the project management position is predicted to grow 7% until 2033, with an average yearly salary of $98,580 in 2023 (around $47/hour). However, the actual pay could vary across industries and companies. 

This month, our analysis will focus on AI/ML-related project management, a field that is currently in high demand. We will analyze the job requirements, skills, and qualifications, highlighting the value of your expertise. Let's look at an example job opening: 

Netflix: Product Manager, ML Platform: Training (10/14/2024)
Netflix offers entertainment services with 278 million paid memberships in over 190 countries. It is one of the big five tech companies called "FAANG." These companies are known for high pay and extensive company benefits. The position is part of a team building the Machine Learning Platform (MLP) to improve researchers' and engineers' productivity.
 
  • The qualifications include covering all phases of machine learning development at Netflix, including data processing, training, evaluation, deployment, and operations. AI projects require the PM to know how to manage the project lifecycle, which involves collecting data, creating training, engaging customers for evaluation, and performing operations efficiently. 
  • It's worth noticing the role of "enhancing data scientist productivity" in the job description. This usually means getting the data quickly and with high quality and facilitating evaluation testing with users. It's a role that requires a solid understanding and a mastery of Agile project management methodology. The requirement for building a "roadmap of platform capabilities necessary to accelerate ML development, especially for Generative AI use cases" is a product management role. This requires working with customers to define OKR and prioritizing the feature roadmap. One technique is defining the platform's unique selling proposition (USP). Another is creating a user advisory board to collect product requirements and feedback. ​​

Netflix: Principal Product Manager, Data Platfor -Analytics Platform (10/18/2024)
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Netflix seeks a Principal Technical Product Manager to lead its Data Platform, focusing on optimizing data utility across the company by managing analytics platforms and driving technological innovations. This role demands a seasoned professional to develop strategic visions customer use cases to engineering features, foster cross-functional collaborations, and spearhead product roadmaps, all aimed at enhancing both the technical and non-technical user experience. Key Skills and Experience Required:
  • Strategic Leadership: Ability to shape and implement strategies for data platforms (Spark, Trino, Airflow, Iceberg, S3) that align with Netflix’s business goals
  • Technical Expertise: Extensive experience in data analytics or ML platforms, with proficiency in Compute engines, Orchestration systems, and Lakehouse technologies.
  • Experience: Minimum of 8 years in technical product management, including significant experience in managing large-scale projects and teams.
To understand, Netflix infrastructure, check this Linkedin post: 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐱 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧? This is a part of management not a product management position however, if you have The technical background and would like to extend your skills to customer driven projects and strategy, then this is a choice.

​Meta: GenAI Project Manager, Product Data Operations (10/21/2024)
​Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is a global technology powerhouse renowned for connecting billions worldwide through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. The company's culture emphasizes rapid innovation, open communication, and initiative, encouraging employees to lead projects and innovate. The Project Manager position recently posted is their Product Data Operations team to advance GenAI programs. The job requires strong leadership and the ability to manage complex, technology-driven projects.
  • Experience Required: At least 12 years in project management, specializing in technology-focused projects, risk management, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Desirable Skills and Knowledge: Proficiency in critical thinking, communication, SQL, or Excel/Google Sheets, with experience in GenAI or machine learning, such as data annotation project. 
  • we need to note this requirement ”Build strategic capabilities (e.g., data-driven processes, frameworks, analytical tools) to identify and prioritize opportunities to accelerate GenAI product development cycles” This means  it requires project managers to know how to use analytic to an AI to drive project Execution.
We hope this analysis helps you prepare for the career changes. Let us know your analysis and  if it is helpful for job searching and career planning. 
Editor's Notes: You may use the following link to find the AI/ML jobs on Linkedin:
  • Project manager AI Jobs in United States on Linkedin
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PMO | How to Apply AI to Project Management

9/22/2024

 
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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.
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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.

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