2022 in Project Management - 7/8
2022 has been an unprecedented year, and it brought with it a wide range of challenges and developments that have the potential to change the way that project managers approach their craft.
This is the seventh article in the list.
7. Generative AI gone mainstream
In recent months, the acceleration of results in the field of generation of text and images by an artificial intelligence has been remarkable. The launch of ChatGPT in particular has triggered a wave of creative use and fantasies about its ability to provide plausible-looking answers to any question.
AI-generated texts can range from creative stories and poems to more practical applications such as summarizing articles, transcripts, and more. AI-generated images can look like photo or like artwork.
Takeaways for Project Managers
Artificial Intelligence might play a role in Project Management, but ChatGPT is not the kind of AI that can achieve that. Unless your definition of Project Management is a purely bureaucratic one.
However, its ability to produce plausible text can be helpful when completing text-based reports.
Let’s take lessons learned as an example: I always recommend to keep track and record issues, causes and lessons learned as they happen during the project. However, this is not always the case - everybody focuses on the resolution, and there is not always the time to take a breath, reflect on what happened and why, and document the lessons learned.
Enter ChatGPT
Suppose that your project had an issue.
You might use the following prompt to collect some ideas:
Write the lessons learned for a project in which (description of your issue). Write one paragraph with a description of the event, one for the causes, and one for the lessons learned.
This will give you some commonplace answers: they might apply or not to your project. If they do, perfect - just adapt the text to the specific context of your project, and you're done. But even if they don’t, they will give you some simple ideas - or help you remember what your actual countermeasures were, or what you could have done differently to avoid the issue.
The List
Generative AI gone mainstream (this article)
Upcoming
ABBA Voyage virtual concert
Bonus point
Agile Methodology and big-”A” vs small-”a”: according to the State of Agile report 2022, "Accelerate Time to Market" is the #1 expected result of an Agile transformation. The ability to manage changing priorities has disappeared from the radar, meaning that it is relevant for no more than 30% of respondents.
Up next
#8: ABBA Voyage virtual concert
I asked GPT-3 a quote about computers from a song by ABBA, and I got this:
One of these days computers will do it all
And I'll be dancing in the street
ABBA, "Dancing Queen"