The Art of Project Management (with AI)
Have you ever wondered how to plan and execute a project where the result is a like a master painting? Your approach to project management is a work of art. The project is on time, within budget, and the resulting business value for the end client is perfect.
We’ll talk about how to become artful in project planning and execution with the help of generative AI. This will be helpful for IT consulting projects, new product development initiatives, and other project types.
When you think about projects, the last thing that comes to mind is the word “art” or “artful.” We often plan a project with a list of tasks in a spreadsheet or a project tool. Then, we just read the task labels without thinking about how to execute each task really well. Are we missing the art of thinking slowly, figuring out how to get stuff done without running into risks or issues? If so, at what cost?
We lose big for not slow thinking
Could that be why 70% of all projects fail on average? It’s even worse with mega-sized projects. According to Professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s research, 99.5% of mega projects fail. Flyvbjerg found that these failures happen equally in public and private sectors and across industries. This includes large IT systems projects implemented by the world’s largest consulting firms, such as Deloitte, Accenture, and Ernst & Young. Today, Flyvbjerg’s research database has over 16,000 projects, and their initial failure rate findings still hold.
The largest issue identified in these research reports is the lack of thinking and planning slowly. Most projects get executed with the mindset of starting fast and executing fast.
Today's common attitude toward project implementation is don’t think, just do. This may come from immense competitive pressures and political tactics. For example, a politician wants to do the red-ribbon-cutting photo op for their city mega-project before the next election. They skip smart planning and instead rush the kick-off for political reasons.
“Start fast” and “fail fast” mindset is hurting our potential
The other reason we may be rushing is the trend from the venture capital mindset of “fail fast.” The idea is not to spend much time thinking about planning and instead execute something today. There’s another similar influence of agile thinking in the project management community. According to many agile enthusiasts, the mindset is “start fast, learn faster,” where they start executing early and then quickly learn from mistakes.
The art of thinking slowly brings success
Professor Flyvbjerg found that all successful projects have a common approach — start with slow thinking for planning and then react fast when executing. The stories reveal that these firms and organizations had an art form of thinking slowly upfront to iron out all possible scenarios and risks. They would invest a huge amount in the planning phase only to realize massive benefits by getting the overall project done on time, on budget, and delivering satisfied business or societal value end results.
For an IT consulting firm with client budgeting, this slow-thinking approach will shift a good chunk of the project budget billable hours to the earlier part of the engagement. At first, this may seem scary, especially when all the focus is on development and testing. However, by taking the time to plan really well, the end results for the client will be worth it. Imagine all expectations are met, and business value is realized. Your consulting firm would be much better positioned for follow-up engagements and client referrals.
The rest of this article will cover what is the art in thinking and doing, what are the characteristics of being artful in your work, how you put it into practice, and then wrap up with an example of how to document the art way of thinking and doing so managers and team members can learn and execute better.
Was is Art in Think & Do?
First, how do we define "art" in the context of thinking and doing? Artists blend colors with instinct, composers weave notes, chords, and tempo to create melody, cooks use creativity to not only build an interesting taste for your pallet but also present for your eyes, and project managers use critical thinking to analyze risks and issues and to discover alternative solutions.
What attributes make it artful when we're looking to build an art form to execute complex projects? Where can using art in thinking and doing truly help your project managers?
Consider finding examples of work done with a touch of art in your organization. Search for someone who naturally makes their work look like art.
Can they use this unique approach in roles like product leadership or project management? If only 10% of your project managers shine and succeed consistently because most of them are too focused on doing project administration work, such as scheduling, then where can you get ideas to help all of your managers learn how to be more artful with planning and executing?
Check your LinkedIn connections or other platforms to see if anyone stands out for mastering the blend of thinking and doing, and ask them for their ideas. You could also dive into books, blog posts, articles, or event talks.
But what if you don’t have time and need to jump-start the art form of project management today? Consider asking generative AI, such as ChatGPT, for help.
ChatGPT for Project Art
I will now share my experience with ChatGPT to obtain ideas on how to help project managers to think and do with the skill of an artist.
I kicked this off by asking ChatGPT what is art when it comes to thinking and doing. It gave me a good draft with a list for thinking and a list for doing. I then updated the answer with some of my changes.
ChatGPT Results:
START --------
Art in Thinking:
Creativity: Explore outside traditional boundaries and build original thoughts. A project may run into an issue that is a show-stopper. When traditional experiences lead us to nowhere, then we need to think outside of the box.
Critical Thinking: Assessing and weighing specifics to reach conclusions. Oh my, did our school teachers forget this one? To improve our product processes, we must question assumptions, analyze information and evidence, take alternative perspectives, and arrive at well-supported and coherent conclusions.
Intuition: Rely on instinctive feelings or deep-seated understanding. Intuition builds up from participating in and managing many projects over time. We start to understand how to move forward even though we aren't conscious of previous similar experiences.
Synthesis: Combining varied ideas to create a unified perspective. For example, a business analyst’s approach to collecting ideas may include asking not only the client sponsor but also front-line workers and people outside the project who may obtain indirect business value from the project deliverables.
Art in Doing:
Mastery: Reaching a skill level where actions become smooth and effortless. For example, a solution architect who has launched dozens of systems implementation projects will know how to prepare for the next launch without thinking twice.
Personal Touch: Adding unique elements to one's work that reflect individual style or perspective. For example, when a consulting manager deploys a new solution for the client, they could get the client lead on a video call with the deployment team so they can all participate when they click the button to migrate the code to production. They don’t all have to be there, but this personal touch would be remembered.
Attention to Detail: Focusing on the nuances and small aspects that elevate work. A project manager is less likely to make careless mistakes and more likely to ensure the accuracy and completeness of their project's tasks.
Adaptability: Adjusting and improvising in response to the situation. For example, if a project manager receives notice of a large directional change from the client sponsor, they should be able to respond rapidly, communicate, reassess the scope, and pivot.
Aesthetics: Creating something not just functional but also beautiful or emotionally resonant. For example, the solution could meet the functional requirements, but what if few end-client users were willing to use it? The product release could become a failure. Good aesthetics could enhance user engagement, market differentiation, emotional connection, and reduced cognitive load.
-------- END
The above art of thinking and doing for project managers’ content contains general attributes for any work and role in the organization. Imagine if all employees had this nailed. What power!
I know what you’re thinking. It would take time to get this embedded in the culture. Maybe incorporating these attributes into daily work may have to come down as an initiative from the C-suite or at least incorporated into HR's mission with a company-wide plan for helping people learn to think this way. For a consulting firm, the practice leaders and executives would need to demand the revamping of their methodologies and frameworks to include artful thinking in all critical parts of their processes.
How would you put this into practice? Let’s look at an example of a quick win by using art in a specific task.
Putting Artful into Practice
Suppose a client hired your IT consulting firm to implement a CRM solution like Salesforce. One of the most critical tasks in your implementation projects is:
TASK:
Define the business value to be created
TASK DESCRIPTION:
?
What’s the tasks description? What’s the how-to?
The success of getting this task done well will determine the success of the project’s solution. Suppose you don’t get the best business value defined for this project. In that case, there’s a risk of failure to deliver the expected business value from the CRM implementation project.
If you delegate the above task to ten distinct project leads, you'll likely receive ten varied outcomes — one great, some so-so, and a couple that are bad. How can we ensure a successful outcome each time? Ideally, we would want the top performer around to do everything. But that's not feasible.
One solution would be to obtain what’s in the head of the top performer and share it with the others. What if that’s impossible? Another solution would be to use generative AI as we did in the above section and incorporate it into the how-to description of getting the task done well.
I picked the “synthesis” attribute from above and modified it for this task description. Here’s an example:
TASK DESCRIPTION:
Synthesis: Combine varied ideas to create a unified perspective on business value. For example, ask not only the business sponsor but also obtain ideas and feedback from future users and other stakeholders. If the scope includes cross-business touchpoints, consider checking in with these people outside the project. Then start to combine different points of view to understand business problems and new opportunities for expanded value.
Although this would be a partial description, it gives you an idea of how to embed one of the art skills from the above thinking and doing list.
Next, let’s talk about how to make this information available at the fingertips of the person owning this task.
Art into Project Frameworks
The aim is to record the task and its description so your project lead can instantly glean insights on how to execute that task.
IT Consulting firms claim to have methodologies, blueprints, and frameworks. But many of their documented processes are only skin deep. Many of their consultants on the ground don’t even know this exists, or if they do, the information is not easy to find.
The solution is to set up your methods and how-to content so they can be retrieved instantly during task implementation.
The project platform you choose to contain this content is crucial. It should be user-friendly, allow you to embed the guidance super fast, and be easy for the task owner to get to when executing. It's equally vital that the system is structured for managing project frameworks and blueprints as dynamic libraries, so future projects can re-use the knowledge and be improved over time.
Example Use Case in Pie
If you cannot do the above content and recipe strategy today with your project software, check out other project tool options in the market.
The following is a short use case video showing how the above task and its description can look in a project tool like our Pie process and project management application.
The above video shows a Salesforce CRM implementation project created from a process "recipe." I opened the project, clicked on the phase (pie slice), then selected the process box. When I hovered over task number 3, it showed the how-to content. Some of this content was from the ChatGPT ideas, as noted in the above AI section.
onboard new team members more quickly
Now that you have powerful content defined with AI (or from your experts), you can use it to help train new team members. When you onboard new people into your organization or group who are new to the project execution needs, they can get started even without a lot of experience or training.
In summary, obtaining knowledge either from your experts or with the help of generative AI like ChatGPT can do wonderful things, including helping you to think slowly so you have fewer risks and issues later in the project. The result is fewer project failures and more happiness.
Written by: Paul Dandurand, Pie Founder
Top Banner Photo by: Muhammad Rahim Ali
and modified with Photoshop Generative Expand
Section Images: Generative AI with DALL-E
and Photoshop Generative Expand