LHP Blog and Technical Articles

Why Traditional Project Management is Broken and How AI Fixes It

Written by Steve Neemeh | Nov 20, 2024 4:00:00 PM
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Why Traditional Project Management is Broken and How AI Fixes It

Hi, this is Steve Neemeh again, creating a series of videos on how to build a truly low-cost, high-performing engineering organization for the 21st century, not for the 20th century.

Last week's topic was the power of data analytics, and this week is revolutionizing project management and how that data can change the landscape of that role in general.

Whether you're a program manager, project manager, project engineer, technical program manager, program leader, or program director, you've been hired to generate an outcome for a specific project and to report that outcome to executives.

That is the function of your job.

In those roles, the question becomes, are you influencing the outcomes of the projects, and how are you influencing the outcome of the project?

So, to influence the outcome, you have to have the know-how behind how these programs come together, the experience that comes with that, and the people skills to navigate a multitude of different personalities and bring that all together into one successful outcome.

Now, with the way turnover rates happen right now and how people move between industries and jobs, how is anyone supposed to get that kind of experience over a decade in one industry?

So I'm going to apologize ahead of time to all the people in these roles, but if you're unable to influence the outcome of the program and navigate the technical discussions that are happening in front of you, you're not a project manager, you're a project reporter.

And I think in the world of AI, your job's in jeopardy.

So all is not lost.

There's a 21st-century solution.

Give the person a mentor, a mentor with 30 years of experience who can work with them on a day in and day out.

Unfortunately, all those people are retiring, and they're retiring at a pretty quick rate right now.

So the 21st-century solution to that is to capture the insights of that person, capture the insights of the program leaders in the past, capture the data from 50 years of development programs, and arm them with an AI assistant, One that can challenge the people working on the project and arm him with the know-how he needs, or she needs to be able to deliver the project on time and budget.

Here are some very standard examples of that.

You're going to a new processor, and a bunch of device drivers and board support packages have to be updated.

Well, how long does that take?

Can your project manager navigate the software leads opinion on that?

If he had the history of the last dozen development programs, I guarantee you he could navigate that.

An even more touchy subject is what was the performance of the team I have on my project in the last program they developed or the last five programs they developed.

You could have that information for your project manager.

He could navigate the best way to optimize the group for a positive outcome.

So if you're an organization that is constantly overrunning its projects and cycling through project managers because you just can't find the right one, the 21st-century solution is to arm them with the right data and an AI assistant to help them navigate the program and make that job a little bit more feasible and doable for someone that doesn't have 30 years of experience in your industry.

That's how you accelerate your program, that's how you do it cheaper, and that's how you make sure that it's effective for generations to come.

If you like this kind of video, go ahead and subscribe, like, and comment.

Then maybe we can start a forum where we discuss how to implement some of these things.

And that's your $1,000,000 minute.