Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow, Info-Tech Research Group. Insights and recommendations for projects, portfolios and change.

getty

​In this industry, we’ve been having an open conversation about our challenges with IT projects for decades, from the era of pre-planned work to the modern world where the very idea of projects and planning seems passé. Can AI finally help with something that has stymied us for so long?

We’ve already seen plenty of examples of AI producing project deliverables: documents, models, code, test plans, testing, training and more. It seems like just a matter of time before we recognize AI as the silver bullet for project management.

But we don’t see widespread success yet, where AI is running projects and reliably churning out finished products. The inhibitor to AI project success isn’t project management or project work. It’s figuring out which projects to do.

AI will prove to be the silver bullet for projects when we use it as the silver bullet for project selection—when we use AI to energize the right projects and starve the wrong ones. The principles behind good project portfolio management haven’t changed. What AI changes is our ability to practice them.

Intake

We hear about the same problem every day using different words for the same dilemma: project intake, demand management and prioritization. These can all mean different things, but IT leaders are usually describing some version of the same problem: having to say yes to too many projects, creating too much demand for too few people.

We expect help from a mature ecosystem of software vendors. The new generation of AI-fueled project portfolio solutions will be capable of assessing risk, resolving ambiguity, estimating costs, scanning the market for lessons learned and iterating with project requestors to turn nascent requests into legitimate project ideas.

But there is a catch. Ambiguity is the enemy of project fungibility.

Portfolio management depends on treating very different ideas as sufficiently comparable so that we can make choices between them. A regulatory requirement, infrastructure replacement, automation opportunity, ERP transformation and new digital product aren’t naturally interchangeable. But every time we prioritize them, we behave as though they are.

That fungibility has to be earned. The price is diligence. Organizations have to articulate the problem, expected value, cost, risk, timing, constraints and resource requirements well enough to create a legitimate basis for comparison. AI can help enormously with this process. It can challenge assumptions, identify missing information, expose ambiguity and iterate with the requestor before an idea ever reaches an executive.

Approval

It’s even easier to see how AI can turbocharge the approval process through classification and comparison across the entire universe of past, current and potential projects.

We’ve never had a shortage of competing project ideas. What we’ve lacked is the ability to maintain an objective and complete comparison between them. Anyone who has repeatedly iterated through the same long list of ideas knows how utterly exhausting that can become.

We can assess the value of an individual project in isolation, but waste is detected across the entire portfolio. That distinction matters. A project can have an excellent business case and still be the wrong investment. Its value competes with every other use of the same scarce money, people, time and organizational attention.

AI-fueled portfolio solutions can continuously compare projects without getting tired of scanning the entire universe of ideas. They will help you say yes to a project with a reasonable expectation that your organization both needs it and can get it done.

Prioritization

In any modern portfolio, this is the stage with the most impact. We can stop weak or nascent ideas from entering the funnel with a sound intake process. We can objectively compare viable ideas and approve the best ones. But approval does not create capacity, so we still have to ensure the right projects get worked on by the right people at the right time.

Prioritization guards against starting new projects too soon, before other projects are finished. It determines which project is next in line and allows us to consciously shelve or pause existing projects when something more important needs to start.

As humans, we too often do something else. We start the exciting new project, continue the old one and pretend we’re resourcing both. Our portfolio of active work should always be realistically achievable. Anything else is merely funded speculation. Every new project should, therefore, pass the gauntlet of all currently approved and active projects before getting started. Approval establishes that an idea is worth doing. Prioritization determines whether it is worth doing now.

AI tools can continually look at actual progress, strategic alignment, changing priorities, staff and funding availability and our entire portfolio of competing ideas to help us resource the right work at the right time.

AI Is Only A Silver Bullet If We Aim It Properly

The core insights driving project portfolio management haven’t changed in decades: Fuel the right investments and starve the rest.

We can assess the value of an individual project, but waste is detected across the entire portfolio. Leaders should focus on the organization’s ability to execute so that project ideas describe attainable value. Furthermore, your portfolio of active work should always be realistically achievable. Anything else is merely funded speculation. Every new project should pass the gauntlet of all currently approved and active projects before getting started.

Every aspect of the project portfolio depends on humans articulating their needs, predicting what will be required to fulfill them and forecasting the outcomes. The old distinction still holds: Project management is doing things right, and portfolio management is doing the right things.

AI can only be a silver bullet for project success when we use it to make the portfolio thrive.​​

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?