Just a few years ago, the very mention of artificial intelligence (AI) would be met with jokes about Martians or UFOs – but now everyone knows a little something about AI and why it matters. No longer the stuff of science fiction or the far-flung future, AI is here to stay and its ability to change the way we work, live, and play is growing daily.
AI has the potential to improve processes, streamline decision-making, fill in knowledge gaps, and support resource planning – all fundamentals of agile management. Think of your day-to-day and how much time you spend on reviewing the product backlog or resource planning to ensure that your projects get delivered on time. Now, what if you had an intelligent AI-enabled agile management tool that could handle the burden of these tasks so you could better focus on meeting the needs of your team and customers?
Yes, AI and its close cousin, machine learning, are making waves in agile management and it’s time to understand what the fuss is all about. Just like the move from flat spreadsheets to highly integrated planning software changed the way you interact with your agile teams and upper management – the same is about to happen with the AI.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
The tricky aspect to AI is that everyone has a slightly different understanding of what it can and can’t do. To help you understand how AI can bring positive change to your agile management system and approach, we’ve put together a concise list of why AI matters:
- Automates and performs high-volume task reliably without error.
- Adds intelligence to existing technology to add a new layer of capability.
- Continues to learn with progressive algorithms, allowing it to spot errors and inconsistencies and to predict options based on history.
- Provides deeper insight into data with its deep learning capabilities.
- With the right algorithms and high quality data, AI changes the value and importance of the data.
It is important to remember that this level of AI takes time and patience. Remember the AI tools are only as smart as the data they’re given and it takes time to learn the data and understand how the data fits together.
How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Agile Management
The automation and deep analysis aspects of AI make it particularly appealing for anyone working in agile management. By giving responsibility for day-to-day management and administration tasks to your AI tools, you’ve got more time to focus on the intangibles of agile management.
Think of how your day changes when your AI-enabled agile management tool uses its knowledge to review your agile projects for performance, areas for improvement, and makes decisions on what and why the teams should work on next. It takes trusting the data that you have to give your agile project the extra set of eyes you need to look deeper into the data.
- Taking over the routine. You likely use an agile management tool that makes it easy to track time, manage estimates, and to create progress reports. Now with AI, you can realize an actual management hub that takes all the different data points that come with team deliverables, resource demands, and client demands and have a fully automated system that automates scheduling, adjusting, reporting, and estimating.
- Risk assessment. AI is really good at spotting patterns and inconsistencies in patterns, much better in fact than human beings. When it comes to risk assessment, any inherent bias that you bring to a project or a team is ignored when you let your AI-enabled management tool manage your risk assessment. Depending on scope of your product, you may be impacted by external factors which are impossible for you to be monitoring – let your AI agile management tool monitor risk factors such as weather, stock markets, and supply chain progress.
- Metadata analysis for error prevention. The power of metadata is what enables predictive typing when you’re texting or the alert on your smartphone that disables texts when driving. This same type of metadata can be used to analyze, review, and predict gaps in your projects that can result in errors. Let your AI-enabled management tool learn about your team, its habits, and your projects and soon you’ll have a better view of how your team can really be expected to perform.
- Improved communication. The more you know, the easier it is to clearly communicate with your team. Rely on your AI-enabled agile management tool to give you the alerts, reminders, and insights into the raw data that your team is giving you. You can have the capability to look beyond the graph that shows the project is behind schedule and understand why it is behind schedule – this knowledge allows you to communicate with and lead your team better.
- Increased efficiency with task coordination. A large aspect of agile management is in keeping all the balls in the air – extreme coordination is required. As your AI-enabled tool learns your data, your history, your projects, and your dependables – it’s much easier to set priorities and make real-time decisions. AI gives you an unbiased insight into your data and tells you for example, who is best suited to complete a story to ensure the iteration is a success.
Deeper insights, unbiased decision-making, logic-based risk assessment, and automation of the routine are all well-suited to AI agile management. Think of AI as your second set eyes into your projects, teams, and iterations and your partner who can ease your day-to-day allowing you to focus on the more human aspects of agile management.
The important thing to remember about AI-enabled agile management is that this is all in the name of improvement and achieving a greater level of success. When you have the ability to improve how your team performs and how your projects are managed – this all points to better outcomes for you and your team. Don’t fear AI – it can and will make your days better so you can focus on leading and guiding and less time on number-crunching.