No Luddites here! Episode 3 of the UMD PM Symposium prequal and guests Al Zeiton, Marissa Brienza and Bill Brantley chat about the role of AI in Project Management and the potential risks and benefits of using it as PMs. We discover the logic and importance of maintaining human interaction—turns out its not fear that makes us think “it will never replace us” but rather AI’s limitations in the larger PM discipline. Ah! But what potential magic AI may bring if we use it as augmenting project management, driving improved risk assessment, and being our outsourced memory! All in service of PMS providing value for customers, and keeping us on the relationship side, even as technology might give us augmented memory, augmented intelligence or even artificial emotional intelligence. There may be guardrails we need to learn as we plunge toward a future of exponential skill growth in which could take PMs to the CEO suite…but augmented PMs maybe the stuff CEOs will be made of!

We all talk Agile, and sometimes we "say we wanna do agile", so this conversation is about the challenges of implementing Agile in different environments with guests David Forsyth, Mike Mellane, and Caitlin Kenny.  Co-host Mike Hannan takes our experts through a journey of the tensions between customers and vendors and the difficulty in managing communication pathways, budgeting, and the principle-agent problem. Solutions you care about included dedicating teams, synchronizing resources, capacity-based budgeting, and fixed-price contracts. Ah, and culture, it always is culture...that the shift that comes with embracing Agile and how transformation should be a continuous journey that focuses on business value. So, with a little patience and a focus on interpersonal accountability, incentives, and autonomy you can build the trusting teams needed to do the Agile dance.  Fight the zealotry, power to the edge, and download the episode!