Sharktower: The future of AI project management
By: Andrew Kavanagh
Tags: AI, Data, Project Management, Data Science, Projects

Sharktower: The future of AI project management

We’re Sharktower, the world’s leading AI and data-driven project delivery platform. We’re passionate about underpinning project management practice with the use of data and developing the potential of AI in the field.

Gartner’s report How AI Will Reinvent Program and Portfolio Management makes a bold prediction:

“AI is about to revolutionise how PPM leaders leverage technology to support their organisation. Initial scepticism will eventually give way to practical AI use cases allowing PPM leaders to spend more time on value creation and less time wrestling with current PPM software technologies. Technology providers must act now and seize this phenomenon”

And that’s where we come in.

It’s no secret that many projects fail or run massively over time and budget. According to McKinsey’s report, Delivering large scale IT projects on time, on budget and on value, on average, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time while delivering 56% less value than predicted. And software projects run the highest risk of cost and schedule overruns. In an ever-shifting business landscape, increasingly enhanced by technology, any large change projects relying on outdated tools and processes are unnecessarily flirting with danger. Do any of these issues sound familiar?

No agility in decision-making and too much guesswork

Difficult to maintain governance across a portfolio and get useful delivery information

Too much effort to create bespoke reports for different stakeholders

Lack of easily accessible information across multiple programs

Wasteful, manual shadow reporting

These pain points often relate to a lack of transparent information and convoluted software and methods. You may have become accustomed to using Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slide decks or even the humble post-it note. All of these serve a purpose, but we believe there is a better way.

A fully integrated project delivery platform, bringing in data from across portfolios of projects and applying machine learning and AI techniques to the gathered data may feel like a big jump, but it’s possible today and will become necessary in the coming years if you’re to stay ahead of your competition.

Project teams already have many factors to account for in achieving their objectives, and Sharktower is offering its services as a virtual team member; predicting, recommending, analysing, learning. It’s the forward-thinking project manager’s right-hand robot.

The data captured by our solution gives you the power to:

Spot problems before they happen and identify unreported risk in projects

Navigate and filter through the reporting noise to identify important signals and achieve focus

Reduce the time from identifying problems to taking positive intervention

Move away from silos of reporting cycles to live, accessible data and a single source of the truth.

Here’s what we’re doing today

Project health checks

Sharktower’s flagship machine learning tool is our Project Health Score. This combines data from all your project interactions to provide an objective score which changes over time. This is your key project governance metric, giving you an insight at a glance into the state of your project is but also allowing you to take action early to improve delivery.

Assessing team sentiment

Sharktower uses natural language processing techniques to assess team sentiment, a key predictor of project outcomes. As a project or portfolio manager, you can address any problems within teams and get back on track.

Project delivery risk modelling

Using information about the projected end dates and risk level of each plan activity, we perform scenario modelling which can help project managers understand the likelihood of the project delivering on the planned timelines.

There’s so much more to come

Sharktower is a fully-fledged system, delivering improved project outcomes to our clients. We have so much more to do though: our vision is to build the autonomous project, navigating humans on the optimal route to the intended outcome.

According to Gartner, by 2030, 80% of the work of today’s project management (PM) discipline will be eliminated as AI takes on traditional PM functions such as data collection, tracking and reporting. We’re here to make sure that happens, but in a way that frees up project managers to focus on delivering value rather than becoming obsolete.

Find out more about what Sharktower does, how it can enhance your projects and our licensing options in our brochure, and then start a conversation with us at sharktower.com.