Show, Don't Tell - What can AI do for You?
Posted by [email protected] on Jun. 6, 2024 / Ways of Working / Subscribe 0
Have you checked out the content on Projectmanagement.com? If you're a PMI member, you can log in with your PMI ID and get access to, well, a lot. I should warn you, though, that there are a TON of conversations and articles about the many wonders of AI and what it can do, and some of the questions get repeated every few weeks. My biggest pet peeve is the people who sound like they're selling something. They spend a lot of time telling you about what AI can do, but now how to use AI to do it, and it's not always helpful. An early writing instructor pounded into my brain that exposition is almost always better than narrative, or that it's better to show than to tell.
I don't have a problem with AI. GenAI is a great tool, and I've gotten some good use out of it at work. After the last AI article I read where the author cited 5-year old data about how AI-based genetic algorithms can find "all possible combinations to achieve the [project] objective" without getting into how it can be done, and then suggested that I can find more information about it in peer reviewed articles in a university library, I decided to run a little experiment with my blog on projectmanagement.com. No, this isn't an Inception moment, I just decided to play around with "how" instead of "what" to illustrate an approach that I find more helpful when talking about new tools (although you might not believe that if you read some of my early writing on agile - I've learned a little since then). The first experiment can be found here - How do you Explain Project Management to a Developer?
As a project manager, prompt engineering for GenAI is worth learning. You won't need it for everything YOU do as a project manager - you don't need GenAI to create a project schedule or identify the critical path - there are tools that do that. But the creative nature of GenAI can be powerful in helping your stakeholders develop requirements or identify risks and potential mitigations they might not have considered. Consider this a teaser for an upcoming post on how to use AI to help your stakeholders. In the meantime, play with GenAI and figure out if/how it can benefit you.
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