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Planning

The hardest thing about project management is aligning people's belief in a common purpose. Develop tools and systems that help to build morale and focus attention.

Systems​

Engineer systems where falling into the flow of success becomes unavoidable.

  1. Must be able to read the project masterfile and understand the full story of:
    • What critical decisions had been made and why
    • What progress had been made
    • Who owned/owns responsibility for what
    • Who were the critical connections with the Customer and Suppliers
    • Critical milestones on critical path to success
    • Engineering and financial plans for critical path
    • Dead line for completion and expected targets for success
  2. Enable newcomers to contribute value as quickly and effectively as possible without repeating past mistakes.
  3. Clear consequences of not following process. Contract terminated and blacklisted for future projects.
  4. Engineer lesson learned into systems that raise the organisation's collective wisdom for running more effective operations.
  5. Consistent process across multiple projects enable an organisation to reliably monitor progress and understand what levers to pull to adjust velocity.

Insights​

  1. Multidisciplinary coordination is crucial in complex projects like battery factory construction.
  2. Risk monitoring, anticipation, and mitigation are essential components of project management.
  3. Effective communication, both laterally and upwards, is vital for project success.
  4. Organizations can be likened to neural networks, with nodes receiving and providing information.
  5. Documenting and disseminating lessons learned is challenging but crucial for organizational growth.
  6. AI has significant potential in extracting insights from project documentation and correspondence.

Checklist​

Systems Thinking for Project Management with AI Integration.

  1. Develop a comprehensive Knowledge Graph:
    • Include organizational breakdown structure
    • Incorporate work breakdown structure
    • Add functional breakdown structure
    • Include location breakdown structure
  2. Implement effective change management procedures:
    • Anticipate and quantify impacts of changes
    • Develop approval processes
    • Create strategies to keep teams productive during changes
  3. Establish a learning organization:
    • Identify reliable sources of information within the team
    • Develop mechanisms to adjust "weights" to different team members' input
    • Create feedback loops for continuous improvement
  4. Implement AI-assisted documentation and insight extraction:
    • Use AI for real-time meeting transcription and action item extraction
    • Develop AI agents to create tickets and follow-up reminders automatically
    • Leverage AI to build and traverse knowledge graphs
  5. Foster a culture of "obligation to dissent":
    • Encourage team members to voice concerns and alternative perspectives
    • Create safe channels for feedback and discussion
  6. Practice first principles thinking:
    • Regularly challenge assumptions and established processes
    • Encourage innovative problem-solving approaches
  7. Establish clear signals for organizational learning:
    • Monitor effective risk identification
    • Track successful development of mitigation strategies (both procedural and technical)
  8. Integrate AI into project management processes:
    • Identify areas where AI can augment human capabilities
    • Develop frameworks for AI-human collaboration in project management
  9. Maintain a balance between rapid iteration and documentation:
    • Allocate resources for documenting lessons learned
    • Integrate documentation into the project workflow rather than treating it as an afterthought
  10. Regularly reassess project management practices:
    • Consider how AI capabilities might reshape project execution
    • Encourage team members to envision new ways of working with AI assistance