Projectmanagment and Automation

The range of project managment and automation capability within your project management software can vary greatly. Some tools use automation to help monitor key aspects of the project and alert you of potential issues such as:

A change in the critical path

A missed deadline

An overloaded resource

A project delay

So the question becomes: What level of automation should you look for, and which project tasks should be automated?

projectmanagmnet and Automation should be looked at as a magnifier. It completes a predefined process for you. So if the process is not already smooth, automating it can make things much worse.

If you don’t have a consistent, repeatable process for smoothing out resource loading, you can’t entrust the task to project management software. It could end up assigning tasks to people not qualified to complete them, breaking dependencies, moving out your timeline, or causing a host of other problems.

If you’re considering incorporating automation into your project management process, ask yourself the following questions: 

What are our most manual, time-consuming, administrative tasks?

Which of our processes are well-documented and mapped?

Which are consistently repeated with little to no variation?

Are these processes basic enough for our project management software to automate without human oversight?

If one of these processes is not completed properly, how significant is the impact on the project?

How you answer each of the questions above will help you pinpoint where automation can provide a benefit to your project and business. Most companies aren’t yet ready to capture the benefits of artificial intelligence, but they can save time by incorporating automation into basic monitoring and reporting.

A few of the most common ways to use automation in project management software are:

The work intake process flow

Creation of new projects and tasks

Sending task reminders and notifications

The review and approval process 

Identifying bottlenecks