Transform PPM to Optimize Value From Every Investment
Develop a game plan for integrating AI into your PPM practices.
Exponential technologies such as generative AI have entered the project and project portfolio management (PPM) space – putting intense pressure on its leaders to automate immediately using AI. Our framework helps PPM leaders put hype aside and build a plan that balances the reality of what can be accomplished today with the potential for transformation in the future.
While today’s AI solutions for PPM simply don’t match the hype, there’s no doubt that the technology will evolve, and some project management tasks will be performed by AI in the years ahead. The Exponential IT future is inevitable, and it demands a PPM transformation plan for the near- and long-term.
1. Don’t let FOMO drive your approach. Take control with a strategic plan.
While organizational leadership may be eager to unlock the promise of AI and the pressure to act immediately may be high, let your strategic plan be your guiding star. And don’t let AI vendors tell you otherwise.
2. Mature your PPM practice now to unlock future value.
Exponential IT isn’t about achieving AI-enabled automation overnight. Use your vision for the future to build a solid foundation now – think good data, strong accountability, and sustainable processes that will support a lasting transformation.
3. Take an iterative approach to PPM transformation.
Your PPM transformation roadmap to the exponential future is not a one-and-done exercise. Balance near-term wins with long-term vision – and iterate on your plan regularly.
4. AI won’t replace you. It will elevate your tasks.
By automating the more mundane project management tasks, AI and Gen AI technologies will allow PPM professionals to focus on more strategic activities. Rest assured that human intervention will be more critical than ever to ensure high-quality PPM outcomes.
Use our framework to transform current practices and develop a long-term transformation plan
Use this Info-Tech framework and the included tools and templates to establish, communicate, and maintain your technology-driven PPM transformation plan and demonstrate early value. Our framework assesses your process, people & culture, governance, and technology readiness across three core domains and eight capabilities:
- Assess your readiness for Exponential IT across project portfolio management, project management, and organizational change management.
- Define and document your PPM transformation strategy and goals to help guide your action plan.
- Analyze available AI use cases for PPM and identify the ones most relevant to your goals and current Exponential IT readiness.
- Define, document, and communicate your near- and long-term roadmaps for improving Exponential IT readiness and leveraging exponential technologies.
Workshop: Transform PPM to Optimize Value From Every Investment
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Assess Readiness and Challenges
The Purpose
Assess your readiness for Exponential IT in PPM and identify the project portfolio management challenges you're hoping to address through emerging technologies.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Situational awareness of your readiness for Exponential IT for PPM
- Confirmation or disproof that technology solutions are the right cure for your project porftolio ailments
Activities
Outputs
Review the Exponential IT for PPM landscape.
- Situational awareness of the Exponential IT for PPM landscape
Perform a readiness assessment.
- Knowledge of your current readiness and areas for improvement
Identify project challenges driving the need for AI-enabled improvements.
- Identification of the root causes of your top PPM challenges
Module 2: Interrogate Challenges and Technology Needs
The Purpose
Unpack the root causes of your PPM challenge pain points and assess your organization's cultural disposition toward Exponential IT to help shape your roadmap.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A business case for using exponential IT technologies (such as AI or GenAI) to address your PPM pain points
Activities
Outputs
Explore root causes of challenges across PPM domains.
- An interrogation of how PPM, project management, and organizational change management shortfalls contribute to overall PPM challenges
Analyze the pressures you're facing to adopt, and the risks of failing to adopt, Exponential IT technologies.
- A risk analysis of adopting (and failing to adopt) AI-enabled technologies for PPM
Define transformation vision and mission statements.
- Custom vision and mission statements for your PMO (or equivalent) and your PPM transformation
Identify and articulate PPM strategic goals.
- Guiding strategic goals or principles for your transformation
Module 3: Make Sense of Available Use Cases
The Purpose
Understand your AI use case needs for PPM relative to what's currently available on the market or through citizen-AI approaches.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A prioritized list of use cases relevant to your PPM challenges that you can research, explore, and (where possible) start to implement post-workshop.
Activities
Outputs
Discuss and document near-term use case expectations and needs.
- Analysis of use case needs
Review Info-Tech's library of current use case options.
- An understanding of use case options
Discuss and reconcile options with expectations.
- A high-level understanding of where the market is relative to AI use cases
Analyze the value, viability, and feasibility of near-term and long-term use cases.
- A prioritized list of use cases relevant to your PPM challenges
Module 4: Wireframe an Initial Transformation Plan
The Purpose
Identify your target state readiness milestones and wireframe your PPM transformation roadmap.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Identification of where you need to get to within the scope of your roadmap horizon
- A game plan for reaching that horizon through specific Exponential IT for PPM initiatives
Activities
Outputs
Determine target-state readiness milestones.
- Target-state identification
Prioritize and exclude capabilities on roadmap.
- A list of Exponential IT for PPM initiatives that will help you realize your target state.
Distill initiatives from prioritized capabilities.
- A prioritized approach to planning your initiatives based on the capability improvements most important to you
Categorize and plan the basics of initial roadmap initiatives.
- A high-level timeline for your executive initatives
Module 5: Finalize Your Transformation Plan
The Purpose
Info-Tech's workshop facilitator will finalize your PPM transformation plan post-workshop based on the four days of input. There may be additional post-workshop touchpoints to fine tune your roadmap and ensure you are equipped with everything you need.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A boardroom-ready presentation template to document and communicate your PPM transformation plan to your IT and business partners
Activities
Outputs
Refine your roadmap.
- A finalized version of your roadmap
Discuss your roadmap reporting needs with an Info-Tech analyst. They may also help you set up the PPM Transformation Dashboard or another of Info-Tech's Excel- or Power BI-based PPM solutions.
- Configured reporting needs
Finalize your transformation plan presentation.
- A finalized PPM transformation plan
Transform PPM to Optimize Value From Every Investment
Develop a game plan for integrating AI into your PPM practices.
What is Exponential IT?
Exponential IT is a framework defined by Info-Tech Research Group.
The technology curve has recently bent exponentially.
Generative AI has been the catalyst for this sudden shift, but there are more and more new technologies emerging (e.g. quantum computing, 5G), putting significant pressure on all organizations.
Speed is now imperative. All IT leaders and organizations are at risk of falling behind if they do not adopt new technologies fast enough.
Our framework instructs all IT leaders on how to transform their organization and elevate their value-creation capabilities, to close the gap between the exponential progression of technological change and the linear progression of IT's ability to successfully manage that change.
This research provides IT leaders with industry-specific priorities for Exponential IT and how to begin an effective Exponential IT transformation resulting in value creation.
What does Exponential IT mean for project portfolio management (PPM)?
- The project and project portfolio management space is on the verge of being heavily disrupted by AI and generative AI technologies.
- An estimated 80% of project management tasks will be performed by AI by the year 2030 (Harvard Business Review, 2023), and 72% of project management professionals say AI is highly likely to change their roles (Harrin, 2024).
- As a PPM leader, you need a game plan to transform your practices and meet leadership expectations without simply buying into vendor-driven hype and biting off more than you can chew.
Analyst perspective
"The future is over-forecasted and underpredicted."
Arthur De Vany)
For every prediction of technology's future in the ballpark of accurate, there are many more that take a swing and miss or at least take a swing and leave us waiting.
For instance, while the 1939 World's Fair accurately showcased the impending boom of television broadcasting and posited a vision of highway and automobile travel that would come to be some 20 years later, it also hosted displays that claimed flying cars, underwater cities, and fully autonomous homes were all just around the corner. To be fair, in some of these cases the technology is getting there just not at the pace the 1939 fair vendors predicted.
With AI and GenAI, humanity is once again at the dawn of an era where the separation of realistic, near-term technology targets from longer-term ones is murky. PPM practitioners might not have kept their reputations intact if they had burned the boats a year ago based on vendor hype, and they shouldn't do so today. They should make and validate a plan to integrate new technology with caution.
While AI holds transformative promise, there is no magic wand to realize its potential. Create a strategy that balances near-term sure bets with longer-term big swings to avoid promising your stakeholders the equivalent of a flying car when a good, smooth highway is all that's possible and needed!
Travis Duncan
Research Director, Project Portfolio Management
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive summary
| Your challenge | Common obstacles | Info-Tech's approach |
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Follow Info-Tech's practical, tactical, two-phase approach to establish and communicate a technology-driven PPM transformation plan that you can deliver.
Our approach includes tools and templates to help you achieve and maintain your transformation plan. |
Info-Tech Insight
Use the destination to inspire the journey. Exponential IT isn't about achieving AI-enabled automation overnight (the complexities of such a feat are impossible). Use your vision for future-state transformation as an opportunity to inspire the near- to medium-term adoption of long-neglected PPM fundamentals (e.g. sustainable processes, good data, strong accountability). With a firm foundation in place, you can build a transformation that will last.
Are you ready?
As a PMO/PPM leader, are you ready to lead a transformation enabled by emerging technology?
As organizational leaders look to reinvent their current operating models to ensure viability in the face of market volatility and technological innovation, project planning and delivery are top areas of focus for automation improvements.
PPM is on the verge of being disrupted by Exponential IT technologies, and PPM leaders need to prepare to help lead the transformation.
- It goes without saying that AI and GenAI are driving this focus. The impacts of these technologies are already being felt, and some of their benefits realized, in some basic project management functions.
- As the technology evolves and matures, it will help run more advanced functions, not just in project management, but in the PPM and organizational change management domains as well.
80% of project management tasks will be performed by AI by the year 2030.
Source: HBR, 2023
72% of project management professionals say AI is highly likely to change their roles.
Source: Harrin, 2024
Change isn't coming it's already here
Exponential IT technologies are already changing the project management profession.
Statistics show that project managers are already realizing the benefits and efficiencies of AI and GenAI within their roles, with the majority of practitioners either using or planning to use soon.
While these gains are primarily being realized on simple tasks, it is only a matter of time before the technology disrupts more strategic portfolio-management-level activities.
Use of AI by Project Managers
Source: Capterra, 2024
Reset your focus
AI and GenAI will retune the roles of PPM professionals but it won't replace them.
Initial fears of project managers being replaced by AI technologies have given way to excitement and optimism about how these advancements will enhance project management roles and enable project and PPM staff to focus on more strategic activities.
"GenAI can support project management tasks in many ways. The more complex the task, the more human intervention is needed to result in high-quality outcomes."
Source: PMI, 2023
Info-Tech predicts four key future-state objectives related to PPM and AI's potential
Solve problems, not calendars
Automate traditional PMO capabilities.
Plan in real time
Let AI run ongoing resource allocation.
Augment teams with AI
Let AI fill in project portfolio, investment risk, and change management gaps.
Trust but verify
Enable true accountability.
"The next generation of AI tools will reward diligent leadership by making [resource] utilization, waste, and completed projects transparently obvious."
Barry Cousins,
Distinguished Research Fellow,
Info-Tech Research Group
As a PPM Leader you need to act, but you still have time to plan
While there is reason for excitement, don't let FOMO drive your approach. This paradigm shift is still in its early days, and you have time to plan a strategic approach.
Vendors hype up what AI will do for PPM in the future, but not the specifics of how today's users can unlock its potential.
The potential is undoubtedly there, but advanced functionality is still forming. Don't let vendor hype put you in a reactive stance. You still have time to plan without jeopardizing outcomes.
Individual Benefit Phase
Benefit Time frame: 0-1 year
Gains at the individual micro level.
Scaling Up Phase
Benefit Time frame: 1-5 years
Gains at the team and employee upskill level
Workplace Maturity Phase
Benefit Time frame: 6-10 years
Entire organizations restructured around AI; global productivity gains realized
Source: Oliver Wyman Forum (quoted in Stevenson, 2024)
Only 21% of respondents to a recent PMI survey said they are currently using AI in project work.
Source: PMI, 2023
Plan your route
Even if your PMO isn't ready to implement AI-enabled use cases, as PMO/PPM leader you need a plan.
Even if your organization or your PMO (or equivalent) is at low PPM maturity (i.e. you're not ready to transition to an Exponential IT paradigm in the near term), chances are your peers and leadership are still interested in using AI to unlock project efficiencies.
- You need to provide direction. Even though in many cases the market and vendors are not ready to deliver on AI marketing hype, your leadership doesn't necessarily know this. They're looking to you for direction.
In a recent survey, only 8% of organizations had no current plans to adopt AI.
Source: TechTarget, 2024
77% of project management professionals are optimistic about the influence of AI in their roles.
Source: TechTarget, 2024
Plan your route based on your mandate
As with most things in PPM, a top-down mandate is best. If you're leadership is driving your approach, you need to leverage their support, but also get ahead of the hype.
While AI is a cutting-edge technology, the success of its scaling up to the degree that it will deliver organizational business benefits will depend on governance models that look more old-school command-and-control than new-school distributed (i.e. universally usable, high-quality PPM data won't come naturally).
Use your transformation plan to ensure executives are meaningfully committed to implementation success and not just chasing another new trend. Further, ensure they know what the technology is capable of in the near term It's not a magic wand!
Source: IPMA
Info-Tech's approach
Use our framework to ensure you have a measured plan that balances near-term quick wins and foundational components with a big picture, art-of-the-possible future-state vision.
The Info-Tech difference:
- A comprehensive yet flexible approach that can help you meet new challenges as they arise.
- A practical and tactical framework and template that will help you save time.
- Industry best practices and practitioner-based insights.
Info-Tech's methodology for Transform PPM to Optimize Value From Every Investment
| 1. Scout the Terrain | 2. Set Tactical Goals | |
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| Phase Steps |
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| Phase Outcomes |
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Just looking for PPM AI use cases?
Not necessarily looking to transform but curious about use cases? Jump to step 2.1.
You don't need to go through all steps in this blueprint to unlock value.
If you are simply interested in knowing more about current- and future-state AI for PPM use cases, fast forward to step 2.1.
In this step, you'll find some key near-term and longer-term use cases, as well as Info-Tech's Excel-based AI for PPM Use Case Analysis Workbook, which contains a robust library of AI for PPM use cases and an analysis framework to assess them.
Insight summary
Blueprint insight: Make it about the journey, not the destination
Use the destination to inspire the journey. Exponential IT isn't about achieving AI-enabled automation overnight (the complexities of such a feat are impossible). Use your vision for future-state transformation as an opportunity to inspire the near- to medium-term adoption of long-neglected PPM fundamentals (e.g. sustainable processes, good data, strong accountability). With a firm foundation in place, you can build a transformation that will last.
Phase 1 insight
Stay calm and plan on. This isn't the first vendor-driven technology revolution PPM practitioners have been through. Don't burn the boats based upon social media hype or vendor marketing. You have plenty of time to make and validate a plan.
1.1 Technology may help accelerate readiness.
Low readiness doesn't necessarily preclude you from unlocking Exponential IT in the near term. The technology is developing so fast that the difference between "ready" and "not" may reduce more rapidly than we can predict.
1.2 Don't let FOMO drive your approach.
You need a plan, but you're not necessarily at a disadvantage if you don't act today. Define the project challenges and business needs you're looking to address before you make any new, big investments. Your current vendors may be fine.
Phase 2 insight
Keep your ear to the ground. AI use cases for portfolio management and project management are still forming (i.e. still a bit underwhelming relative to the hype). Don't get complacent! This could change overnight. Stay tuned-in to AI developments across the landscape.
2.1 Avoid getting caught up in AI anxiety.
The robots aren't coming to replace us they're coming to give us a hand! PPM staff have been overallocated for years. AI technology represents our chance to make the case for more process adoption, which will in turn free us from some tasks.
2.2 Don't set it and forget it manage it!
The creation of a transformation roadmap shouldn't be a one-time activity. Take a rolling wave approach, balancing near-term wins with longer-term vision, and iterate on your plan at a cadence that makes sense.
Blueprint deliverables
Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.
PPM Transformation Workbook
Use this Excel workbook throughout your engagement to assess readiness, define needs, and wireframe a roadmap.
AI for PPM Use Case Analysis Workbook
Use this Excel workbook as you identify AI use cases for PPM and assess the value, viability, and feasibility of implementing them.
Other blueprint deliverables:
- PPM Transformation Plan Dashboard: a Power BI Desktop template that connects to the roadmap tab in our PPM Transformation Workbook.
Key deliverable:
PPM Transformation Plan Template
Set expectations on what's required and what's to come with a measured, comprehensive, and customizable template
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
You get:
- Transform PPM to Optimize Value From Every Investment Deck
- PPM Transformation Workbook
- AI for PPM Use Case Analysis Workbook
- PPM Transformation Roadmap Dashboard
- PPM Transformation Plan Template
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 2-phase advisory process. You'll receive 10 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Scout the Terrain
- Call 1: Discuss needs and Exponential IT for PPM interests.
- Call 2: Examine Exponential IT readiness.
- Call 3: Interrogate business needs and project challenges.
- Call 4: Continue to extrapolate challenges and technology needs.
Guided Implementation 2: Set Tactical Goals
- Call 1: Determine PPM strategic goals based on readiness and needs.
- Call 2: Document goals and measures in transformation plan.
- Call 3: Discuss use cases and review library.
- Call 4: Perform a near-term and long-term use case analysis.
- Call 5: Distill roadmap initiatives from readiness, goals, and use cases.
- Call 6: Document and finalize Exponential IT for PPM roadmap.
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Transform PPM to Optimize Value From Every Investment
