How artificial intelligence helps optimize resource planning

October 11, 2022 – Reading time: 4 minutes

Have you ever thought about using artificial intelligence to optimize your resource planning?

We all know that the success of a project depends a lot on the right allocation of resources. A team manager must know about each team member in detail. And when we talk about skills, we don’t just mean knowledge but also soft skills, motivation, preferences, interests, career planning, strengths, and weaknesses. All this information needs to be collected, stored, managed, and, most importantly, kept up to date. This is undoubtedly a time-consuming and never-ending task that could easily be automated using AI – also by smaller and medium-sized companies.

Marc Bollmann, Dr. Marc Großerüschkamp and Mayanga Ngoy wrote about this in the current issue of ProjektMagazin.

The success of a project depends on the appropriate allocation of resources. For optimal resource allocation, the project manager needs much time and detailed and up-to-date information on the possible candidates. The more complex and extensive the projects are, the more difficult it becomes for the project manager to keep track of this data and consider all aspects. This is precisely where AI has its strengths. Large amounts of data and complex interrelationships are not a problem – they are a prerequisite for suitable use.

In resource management, the focus is not on the availability of people but on the required competencies – also known as skills – that lead to project success. The goal is to cover the demand for personnel resources with the skills needed for projects in a timely manner through employees.

Skill management poses several challenges. The most important and, above all, the most time-consuming task is the complete documentation of the skills of all team members. To successfully manage a team, it is essential to know each employee in detail. That means to know about their hard and soft skills, motivation, preferences, interests, career planning, strengths, and yes, also about weaknesses. Especially in large teams, team leaders often lack this information.

This is where artificial intelligence has its strengths: It can easily and quickly manage large amounts of data and draw logical conclusions. This information is usually stored in databases. These are initially built up from the existing data in the company, which can be resource allocation plans from past projects, for example. Further data can be collected and kept up to date, for instance, with an AI-based chatbot that makes direct contact with employees. Unlike personnel files, where the skills of individual team members are often not expanded and updated after they have applied, for example, if they develop new skills, AI can always keep all information about employees up-to-date.

Artificial intelligence works with text and language processing, visual skills, knowledge representation, and memory to recognize patterns and draw logical conclusions. The larger the workforce and the more complex the project, the more rewarding it is to use such AI systems. The algorithm analyzes all planning and short-term readjustments from the past and learns how to control interventions that have influenced the work result and the overall costs.

Lessons learned are often made after project completion, but are measures for the future really derived from them? Many things are lost in everyday life, which means that the causes of errors and best practices are quickly forgotten until they happen again in the next project and have to be solved again. Machine learning is advantageous in that real-time data is analyzed repeatedly to learn from it. Human actions become more and more comprehensible for the system.

The use of AI represents an excellent opportunity to sustainably improve resource management in companies and help project managers to more successful projects. Its use is worthwhile for SMEs and large companies that run complex, recurring projects.

At INVENSITY, we work in the specialist area of project management with our AI experts to develop solutions for our customers. Our focus is on a flexible, module-based solution that can be adapted to the respective tool landscape of our customers. We analyze the existing data infrastructure and the data management system and prepare the data for the use of AI. In addition, we train all project staff in the use of artificial intelligence.

Here you can find the full article (German).

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