Cristian Dordea
Dec 8, 2023
AI's Surprising Impact on Agile Project Management
What Every Agile Project Manager and Scrum Master Needs to Know
In short:
Emerging Trend in Tech: There's a growing shift in large enterprises towards data projects utilizing Machine Learning and AI.
Challenge for Agile Professionals: Current training for Scrum Masters and Agile Project Managers primarily focuses on traditional software development, leaving them unprepared for the unique demands of managing AI and data-centric projects.
You need to know about this trend that will start impacting most Agile Project Managers and Scrum Masters.
This is Cristian, the Agile Shop founder.
As a consultant for large Fortune 500 enterprises and a former Director of Program Management in the data group for a top Media & Entertainment corporation, I started noticing a new trend in tech and how most Scrum Masters and Agile Project Managers are slowly starting to be left behind.
Here is what I mean by the tech trend:
Today, more and more time and budgets in large enterprises are focused on data projects. This is because most of the large enterprises have accumulated large data volume over the years. With the Machine Learning and data science capabilities of today, they can generate more value by applying these techniques to extract insights from their data. Not to mention the use of new experiments or services altogether, such as internal chatbots, can create efficiency for internal employees and even their external customers.
Data projects using ML, data science or AI are increasing at an exponential rate in enterprises in the US, especially with the hype from consumer-facing products like the OpenAI chatbot. Most of these projects in large enterprises are experimental for now, but this is where the future is going.
In the same way mobile software development exploded with the release of Google & Apple mobile app stores around 2008, today AI projects and development are getting traction due to the OpenAI ChatGPT breakthrough. This AI wave has been going for over a year now due to the OpenAI breakthrough, but we should see even more traction with the release of the AI custom GPT store planned for early 2024 by OpenAI.
This will create even more interest from large corporations to launch new custom AI projects internally, so they don't miss this wave, which now seems to not be just a short-term trend.
But here is the problem
Most of the people who started to learn or train towards becoming a Scrum Master or Agile Project Manager are only being taught to perform within a software development team or environment. Those techniques don’t work for most data or AI projects.
Most Scrum Masters and Agile Project Managers are only familiar with traditional software development work and can struggle to transfer their existing skills to provide value on new data & AI-type projects.
The good news is
This AI wave is just starting in large enterprises. Most of them are experimenting with the latest ML models and AI solutions to see how they can create internal value for the organization or bring value to their customers. As with any new technology breakthroughs, for the first couple of years, most solutions will be experimental before large fully-baked enterprise solutions will hit the market.
Here is what I’m doing about this trend
As I have been working with these types of projects and data teams in large enterprises, I realized things are moving so fast in this field, that if I don’t keep up with the latest trends in this space, I will fall behind as well.
So, I decided to not only keep up with the latest AI business use cases and news, but also to dedicate time to learning and exploring new methodologies and ways to manage AI projects in large enterprises, as well as how to scale AI projects and teams.
I created this newsletter to share with anyone who wants to learn about AI projects and Agile delivery techniques as well as the challenges of AI projects in large enterprises. and how to manage these projects successfully.
Every 2 weeks you will get the latest headlines and an inside look into the delivery of AI solutions in the business landscape.
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