Artificial Intelligence and the Project Manager

Organizations use teams to create wealth, market share, customer service, competitive advantage, and organizational success. Effective teams accomplish their assigned end goals by engaging in collaboration as a joint learning activity. Enhanced effectiveness is why collaborative tools are so critical to the project manager, and 7 out of 10 IT professionals see collaboration as essential to their organization.

• Identify and engage critical talent independent of their location. This capability improves the manager’s ability to bring complementary skills into a collaborative environment with the broader team;  
• Encourage and build healthy relationships with remote team members. Strong relationshipsare the heart of effective collaboration and leadership;
• Present and communicate a guiding vision to the team. Providing clarity of purpose enhances collaboration;
• Work with local and remote team members to jointly prepare a clear mission objective and define group rules of engagement;
• Connect the project with higher level organizational objectives;
• Create an atmosphere of safety, trust, and respect that, in turn, encourages multiple perspectives, diverse viewpoints, and creativity;
• Make everyone’s ideas and suggestions visible and tangible by building prototypes, or drawing diagrams;
• Provide an easy-to-use infrastructure that enables learning, communication, andcollaboration;
• Remove barriers to high performance by nurturing individual brilliance;
• Coach for improved teamwork, emotional intelligence, and navigating difficult conversations;
• Jointly celebrate joint accomplishments; and
• Capture best practices and things that should be avoided.

These are all reasons why Cisco launched Webex Teams. This collaborative platform uses machine learning to present an intelligent and human-like conversational interface for any application or device. With this capability, project managers can eliminate the friction usually associated with remote team member communications. The solution has also embedded Webex Assistant, an AI-enabled service for managing directory and scheduling information and designed to assist, participate, and take action that supports the project manager. Webex Assistant leverages the powerful Webex graph to access better information faster. In doing so, it essentially injects artificial intelligence into every team interaction.

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