Intelligent project management and automation systems

Effective management of projects is becoming increasingly important for any type of organisation to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business environment due to pressure of globalisation. Planning a project with proper considerations of all necessary factors and managing a project to ensure its successful implementation are facing a lot challenges. Initial stage in planning a project is costly, time consuming and usually with poor accuracy on cost and effort predictions. On the other hand, detailed information for previous projects may be buried in piles of archived documents, which make it increasingly difficult to learn from the previous experiences. Project portfolio has been brought into this field aiming to improve the information sharing and management among different projects. However, the amount of information that could be shared is still limited to generic information. In this paper, we design and implement a novel software system iPAS, which automatically generate a project plan with effort estimation of time and cost based on data collected from previous completed projects in standardised industries. To maximise the data sharing and management among different projects, a method of using product-based planning from PRINCE2 methodology is proposed. iPAS has been trialed with cases in two organisations, which clearly shows the business benefits of autonomic project management. It reduced effort to plan new projects and manage project portfolio and decreased estimation bias thereby reducing operational risk. It also automatically benchmarked performance against company best practices.