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How Blockchain Can Put Professional Project Managers Out Of A Job


At one point in my career, there was a Gartner report out saying that about 72% of IT projects were in "Recovery". It means that they were either late, over-budget or missing milestones altogether. I saw evidence of that everywhere I looked, in the large organization where I worked at the time. Huge multi-million dollar projects came to nothing. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) were not met and things stalled -- sometimes because major stakeholders bickered over specifications after the project was started.

The band-aid fixes entailed adopting Agile methods where the scrum master was to remove impediments, or hire more consultants to speed things up. All of these actions rarely made any difference in the long run.

I have always believed that project management was merely applied common sense. I still believe it. However, I believe that common sense ain't so common. The failure of many projects hinges on missed details because the project manager operated at the 30,000 foot level, while the linchpin that caused the delay or failure was down in the weeds of project execution -- usually by a person not even on the radar of a project manager.

There has to be a better way, and to my mind, there is - blockchain. Here is the vision. Blockchain is a transparent, immutable, autonomous, outage-resistant true ledger that can have built-in intelligence with smart contracts. Suppose that instead of a Gantt chart, you had a series of smart contracts. The KPIs and milestones were all smart contracts. Having smart contracts forces one to think on an extremely granular level -- one not normally reached by a human project manager.

Each smart contract would assign a number of tokens to the project, based on activity completion. As each person in the project completed their tasks, they record their activity in the blockchain, and the blockchain itself keeps track of completion percentage by transferring tokens to the completion account. All of the tokens for that task or milestone are accounted for when complete. The sum total of all possible tokens represents a completed project meeting all goals. The blockchain is linked to an executive dashboard which does extensive drill-down reporting.

But wait, don't send money yet. There is more. Each entry in the blockchain feeds an AI engine that Map-Reduces and learns about the company's projects. This is the methodology of taking all process data (event logs and everything), integrating it into information and transforming it by abstraction into knowledge. This knowledge will be stored in a master blockchain which will have data to assist in the creation of smart contracts and the parameters necessary for future projects.

Such a system could not only out-perform a human project manager, but in the long run it would be cheaper. The most expensive part of most projects are usually the people costs and that area is usually the weakest link. The project management discipline is ripe for an AI/Blockchain disruption.