Autonomic project management

This paper introduces a new class of project management system that may be used to overcome many of the shortcomings of current project management systems and enable new functionalities that will significantly improve project outcomes. Current project management methods are not good enough because (i) they exacerbate our tendency to prefer the illusion of certainty to the reality of doubt, (ii) all tasks are modeled as being equally important resulting in the project manager misguidedly focusing on pre-defined critical path tasks, (iii) data is entered by project managers, who often, unintentionally or otherwise, create a biased estimate of the project outcome, and (iv) errors in specifying tasks remain undetected until they manifest themselves in project problems. The business benefits of Autonomic Project Management include (i) reduced effort to define projects and manage a project portfolio, (ii) properly focusing project managers on critical tasks rather than the critical path, (iii) using auditing to decrease estimation bias thereby reducing operational risk, (iv) early identification of potential problems in not-yet-started tasks, and (v) automatically measuring and benchmarking performance against company and industry best practices thereby identifying opportunities for companies to improve their ability to perform tasks in selected areas.