Intelligent Project Risk Management – Can AI help to uncover unknown unknowns?

Intelligent Project Risk Management – Can AI help to uncover unknown unknowns?

Our guest: Rüdiger Geist, Associate Professor in Project Management at the University of St. Petersburg and the University of Reykjavik

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In a world of increasing uncertainty with many unknown unknowns, the management of risks in projects is naturally impacted and becomes more and more difficult, resulting in many projects going off track and being subject to failure.

Accordingly, organizations should be defining new ways to help detect or better predict these risks prior to them materializing. One begs to think, that this could potentially be done by applying Artificial Intelligence to use historical project data to identify hidden patterns. But to what degree can AI effectively contribute to better and accurate detection of risks?

Taking into consideration the different types of uncertainty as well as the impact of human biases, we want to understand how project risk management will look like in the future. Has AI the capability to significantly reduce the risks of projects failing from unknown unknowns by detecting previously hidden risks or even black swans early enough? And what will be the role of the human project manager in the future in the context of project risk management?

Together with our guest, Rüdiger Geist, Associate Professor in Project Management at the University of St. Petersburg and the University of Reykjavik, we will have an in-depth discussion about this topic and explore possible scenarios from both the human side as well as from the angle of technological capabilities.

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Rüdiger Geist is the managing director of Spirit at PM GmbH in Switzerland. He holds a master's degree in project management from George Washington University (GWU) in the USA, as well as an IPMA Level B, a PMP®, and a PfMP® certification from PMI®.
He is also an associate professor for project management at the University of St. Petersburg, the University of Reykjavik, member of the PM advisory board of the University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration in Zurich, and winner of the 'best teaching award' 2014 of the Kalaidos University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland.

In previous roles, Rüdiger was the leading project management coach, project manager, and project portfolio manager at Swiss bank Credit Suisse, he also worked as a Senior project manager, coach, and portfolio manager at various consulting companies, and acted as a deputy CFO, contract manager, project manager and coach at CSC Switzerland.

Rüdiger is frequently blogging and has written several books and articles as well as given lectures and presentations for many conferences. From 2006 to 2011 he was part of the board of the PMI Switzerland Chapter as Vice President Education & Certification and is a member of several expert groups of the Swiss Project Management Association.

He further developed the program and project management simulation Swiss Island®, which won the "PMI Continuing Professional Education Product of the Year" award in 2017 and is named in the 'Who's Who in The World 2017' as a representative of Switzerland.