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Voice Interfaces in Project Management

This document summarizes a presentation on how voice interfaces could change project management. The presentation discusses how voice is a major shift from touchscreens in how people communicate. Voice interfaces could improve requirements gathering by enabling clarifying questions and prioritization discussions. They could also enhance project reporting by allowing stakeholders to ask questions directly and get quick updates. Additionally, voice interfaces may utilize IFTTT and push notifications to send alerts about project status changes or missed milestones. While these capabilities exist now, voice interfaces could scale them better through natural language understanding.

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Abhishek Kumar Singh
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68 views28 pages

Voice Interfaces in Project Management

This document summarizes a presentation on how voice interfaces could change project management. The presentation discusses how voice is a major shift from touchscreens in how people communicate. Voice interfaces could improve requirements gathering by enabling clarifying questions and prioritization discussions. They could also enhance project reporting by allowing stakeholders to ask questions directly and get quick updates. Additionally, voice interfaces may utilize IFTTT and push notifications to send alerts about project status changes or missed milestones. While these capabilities exist now, voice interfaces could scale them better through natural language understanding.

Uploaded by

Abhishek Kumar Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Talent & Technology Symposium 2019

Presenter: Bart Gerardi


Title: How Voice Interfaces Can Change Project Management
Date: Wednesday, 12 June 2019
Voice User Interfaces

2
Voice User Interfaces

3
Voice Interfaces (cont.)

• Today, we think of devices, won’t be long till it’s ubiquitous


• (think touchscreens)

4
Impact on communications

• Voice is a big shift in how communication occurs


• Bigger than just talking

5
Project Communications

6
Project Communications
• “Communications” is listed as #6 in the top 10 reasons for
project failures

• However, the rest of the reasons, such as “Poorly Defined


Scope” and “Improper Stakeholder Management” can be linked
to communications as well
• What we have here…

7
Communications are hard
Jeff Bezos on Communications:

• “People were saying that groups needed to communicate more.


Jeff got up and said, ‘No, communication is terrible!’ ”

(This quote is probably true, but unconfirmed.)

8
Communications aren’t terrible
• But they are inefficient
• And the more of it you have, the more of it you need

• The current mechanisms are mostly push, and only a small


percentage is understood

9
Milk

10
NLP vs NLU
• There’s a huge different between what was said vs. what was
meant.
• What was said is easy, what you meant was infinitely more
difficult

11
Impact 1 : Requirements Gathering
• Think about the Milk example

12
Impact 1 : Requirements Gathering (cont.)
• Clarifying Questions (both obvious and non)
• Corner cases
• Natural answers

13
Impact 1 : Requirements Gathering (cont.)
• Voice Macros
• Missing requirements

14
Impact 1 : Requirements Gathering (cont.)
• Prioritization conversation

15
Impact 1 : Requirements Gathering (cont.)
• Voice backup

16
Impact 2 : Reporting
• Reporting takes time, and doesn’t necessarily answer all the
questions
• Back and forth takes longer, and you don’t always know who
wants to know what

17
Impact 2 : Reporting (cont.)
• Reporting rarely answers direct questions

• What’s the biggest risk?


• What’s changed since my last update?
• How are we tracking to the next milestone (and what is it?)

18
Impact 2 : Reporting (cont.)
• Or even fuzzy questions: “How are we doing?”
• Anything I should know?

19
Impact 2 : Reporting (cont.)
• Complicated (difficult) vs Complex (lots of pieces)

20
Impact 2 : Reporting (cont.)
• Project reporting tends to come on a cadence, weekly, every
other, monthly, etc.
• Think about our SMS conversation earlier, off-cadence
questions are usually unwelcome and wasteful
• The wrong questions is often asked, as well
• Suggested questions

21
Impact 2 : Reporting (cont.)
• Project managers have lower friction to updating
• “Red Alert”
• Voice updates, too

22
Impact 3 : IFTTT and Push
• If this then that lets you set alerts
• “Tell me if” of any size

• Can do more than that and can combine disparate items

23
Impact 3 : IFTTT and Push (cont.)
• Tell me immediately if project changes status
• Missed milestones
• Blockers, etc.

24
Impact 3 : IFTTT and Push (cont.)
• Publish / Subscribe gives a new channel for Project
communications
• NLU lets the subscriber ask without having to know what to ask
for
• Follow up questions

25
We can do this now, but…
• Most of this is possible already
• Friction is too high for most
• And NLU scales better than human intervention

26
Getting there
• Won’t be soon, but will be sooner than you think
• Resist the urge to just replicate what you already have
• Project stakeholders need to get used to asking

27
Thank you

Questions?

28

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