Generative AI, Visualization, and the Future of Managing Megaprojects

In a project entitled "The Future of Managing Megaprojects," the Stevens research team prototyped two advanced generative AI based data visualization concepts to enhance organization and situational awareness in highly complex, highly uncertain projects. Megaprojects are “large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost $1 billion or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people.” These projects are often mega-systems and are marked by operational uncertainty, behavioral complexity, pluralistic decision-making, and external environmental volatility. As megaprojects cost billions and often

involve the labor of thousands of people, improving the success rate of these projects is critical.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, 80% of project management tasks will be automated using big data, ML, and natural language processing. This market will likely focus more on automating routine project management activities and not the more difficult aspects of managing through the complexity and uncertainty in megaprojects. Complex project management is characterized by the heuristic abilities of leadership to sense and recognize emergent issues in the project, combined with their abilities to lead change: to define and execute alternatives paths to success. Few leaders selected for megaprojects have the combination of skills needed to be successful, they need help. AI and ML approaches have potential benefit to management of megaprojects as they can discover emerging patterns in large data stores that provide insight to emerging issues and then can automate and rapidly execute evaluation of multiple options.

Dimensions of complexity are not just the scale of the project but also the transformative impact they have. Complexity creates uncertainty, particularly in early project stages. Traditionally risk management is tracked in tools, but uncertainty management has relied on that leadership intuition. The megaproject uncertainty framework was developed in this research as the primary organizing framework for managing complexity and uncertainty. This framework serves several purposes: as a playbook for megaproject leadership and management; as a high level visualization dashboard for future megaprojects; and as a megaproject leadership model.this presentation will discuss the megaproject uncertainty framework, the prototype visualization dashboards, the approach to use generative AI to monitor project status, and what we learned from this effort.