PMINJ’s Life Sciences LCI, along with our fellow CoPs from the Belgium and Germany Chapters and support from PMI’s Thought Leadership Team, for the first time ever ran a hackathon on June 5th entitled “Harnessing GenAI for Project Management in Life Sciences”. There were 70+ participants (I had the pleasure of being one!) from 14 countries representing 82 organizations in the mix. Our goal was to exchange ideas and seek answers to many challenges project managers are facing today in our Life Sciences industry. It was truly a pleasure to participate in this event, and I want to share my experience and hopefully motivate you to participate in such future events.
A hackathon of this scale aimed to achieve the following:
- Exposure to Tools & Techniques:
Participants were able to experiment with various tools such as Large Language Models and practice techniques like prompt engineering to seek more accurate and contextual answers. - Networking and Collaboration:
The Planning team cleverly distributed participants into random groups as part of the teaming and problem solving. These group assignments fostered collaboration and networking among us as participants, leading to lasting friendships and future collaborations. - Experiential Learning:
Hands-on opportunities allowed us as participants to interact with experts, which enhanced our learning experience. - Fun and Engagement
The playful nature of the hackathon, helped the team to engage deeply. As there were time limits, teams needed to huddle together and as a result members will be able to retain knowledge gained in this exercise.
Generative AI is evolving at an unprecedented pace and it is extremely important to keep up with this pace as a user of this fascinating technology. Project managers and project coordinators are already taking advantage of enterprise GenAI based tools available to become more productive, especially regarding meeting summaries and action items. Product managers can complete requirements gathering faster by using and modifying meeting summaries and action items into product features. Software engineering teams can produce detailed designs and write code faster based on those well-documented features. The same productivity applies to engineers engaged in Quality engineering and automation, as testing requirements can be a byproduct of these well-documented features. When product transfers to production, site reliability engineers (SRE) can apply GenAI in IT operations to describe a problem and potential solution(s) to apply, thereby enriching the runbook. In software engineering, GenAI brings a lot of engineering excellence and project managers can harness the same, not only to bring productivity and efficiency to development but also to the business outcomes to satisfy business stakeholders at scale and at speed.
As Project Managers keep pace with the evolution of GenAI in the marketplace, the future will present a lot of opportunities for all of us to be part of something beautiful that we are building in our workplace. Regardless of your role - Project Manager, engineer etc., - let’s embrace hackathons in our workplace or beyond to spread the knowledge and build communities to help each other thrive.
