We gathered 57 of the top AI in project management statistics to help understand this key development in technology. Recent advancements in tech have changed how project managers work.

Using our 20 years of project management experience, we reviewed AI statistics and trends from trusted third parties, which forms the foundation for this list. It covers everything from the impact of AI replacing jobs to how AI is used to support the delivery of projects.

Many project managers will be aware of the impact (or potential impact) of GenAI and other AI technologies in project management, although not everyone has yet to see substantive benefits in real-life adoption. Let’s take a look at the latest stats.

Top AI in project management statistics

You’ve probably read that 80% of project management tasks will be eliminated by AI by 2030 (Gartner). That means removing the busywork of project management like data collection, status reporting and tracking – which I think is a good thing.

Here are some other top project management statistics worth knowing.

• The global market for AI for project management is expected to grow to US$5.7bn by 2028 at a CAGR of 17.3%.
• 41% of experts report significant enhancements in project delivery since adopting AI-based tools and techniques.
• 28% of a project manager’s skill set can be augmented by GenAI including methodology and life-cycle driven tasks.
• There are more data and analytics projects being kicked off in 2024 than previous years, with 77.6% of organizations reporting that they are driving business innovation with data compared to 59.5% in 2023.
• 72% of project managers say AI is very or extremely likely to change their roles.

Sources: Markets and Markets, Nieto-Rodriguez/Viana Vargas, LinkedIn, Wavestone, APM

Listen to me and Cornelius Fichtner discussing these stats in a webinar

I met Cornelius for a webinar on AI for project managers and what these statistics really mean for practitioners. We got some great questions during the live broadcast, so if you'd rather watch than read, check it out!

Adoption of AI in project management

22% of project managers say AI tools are deployed in their organizations and in use today (Capterra). However, different surveys report different adoption levels. PMI’s GenAI report says that a third of practitioners' organizations have adopted AI in at least a moderate capacity.

Only 12% have adopted AI in a substantial way, and the adoption levels are much higher in tech-forward companies (34%).

• 39% of project managers say there are plans to deploy AI tools in their organizations.
• 21% of business leaders say deployment of AI tools is not in their current plans.
• Companies expect to increase investment in AI for their project management function by 32%.
• 29% of project professionals say they don’t feel ready for the adoption of AI tools. Only 9% say they are extremely ready.
• 75% of experts say complex projects are very likely or extremely likely to benefit from AI compared to a simple project.

Sources: Capterra, IPMA, PMI, APM

Impact of AI on project management jobs

47% of people believe that AI would do better at treating all job applicants in the same way than humans (Pew Research). So that could be a positive for project managers applying for jobs.

Will AI replace project managers? I don’t think human intelligence will ever be removed from project delivery. Here are some other statistics on the impact of AI on project management roles.

• 85% of people believe that on-the-job training is the best way to develop the AI skills required.
• Large Language Models help the least experienced employees the most. Research shows that less experienced staff showed a 43% improvement in performance when using LLMs, compared to an improvement of only 17% by more experienced staff.
• 80% of project leaders believe they will have more time for complex managerial tasks when using AI tools.
• The non-IT skill required the most for using AI in project management is analytical thinking, followed by creative thinking and complex problem solving. Social skills are considered the least likely to be needed to use AI.
• Only 40% of practitioners believe that AI will create new tasks. 54% believe it will change the way work is organized and 53% believe it will increase project team agility.
• 65% of experts see AI as a catalyst for implementing advanced project management strategies.

Sources: IPMA, Microsoft, Nieto-Rodriguez/Viana Vargas, APM

AI Project Manager salaries

I couldn’t find a survey that summarized AI project manager jobs and salaries, probably because there aren’t that many positions. The role hasn’t been around that long. Oceania is the continent that is doing the most to build or recruit AI competence into the organization (PMI).

However, I searched Glassdoor and Totaljobs, and from the job adverts I saw, the average salary for an AI project manager in London, UK, was £75,000.

Glassdoor puts salaries for an AI project leader at between £41k and £77k per year.

Salary.com says that Wells Fargo pays AI project managers between $90,629 and $124,401.

Another way to review the salaries for an AI project manager is to consider that as it’s a niche skill, those roles are likely to command higher-than-average salaries. The Bureau of Labour Statistics says the highest 10% of project management specialists earned $159,150, so you could consider that a benchmark.

One thing that isn’t clear is whether AI will, over time, actually reduce salaries as the role will not require so much administrative work – companies might be looking to make cost savings.

Uses of AI in project management

AI is in use by project delivery practitioners and Project Management Office professionals, generally through tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, and more specifically such as in tools designed to support particular domains like AI in risk management.

Latin America has the highest AI maturity levels and also spends the most effort on making sure employees are ready to use AI tools (PMI).

25% of PMO directors say that AI has disrupted their PMO (Capgemini) – and I’m sure that number will only continue to rise. Let’s look at some more statistics about the benefits of AI.

• Over 70% of practitioners say that achieving compliance with quality standards could benefit from AI adoption.
• 65% of project managers say that they are most likely to use AI during project deployment and execution phases.
• Automating tasks is the top benefit for using AI tools (cited by 33% of project professionals), followed by effective resource allocations (32%) and getting more accurate metrics (27%).
• Predictive analytics tools and chatbots are the most commonly used, with 26% of organizations using these or planning to use these to support project delivery.
• 23% of organizations are using or planning to use RPA.
• 66% of experts believe that project scheduling and time management is the area with the highest potential for AI process automation.
• 60% believe that augmented analytics can help risk and opportunity planning and management.
• 49% of organizations believe that implementing GenAI will generate huge productivity gains.
• Over a quarter of project managers are extremely likely to use AI to analyze large data sets on complex projects – I can see this being useful for identifying potential risks and in analyzing real-time data.

Interestingly, project management domains where there is low impact from AI are considered to be stakeholder management, project communication and project budgeting.

Sources: Capterra, APM, IPMA, Wavestone, PMI

Barriers to adopting AI in project delivery

The ‘classic’ barriers to adopting any new technology, like limited funding, user adoption and senior support, training etc are holding back AI’s progression into companies. Cyber security concerns and the risks of putting your data into a model that you don't completely own are also holding people back -- addressing these adequately seems very expensive at the moment.

Other limitations like the carbon offsetting burden – training an LLM can emit 25 times more carbon than one-way air travel between New York and San Francisco – may also hold companies back from building their own solutions (Stanford).

The shift towards using AI tools is happening so quickly that the regulation is lagging behind, and in regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, this is an issue.

• 70% of people report that a limited understanding of AI technologies is the most important barrier to using new tools.
• 49% of professionals say that limited financial resources are a barrier to adopting AI.
• 28% of project professionals say lack of a clear strategy is the main barrier to adopting AI tools at work.
• Other barriers to adopting AI include ethical, privacy and security concerns (26%), and AI technology immaturity (25%)
• 1 in 5 project managers say there are inadequate skills within the team to implement AI tools.
• 74% of experts are worried about potential ethical challenges resulting from AI-based decision making.

Sources: IPMA, Capterra, Nieto-Rodriguez/Viana Vargas

How project managers feel about AI

The future of project management is positive, with high demand for jobs and a strong focus on successful project outcomes – there is a lot to be done, and AI is poised to help.

• 44% of project practitioners believe that they will end up with more projects to manage as a result of organizations adopting AI.
• Only 29% of project managers are worried about AI taking over their jobs, although this increases to 40% in the next 15 years.
• 77% of project managers are optimistic about AI.
• 44% of project professionals say they are extremely satisfied with the use of AI technology at work, and 46% report being very satisfied.
• 54% of companies using AI in project management are very comfortable using it to make decisions. Only 2% are not comfortable.
• 68% of project managers say they have not received enough training on how to use AI tools.

Sources: IPMA, Nieto-Rodriguez/Viana Vargas, Capterra, APM

What do these project management and AI statistics mean?

Here are my top 3 takeaways from analyzing hundreds of artificial intelligence project management statistics, charts and numbers.

Takeaway 1: AI isn’t going to take your job (yet)

My key takeaway from analyzing the data is that AI isn’t going to take your job if you work in project delivery. Too many project management skills can’t be done by computers… which is a good thing in my view! You can only get so much business acumen, systems thinking and cultural understanding from a model.

However, the many surveys and research studies all point to the same thing: the role of a project manager is changing, so you do need to keep up to date with how the tech is evolving. Sentiment analysis, for example, is an area where we could get stakeholder engagement insights from a data set to help determine action plans for different stakeholder groups.

Consider how AI can help with monitoring, controlling and creating project deliverables. The other area to actively look into is resource management: resource availability and capacity planning is a common pain point with the project managers I mentor, so anything that helps is a plus.

I think there is a lot of data and training out there now, including courses from LinkedIn Learning and PMI, so there is no excuse not to have a basic understanding of tools like GenAI and what they can do.

If you can lobby for AI training and time to practice with the tools available for you, then do so. Knowing how AI-driven solutions work will only make your job easier, and most project managers report not having been provided with adequate training.

Takeaway 2: AI benefits complex projects

The next thing that was clear to me from reviewing the data is that AI benefits complex projects. The larger your data sets for research and analysis, the more AI-powered tech can make it easy for you to sift through the data.

We're going to see a move from predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics, where AI gives us information on project performance and ideas about how we should act on the data to course correct or take the next step. At this point, we still need a human to scrutinize the output, but this will remove some of the 'gut feel' of project management and hopefully help us all make better, data-driven decisions.

APM’s research says that IT and Technology projects are most likely to see a benefit from AI but I think over time we’ll also see legal project management and construction seeing benefits due to the huge amounts of data that can be used in those projects.

I think that the biggest barrier to making use of this advancement is having clean data. I would suggest that any project teams looking to use the analytical power of data models and LLMs need to schedule time on the plan for data cleansing and preparation.

Takeaway 3: GenAI benefits less experienced project professionals

Finally, I picked out the point that GenAI is more beneficial to people with less experience. Project success rates are hugely impacted by the quality of the team working on the project. With natural language processing and machine learning, it is easier to review data from historical projects to support project planning.

This is so important for a profession where we are losing experienced project managers to burnout and people transitioning out of the job. Routine tasks can be made easier and projects processes can be turned into workflows with RPA.

Final thoughts

Reliable AI facts and statistics on artificial intelligence in project management is important to understand the sentiment of how project professionals are feeling about the impact of newer technologies and to provide valuable insights into how it is used.

AI will continue to dominate project delivery conversations and become embedded in the ways that projects are scoped, executed and analyzed in the years to come, most likely removing administrative tasks and supporting informed decisions.

Perhaps the question we should be asking is how do we want AI to impact project management? Then we can shape the technology to deliver the best results.

This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: 57 AI in Project Management Statistics

What should a PMO measure?

There are millions of data points, so how do you decide what is really going to make a difference for your team?

In my experience, we want to track metrics that we can do something about and that enable decision-making. There are plenty of things that your Project Management Office could track but that wouldn’t move the needle – focus on capturing data that’s to do with things you can actually do something about.

Below are some examples of key performance indicators to consider, that measure project performance in an aggregated way.

If you are looking for KPIs to set for people in project roles, as part of their annual performance review, then I have a guide to KPIs for Project Managers that also covers goals you can set for PMO analysts and PMO managers.

Delivery success KPIs

• Project benefits realized vs planned – in my experience this is the most important one!
• % of projects delivered on time
• % of projects delivered on budget (or combine these two for a ‘project success rate’ measure, although you’ll have to be very clear how ‘success’ is defined)
• Customer/stakeholder satisfaction scores
• Milestone completion rate – helps you identify trends in projects running behind

If you’re in a less mature environment, it can also help to track aggregated project-related KPIs, for example, actual cost of all projects under portfolio management.

Governance adherence KPIs

• % of projects with approved business case (which will be 100%, obviously!)
• Compliance with reporting cycles (e.g. weekly updates submitted)
• Audit or QA findings resolved within agreed time

Someone suggested that we include ‘% of projects following the agreed methodology’ but as you should be tailoring the methodology to suit the project, that is a bit pointless.

It’s also really hard to establish what it looks like to follow the methodology. Perhaps track how many projects go through the stage gates or approval process, if that’s important to you.

Operational/throughput KPIs

• Number of active projects vs resource capacity
• Resource utilization (useful for professional services organizations)
• PMO response time (e.g. to new project requests)
• % of projects using standard templates/tools
• Project stage distribution (e.g. initiation vs execution vs close)

How to report PMO KPIs to senior leaders

As a PMO leader, you've got to share information with other leaders.

Tailor the message to the audience

Execs care about strategic alignment, risk, ROI, or in your organization the emphasis might be on something different, like sustainability goals or budget spent.

They want data they can use to take decisions, so measures like resource utilization rate, rework rate, resource conflicts, those are things they can act on. And your data can surface this information.

Practitioners (that’s project managers like you) would want to see different things. I am interested in whether my project is achieving its sustainability objectives, of course, but I’m also more bothered about whether I’m being judged on compliance with reporting cycles. And in that case, I want to see my track record.

Tailor the message to the audience so everyone gets what they want.

Use visual dashboards

Use Red-Amber-Green (RAG) status for measures, projects or the portfolio overall. Read my guide on how to define RAG and use it on projects, so you can set criteria about what each color means.

Show trends and the impact you’ve made, not simply raw data points. Add spark lines in Excel or use arrows or RAG status to show movement from last month (or the last time you reported – try not to get into the habit of reporting weekly as it’s a lot of work and really things don’t change that much).

Make it easy to spot outliers or risks needing action: call these out with colors or in a separate section of the dashboard if necessary.

Suggested reporting cadence

Live dashboards are great, and people can self-serve information in real-time. But let’s be honest: stakeholders won't go looking for the information. The number of individuals I can think of who have self-served in my career would fit on a hand. That’s not because they don’t care, but because once the dashboard is in place, they assume someone will report outliers and escalations, and we do.

As a PMO leader, you’ll still have to send out links to dashboards, packs, decks or email updates, depending on what your leadership team needs. 

Monthly or quarterly portfolio review packs are useful to have as an audit trail of a snapshot in time. You might also need to produce KPI snapshot slides for exec meetings or ad hoc deep dives for problem areas, so be ready!

Communicate the reporting deadlines to project managers so they can organize themselves to give you the data you need.

KPIs in action: Example metrics dashboard

There’s an example below of what a dashboard could look like in table format. I wasn’t able to use status indicators as colored blobs in the Status column, as the emoji characters wouldn’t show up in this article in every browser, but I would recommend that you do that.

Switch out the words ‘Red/Amber/Green’ in the Status column with a visual color indicator. Leave the word in as well. This makes the report more accessible. Remember, people with red/green color deficiency will find it harder to distinguish on track and off track projects if you skip the words.

Include a legend:

• Green = On target
• Amber = Watch / trending up
• Red = Off track

Tips for customization

• Replace months with weeks or quarters depending on your reporting cycle.
• Add trend arrows (? ? ?) if desired for visual clarity.
• You could also highlight the top 3 KPIs in a summary box at the top of your report

Add any extra measures you’ve identified that will help your execs or team make the right choices about where to focus their attention.

Agile PMO dashboards

What if your PMO has to cover projects using Agile methods? You can use agile metrics to report overall on projects, but do tailor as necessary to give you useful data, not just reporting on project-level info that isn’t useful when rolled up.

Here are some examples.

Tools for dashboarding

If you already have enterprise project management software, you may find it has dashboards or rolled up reporting already. If so, use that as a starting point.

You can also pull out data from your project management tools and display it through Excel. Google Sheets, PowerBI or other tools like Smartsheet.

What to do with your KPIs

Use KPIs to trigger action, not just report history. They should (if I haven’t already made this point often enough above) drive action and decisions. Reporting for the sake of reporting is time consuming and pointless.

Create KPI ownership within the team. Show people what the KPIs are being used for so the project teams understand what is happening to their data.

Review and evolve KPIs as the PMO matures. What works in the first few months of your PMO won’t be what you report on in two years. Go with it, you’ll get feedback and evolve in time, and that’s fine!

This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: PMO KPIs: Success metrics to prove the value of your PMO

There's a stat that gets thrown around a lot in project management circles: project managers spend up to 90% of their time communicating. I’m not convinced that there was a lot of robust academic research behind that number, but the broader point still stands. Communication is the job. Everything else — planning, risk management, scheduling — supports it.

And yet, for all the time we spend communicating, we don't always make deliberate choices about how we communicate. We default to email because that's what we've always done. Or we stick to weekly status meetings because the project plan says so. Or we fire off a Teams message when what the situation really called for was a proper conversation.

Choosing the right channel matters. If you’ve ever tried to get hold of a stakeholder and missed them because they don’t monitor their Teams messages or whatever, then you’ll know what I mean. I have one project sponsor who is on WhatsApp every day, but wouldn’t take a call, because he’s out on the road. So you have to know your audience and what will work for them.

Channel choice isn't a minor detail

According to PMI's Pulse of the Profession research, 56% of project spend is at risk due to poor communication*. In other words, you could be wasting over half your project budget if you don’t get the comms right.

So is that 'project managers aren't communicating enough'? I don’t think so. In my experience, the more common problem isn't volume. It's mismatch — the right information going out through the wrong channel to the wrong person at the wrong moment.

If your information is not accessible (or interesting), then it won’t have the effect you were hoping for.

Your communication management plan should address all of this, but even if yours is fairly basic, making more intentional choices about channel selection will pay dividends.

When you're building or updating your communications management plan, add a column for preferred channel. Ask people directly. It takes two minutes and it can save you significant rework when you discover, three months into a project, that the sponsor has been deleting your status emails unread because they assumed someone else was summarizing them.

The communication channels problem

One of the things the PMBOK Guide covers — and that you'll want to memorize if you're studying for CAPM® or PMP® certification — is the communication channels formula.

The number of potential communication channels in a project is calculated as n(n-1)/2, where n is the number of stakeholders.

What this formula makes clear is how quickly communication complexity escalates. A single person added to a 10-person project team increases communication channels from 45 to 55. That’s a 22% increase in complexity for a 10% increase in team size. This is why communication management can't be improvized on larger projects.

But structure doesn't mean rigidity. It means knowing your options and making deliberate choices. And that’s even more important when you bring users and customers into the mix.

The main channels available to you

Most project managers have access to a fairly consistent set of communication channels, even if the specific tools vary. Here's how I think about them.

Email

Email remains the workhorse of project communication, and for good reason. It creates a record, it allows people to read and respond at their own pace, and it's universally accessible.

It's particularly well suited to formal updates, decisions that need to be documented, and information that stakeholders will need to refer back to.

The downside is that it's easy to ignore. An email can sit unread in a busy inbox for days. And in high-volume environments, important updates can get buried. If you're sending status reports by email, think carefully about format and frequency. A long, poorly structured update is worse than no update at all, because it trains stakeholders to stop reading them.

Meetings

Meetings are high-bandwidth: you can pick up tone, handle questions in real time, and build relationships in a way that written communication doesn't allow. They're the right choice for anything that needs discussion, negotiation, or alignment. Status meetings, steering group sessions, workshops — these need to be in-person or video, not summarized in a document.

The pitfall is over-reliance on meetings. If everything becomes a meeting, people stop attending properly. Meetings should be reserved for communication that genuinely benefits from dialogue.

Instant messaging and collaboration tools

Teams, Slack, WhatsApp — whatever your organization uses — these are fast and conversational. They're well suited to quick questions, informal updates, and day-to-day team coordination. They're not well suited to formal communication that needs to be on record, or to reaching stakeholders who aren't active on the platform.

One issue I see regularly is that important decisions get made in Teams chats and then lost. If something matters, move it to email or a document.

SMS and text messaging

Whether you favor WhatsApp, iMessage or ‘traditional’ SMS, these all get underused in project management, which is a shame, because they have a useful place. Open rates for text messages are significantly higher than for email, and texts tend to get read quickly. For time-sensitive alerts (a go/no-go decision, an urgent escalation, a reminder about a critical sign-off) SMS is more attention-getting than email.

If you're running a project with external stakeholders who aren't on your internal systems, or working with senior sponsors who are hard to reach by email, SMS is worth considering as part of your outreach toolkit.

Dashboards and status reports

For stakeholders who need a regular view of project progress but don't want to be emailed about it, a self-serve dashboard or a structured status report distributed on a predictable schedule can work well.

These are ‘pull’ communication: the stakeholder chooses when to look. They work best for stakeholders who are engaged and know what to look for; they don't work well as the primary channel for disengaged or hard-to-reach stakeholders.

In my experience, after a while, no one but the hardcore PMO team look at them. Sometimes they are just about providing confidence to senior stakeholders. Once they know that things are being tracked and that it’s all OK, they use their time for other, higher priority tasks than checking a dashboard, on the assumption that they’d hear about it if something was seriously wrong.

Combining channels: the case for a blended approach

For most projects, the right answer isn't one channel, it's a mix. You might use a regular email update to share the week's key progress, WhatsApp or a Teams message to flag anything urgent, and a monthly steering group meeting for anything that needs a decision.

It’s worth the effort to learn how to use email and SMS together for blended project communications. That resource is particularly written for a marketing context, but it translates well into thinking about stakeholder engagement, particularly around personalization, timing and avoiding channel fatigue. Whether you are communicating internally or externally, segment your audience, vary your channels and don’t rely too heavily on one medium.

Remember to lean into the expertise in your Marketing department if you are planning on messaging customers. Normally, project people wouldn’t reach out to customers directly as you’ll have a structure in place to do that, so make sure you’ve got a CRM expert on the project team (which is what we did – no one is letting me get my hands on the system to communicate to customers!).

Get the timing right

Channel and timing go together. Email sent at 11pm on a Friday will be buried by Monday morning. An urgent SMS sent at 7am will be seen immediately but might annoy. A monthly steering group update shared two days before the meeting gives people time to read it; shared the night before, it doesn't.

Think about when your stakeholders are most receptive. Senior sponsors are often more engaged mid-week than on Mondays or Fridays, but that might be different in your organization.

Teams with operational responsibilities may not be checking project communications during busy periods, like month end, and they probably won’t show up to meetings (Finance colleagues, looking at you).

None of this needs to be complicated. A simple communication matrix to remind you what to do when or who needs what, that’s often enough to bring some discipline to what otherwise becomes ad hoc.

A quick note on documentation

Whatever channels you use, make sure that decisions and key information end up somewhere they can be retrieved. Instant messaging and informal conversations are great for getting things done quickly, but if the audit trail lives in someone's deleted messages, you'll regret it.

I’m happy to chat on Teams, but when we’ve made a decision or got some kind of output from that back-and-forth, it goes on an email to everyone, or is transferred to the action log, or something, so it exists somewhere that is not a conversation thread.

In summary

Communication channel selection isn't a detail to figure out later. It belongs in your communications management plan, it should be revisited when your stakeholder landscape changes, and it should be driven by what your stakeholders actually need — not by habit or convenience.

The channel-per-stakeholder approach, combined with deliberate thinking about timing and frequency, is one of the more practical ways to improve stakeholder engagement without significantly increasing the time you spend communicating. Often you're doing the same work, just routing it better.

If you're looking to develop your stakeholder communication skills more broadly, you might find my book Engaging Stakeholders on Projects a useful complement to the tips above. And if communication planning is something you want to explore with a peer group, it's a topic we return to regularly in the Project Management Rebels community.

* Project Management Institute. (2013a). Pulse of the profession^® in-depth report: The high cost of low performance: The essential role of communications. Newtown Square, PA.

This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: How to choose the right communication channel for your project stakeholders

What is the stakeholder salience model?

The stakeholder saliency model was proposed by Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997). They define salience as:

the degree to which managers give priority to competing stakeholder claims.

Their model looks at how vocal, visible and important a stakeholder is. Those dimensions help you identify the stakeholders who should get more of your attention.

Project stakeholder management and saliency

Project management relies on people: you need the project team to get things done, and that team might include members of different stakeholder groups. It’s common to have a core team of people who work daily (or at least regularly) on the project, and then a wider stakeholder community.

The saliency model is a tool you can use as part of stakeholder analysis, management, and engagement. It’s a way of categorizing stakeholders so you can evaluate the best way to involve them in the project.

There are three elements to consider, which together highlight the saliency of a stakeholder: in other words, how much priority you should give that stakeholder.

The three considerations are:

• Legitimacy
• Power
• Urgency.

Let’s look at each of those and how they can support stakeholder classification.

Legitimacy

This is a measure of how much of a ‘right’ the stakeholder has to make requests of the project.

Legitimate stakeholders can have a claim over the way the project is carried out can be based on a contract, legal right, moral interest, or some other claim to authority.

The strategic management layer in an organization is likely to have a say in how the project proceeds. Key customers or clients are also likely to have high legitimacy.

Power

Power is a measure of how much influence they have over actions and outcomes. Their power could derive from hierarchical status or prestige within the organization, money invested from a particular shareholder, ownership of resources required to successfully deliver the outcome, or similar.

Larger projects are likely to have higher numbers of people with power involved because they tend to attract greater corporate governance and oversight – so the top management likes to know what is going on.

There are also often power imbalances at play within complex organization structures, so identifying those early will help you come up with strategies to make them work for you.

Examples of stakeholders with high power are the sponsor, the CEO and the client.

Urgency

This is a measure of how much immediate attention they demand and how unacceptable a delay in response/action is to the stakeholder.

The expectation of high urgency can result from some kind of ownership, previous experience where urgent action was taken that leads to continued expectations of comparable response times, a time-sensitive problem that creates exposure for the stakeholder, or similar.

For example, how often are they likely to bring you urgent issues? Things that can’t wait?

Again, sponsors, clients and senior management are likely to score highly for urgency. Regulatory agencies and compliance teams might also have the right to demand immediate action.

Together, an assessment of these three elements can tell you how engaged a stakeholder is or will be in the work and how they could influence the project. This is useful information for tailoring your engagement activities and working out with whom to invest your time.

How the dimensions overlap

The picture above shows how power, legitimacy, and urgency overlap to give stakeholders more or less saliency.

Project managers love a good Venn diagram!

Stakeholders that fall into areas where they have two or three elements of saliency are the ones to be most aware of and to spend the most time with. They're the ones to focus on when you're doing stakeholder mapping.

Mitchell, Agle, and Wood define these salient stakeholders as follows.

Dominant stakeholders

This group has the stakeholder attributes of high power and high legitimacy to influence the project. An example would be the board of a company. The blend of power and legitimacy means they can act on their intentions, should they ever want to.

They might not spend much time on the project, but you know about it when they want to get involved. They also have controlling influence over things like resource allocation, and they might have a say about how the budget is spent, for example.

Dangerous stakeholders

This group has high power and also expects their needs to be met with a high degree of urgency. However, they have no legitimate claim over the project.

The researchers point out that people in this group, for example, pressure groups, can use coercive power and unlawful tactics to draw attention to their interest in the project. So there's some potential stakeholder behavior to watch for here.

Dependent stakeholders

This group has legitimacy and urgency but lacks real power to influence the direction of the project. An example would be the future process owner who will be responsible for running the activities resulting from the project’s deliverables.

If you work in projects for local governments, for example, you might find that lobby groups, local community groups, or local residents fall into this category.

They have a legitimate claim to influence the project as the outcome is going to impact their environment. They want their views to be heard in a timely fashion. But they don’t really have any power to influence the direction of the work because they are not employed by the contractors.

They are ‘dependent’ because they depend on the power of others to generate action at this time.

Definitive stakeholders

This group meets all the criteria for saliency. They have high power in the situation, they have a legitimate claim over the project and they have a claim to urgency.

For example, your sponsor.

Together this gives them an immediate mandate for priority action on the project. Typically, this situation occurs when a dominant stakeholder wants something done and gains urgency as a result.

Small projects may only have definitive stakeholders: perhaps just you and a manager.

Non-stakeholders

They also define a group of people who don’t meet any of the criteria and are therefore not stakeholders.

I would advise caution when using this label because they might become stakeholders at some point, especially for internal colleagues.

There’s also a risk attached to labeling everyone else as non-stakeholders. Perhaps you simply haven’t identified them yet.

Other types of stakeholders

The model does talk about other groups – what happens if someone falls into the bracket where they only meet the criteria of urgency, for example. If you want to look them up, these are:

• Dormant stakeholders
• Expectant stakeholders
• Latent stakeholders.

My personal view is that in a business context, given how little time we have to engage all the stakeholders, it’s better to focus on the individuals and groups who tick two or more boxes. The reality of managing projects is that you simply don’t have the time to go through a consultation process and do the analysis for everyone.

Your choice, though.

How to use the salience model

So what are the practical implications for the model of stakeholder salience? I like it because it goes beyond the 'classic' approach of influence and interest. A power/interest matrix can be useful, but it doesn't always show the full story, especially if you have external individuals or groups involved. And there are other stakeholder analysis frameworks as well, so you may have to use whatever your organization suggests is the appropriate way to work this out.

However, understanding saliency is useful because it helps you identify how to spend your limited resources. You have limited time, and you can make the most of that by applying different levels of stakeholder engagement to different people.

Stakeholder relationships are time-consuming, so it’s worth investing your energy where it is going to have the greatest effect.

Look through your analysis and identify the individuals and groups who are going to benefit most from your time. Prioritize the definitive stakeholders as they tick all the boxes.

Then look at the other groups. There might be important stakeholders hidden away in other categories. Don’t let the model become a replacement for common sense.

However, remember, stakeholders can move between the categories as the project and the situation evolve.

Power, urgency, and legitimacy can be lost and gained slowly over time, or in a moment. Keep your analysis under review and switch up your actions accordingly, creating a stakeholder management strategy that fully engages your community to the best of your ability.

This is an edited extract from Engaging Stakeholders on Projects: How to harness people power by Elizabeth Harrin (APM, 2020).

You might see older versions with the old APM branding on the cover (red, black and purple). It's the same book on the inside, but the cover was updated in 2023 in line with the APM's rebrand.

Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R. and Wood, D. J. (1997) ‘Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts’, The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 22 (4), pp. 853-886.

This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: The Stakeholder Salience Model and How to Use It

As a project manager, your time doesn't just belong to you. You're managing your own workload while coordinating teams, chasing updates, running meetings, and fielding requests from stakeholders who all think their priority is the priority.

There are no real shortcuts in project work, but there are smarter habits. I've been managing projects for over 20 years and these are the time-saving approaches I actually use.

Some of these will be familiar. Others might be the nudge you need to finally do the thing you know you should be doing. Either way, I hope you find something useful here.

1. Call people before meetings

Give people a ring before a meeting. Ask them if they are still coming and if they have anything for the agenda. (Do you need a template for that? Grab a meeting agenda template here.)

If there are any decisions to be made, talk to them about the options and informally canvass their opinion on what they think is the right way forward.

This takes a little time but saves eons of time in the actual meeting, because you’ll be able to use the information you have gathered to head off conflict and bring the group to a decision far more quickly.

2. Trust your processes

You don’t want to worry about how to handle changes when they get raised. Or what to do to process an invoice. So set up processes for repetitive tasks.

The extra bonus benefit of having documented processes is that you can then hand the work off to someone else – they can follow the process steps just as well as you.

Common processes for project management include:

• Making decisions (yes, you can have a process for this!)
• Risk management
• Setting up a meeting (my bundle of meetings templates have a checklist for this process).

Even things like using a password manager app means you have a process for logging into the many software tools that project managers use throughout the day. Single sign on is a must-have!

3. Use templates

I never write a project document from scratch. There's always something I can start from — whether it's last month's status report, a risk log from a previous project, or a stakeholder comms plan I've adapted a dozen times.

I'll just say here: Don't steal templates from one employer and use them at another employer. That is most likely against your contract of employment, and you don't need to anyway, there are plenty of document templates available online.

Templates work for more than just documents, though. Think about your project management software: most tools let you save project structures, task lists, or board layouts as reusable templates. If you're setting up a similar project for the third time and starting from scratch each time, that's wasted time you could easily reclaim.

The same goes for emails. I have saved drafts for common messages — meeting invites, escalation nudges, end-of-stage summaries. I'm not sending identical emails, but having a starting point means I'm not staring at a blank screen either.

If you want ready-made templates to get started, my template shop has a range built specifically for project managers — including meeting templates, status report formats, and more.

Lean into generative AI

One more thing on templates: if you don't have a starting point at all, AI tools like Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude can generate a first draft for you in seconds. Describe the document you need ("a project status report template for a construction project with a steering group audience") and you'll get something workable straight away. It won't be perfect, but it'll be 80% of the way there and it's easier to start with that than a blank page.

I created a sample project charter for a learning exercise recently and I was impressed at how good the output was. I use Claude regularly now for documents I haven't created before, or when I'm moving into something new and my usual templates don't quite fit.

Treat the AI output as a starting point, not a finished product, review it, adjust it to match your project context, and save it as your new template for next time.

4. Batch your work

Switching between tasks isn’t productive because it takes you time to wind down one task and get into another. Task switching is a productivity killer -- that's valuable time that could be spent figuring something else out.

Batching tasks is where you work on multiple things that use the same tools or skills at a time. For example, part of my job at the moment is to support corporate clients with project management content for their websites. In other words, I write stuff for them, create graphics and from time to time do short videos.

Video work is easy to batch. I have to produce a video for a client once a month, but setting up the camera and so on just for one recording seems like a lot of effort for not much return. And thus we arrive at the concept of batching. I tend to record three or four videos in a batch because it takes time to set up the camera and pack it all away again.

I do the same with emails: I’ll block out a morning or an evening to just blitz emails. You could do the same with any similar tasks. Block booking meetings is a good one. Here are other tasks that you can batch:

• Returning phone calls
• Filing
• Completing project reports for multiple projects
• Completing timesheets for multiple projects
• Providing feedback or saying thank you to team members.

I teach strategies on how to do this in my course on managing multiple projects. There's a free webinar on the most important skills for juggling several projects at once that you can watch to get the basics.

Timeblocking

Batching goes hand in hand with timeblocking.

Block off time in your calendar for related work, whether that's replying to emails or exercise. It's a way to make sure you've got a stretch of focus time available to get into a task.

It's one of the time management tips I use the most. I block time to create steering deck reports, do month end financial management and lots more regular activities. If I don't, my calendar gets broken up into smaller chunks for meetings about a range of projects and it's hard to find the capacity to focus on the bigger things.

Manage your energy levels

Do the most difficult tasks on your To Do list at your high energy times.

This isn't really a productivity hack: it's a way of knowing how your body works and listening to your rhythms. Your mental energy might be highest in the morning, like mine. You might dip in attention after lunch. Or you might be a night owl.

Start time tracking or use a time management app to monitor how you spend your time for a week and you'll see when your productive time is. Look for when there is a drop in productivity.

Fill those lower-energy time slots with lower-energy work like replying to phone calls, filing, easy jobs you can do without much effort. And use the high energy times, your peak productivity hours, for complex tasks, like digging into your scheduling tool to find out why the autoscheduling isn't giving you the answer you expect.

5. Write your reports as you go

This tip saves me thinking time.

I take last week’s (or last month’s) project report and save it with the name/date for the next report. Then I highlight all the text that needs changing or updating in yellow. During the reporting period I go into the document regularly – sometimes I have it open practically all the time – and add in things that need to be reported.

So if I add a new risk to the risk register that is significant enough to make the report, I put it on the report at the same time.

At the end of the reporting period there will still be some bits in yellow that need to be updated or removed, but the bulk of the updates will be done and I won’t be struggling to remember what significant things happened.

6. Consolidate your notifications

I can’t do with managing app alerts from Teams on my iPad, LinkedIn messages on my phone, and desktop alerts for meeting appointments from my calendar.

My inbox is where I spend a lot of time. Here is one of my winning time management techniques: All my important notifications go to my inbox so I only have one place to check. Consolidate them (or turn them off).

You don't have to use your inbox. You can forward notifications to Slack (if that's your tool of choice) using a range of integrations, or some other workflow that helps you. The point is just to consolidate the noise.

Read next: Best and worst habits for managing email. Find out how to ditch the email clutter!

7. Turn off popups

As with notifications, turning off popups helps minimize the noise. This helps you focus without being distracted. Turn off the popup in Microsoft Outlook (or whatever you use) that tells you when you have a new mail. And if you get other popups like Teams chat notifications or even anti-virus 'look at us, we've done something in the background to your computer that you don't care about' messages, then go into the app settings and turn them all off.

The extra benefit of this is that you don’t then get those notifications ping on the screen when you are busy trying to show someone something on your computer. Trust me, they won’t be able to stop themselves from reading your alerts and messages.

8. Stand up for phone calls

Try it, it works! If I want to get someone off the phone, I stand up. Somehow it helps me finish the conversation more quickly.

Note that this doesn't work if you are on a video call, unless you can tilt up your camera somehow. When I have tried this, all I've got in nostril shots -- not a good look! This is a tip for being on the old-fashioned phone, not a Google Meet call.

Generally, calling people (even on Teams/Google Meet etc) is often faster than emails or instant message if you can get through to them.

9. Unsubscribe!

Reading all those emails eats up time in the day. Unsubscribe! Be ruthless.

Not from my newsletter, obviously :)

10. Delegate

You will burn out trying to do it all. Delegate as much as you can to as many people as you can. Say no a lot.

It's hard to delegate urgent tasks because by the time you've found the person to do the work and explained what needs to be done, you could have more quickly done it yourself. So think about what can be delegated -- the routine activity like updating project management tools or daily tasks.

There’s a long article here on how to delegate tasks if you are finding it difficult to let go.

11. Use email mailing lists

I have standards lists of people to whom I write every week. There are lists for people who get this report or that one, lists of project team members, Steering Group members, wider stakeholders, people who get the project newsletter… and so it goes on.

I can’t hold all those names in my head and I know the implications of what would happen if I left someone off accidentally. Given that people get 117 emails per day, you want to make sure that you're not sending too many or missing them out.

I have email mailing lists for all these scenarios. Some are created directly within Outlook so I can use a short name and call up the mailing list people. Some I have in Excel and then open the file and copy and paste the names – this is for a particular user group that changes almost every week. It’s easier to add and delete members in a spreadsheet than it is to use Outlook’s email list function.

Set up lists for your own project and save a few seconds here and there trying to remember and enter all the names.

12. Cut meeting times

Check your diary. Are all your meetings in for an hour?

An hour isn’t the ‘right’ length of time for a meeting. It’s just the length of time that calendar apps default to. These days, my Outlook defaults to 30 minutes (this has changed since I started work, unless it's a system admin setting that my company has amended).

However, software shouldn’t dictate how long your meetings are. Challenge yourself to set up your next meeting for 45 (or 25) minutes and to stick to it. I promise you will be more focused and you’ll still get through your agenda in the time.

Plus you get extra minutes of your day back. Win!

13. Pick your battles

Sometimes, being right is not as important as getting the job done.

Sometimes, it is worth the fight and you have to do it for the good of the team. Sometimes, just let it go and save your time and energy for a day when you have to step up.

If your sponsor is asking for something that is a bit outside your job role but that you could do easily enough, or your team wants to do a task in a different way to how you would do it: think about whether it’s a battle worth getting into.

If it isn’t (and it probably isn’t), move on.

14. Use checklists

This is another tip that stops you relying on your memory and helps you systemize more of your tasks.

Use checklists: for meeting prep, packing luggage for overseas business trips, for finishing a project stage, for starting a project… for anything really.

If you do it routinely, a checklist can help you work through the steps more quickly and with less stress.

Read next: 3 easy steps to make a checklist for any process

15. Take a break

Finally – and I know this sounds counter-intuitive in an article about getting things done faster – take a break. Have a lunch break. Go for a walk.

You’ll come back refreshed, with more energy and a clearer head to face the rest of the day. Even a short break away from the screen can help. Get a coffee, chat to a colleague and preferably get some fresh air if you can.

Regular breaks really do make a difference to your productivity. It's reflective focus, and letting your mind wander, that can help you solve complex problems. Try it -- it really works!

Finally: Use AI to handle the low value work

I was sceptical about AI tools for project management at first. But I've changed my tune, because the time savings on certain tasks are real. And I still don't think I'm using it to its full capacity.

25% of project managers are 'very familiar' with AI, up from 16% in 2023, with two thirds of project professionals now using AI (up from 41% in 2023), according to the AI-Driven PM Revolution survey (Nieto-Rodriguez/Viana Vargas 2025). So if you don't use it, you'll be left behind.

Need a staff briefing written? Want to tidy up your meeting minutes? Then generative AI is my go to. Sometimes, I know that writing from scratch is going to be faster and more accurate, but sometimes it's worth leaning into the tools you have available.

You have to know which tasks to hand off. AI is genuinely useful for the kind of work that's necessary but cognitively draining: drafting documents you've written a hundred times before, summarizing long email threads, turning scrappy meeting notes into a structured action list, or writing a first draft of a stakeholder update when you know what you want to say but don't want to spend 20 minutes saying it.

You do have to check it though: taking the meeting transcript and turning it into minutes might not be the win you think it is. And watch out for those side-conversations at the top and end of meetings where people "stay on for a few minutes" -- you don't always want those documented!

If a task requires your judgement, your relationships, or your knowledge of the project, keep the task. If it's just a case of getting words on a page in a standard format, AI can take a first pass. Think of Copilot or whatever you use as a very fast junior assistant who needs editing, not a finished product.

If you want to explore this further, I've written more about AI in project management and how to use it without losing the human judgement that actually makes projects work.

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This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: How to save time at work: 15 tips for project managers