The Artificial Intelligence Startup BASIS Delivers Innovative AI Planning Assistant

SThe community for designers Dribbble helps you hire designer, grow and look for design inspiration!

Listen to this article

* – This article has been archived and is no longer updated by our editorial team –

Below is our recent interview with Melissa Kam, Marketing & Customer Success at BASIS:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to BASIS?

A: BASIS was built on the premise that a plan reflective of an organization’s history and expertise is a more realistic and achievable plan. The more realistic the plan, the higher the chance of project success.

Simply put, BASIS is an AI planning assistant. The AI engine makes suggestions to planners during the planning process as to durations, cost, risks, and even the sequence in which work should be performed. These suggestions stem from a Knowledge Library specific to the organization using BASIS.

Q: How long has BASIS been in the industry?

A: While BASIS itself is a young company (founded in 2016), the BASIS team has revolutionized the science of planning over the past two decades, founding innovative organizations such as Pertmaster (now part of Oracle’s Primavera offering) and Acumen (now part of the Deltek PPM offering). BASIS is the third chapter in our journey.

Q: Is AI going to replace planners and schedulers?

A: Absolutely not. In fact, planners should see AI as another tool to make the job of building schedules for highly complex projects easier. The Artificial Intelligence capabilities within BASIS improve the realism/feasibility of plans and make the planning process faster, but don’t replace the need for human reasoning and experience.

Because of this, BASIS provides the opportunity to solicit feedback from your expert team. A simple markup process allows a discipline lead, commodity manager, construction superintendent, and other project stakeholders to tell the planner if they agree or disagree with the project plan. You can verify if team members believe the plan is achievable through realism measurements within BASIS.

Q: You’ve recently announced the release of BASIS 2.0, the latest innovation in project planning; could you tell us something more?

A: The 2.0 release and capabilities added after that release, solidify BASIS as a solution for plans at any phase of the project lifecycle.

• Pre-planning
o The pre-planning phase of a project is the point at which we are formulating the foundation of our plan, making sure we understand the scope (at least at a high level), and that we have a semblance of an overarching timeline, etc. Organizations often include concept select, proposal phase, and pre-construction activity as elements under this pre-planning umbrella.
o BASIS supports pre-planning by accelerating the development of Level 1 through Level 3 plans, the creation of proposal schedules, and the ability to define and manage pre-construction related activities and plans.
o BASIS improves the realism of plans by allowing the planner to adopt suggestions from the AI engine drawing from historical experiences/projects/context in the Knowledge Library. This process dramatically accelerates plan development. We like to say, “Better plans, faster with BASIS.”

• Planning & Execution
o During the planning and execution phases of a project, organizations typically continue to add detail to their plans as scope becomes clearer. A detailed schedule is often broken down into 30, 60, or 90-day listings of tasks. This is often called Short Interval Planning (SIP), and this process is used throughout the execution phase of the project.
o The issue is, this SIP process often creates a disconnect between the schedule and the detailed listing of tasks the field team will use to execute the work. The planner is left with no insight into whether the detailed Short Interval Plans actually support the schedule timeline/objectives.
o BASIS addresses this challenge by allowing a planner to allocate portions of a schedule/scope to discipline leads (those managing the work for the team in the field) who then detail the tasks and sequence of work for the next 30, 60, or 90 days. The planner then has complete visibility into how aligned the field team’s task listing is to the dates/expectations in the schedule.

• Closeout
o People regularly theorize about the value of lessons learned and archiving during closeout, but the truth is, this rarely gets done on real projects. We believe this is due to the minimal benefit associated with reusing lessons learned and historical as-built performance, and worse, capturing this in a meaningful way is challenging. Therefore, closeout has primarily been seen as a “check the box” type exercise if it’s even done at all.
o With BASIS, organizations have a means to continually refine the knowledge used for building projects. When a project reaches the closeout phase, the completed or as-built plan can be published to the BASIS Knowledge Library so that your experiences are captured and available to the next project.

Q: Does this replace my existing CPM tool?

A: No. In fact, quite the opposite. Firstly, BASIS is a planning tool, not a scheduling tool. BASIS is designed to enhance your investment in a CPM tool such as Primavera, MS Project, or Deltek Open Plan. At the pre-planning phase, organizations use BASIS to build the top-down plan that is the foundation of your detailed schedule – which is built using your CPM tool of choice. Likewise, the markup and consensus capabilities of BASIS enables schedules developed in a CPM tool to be integrated into the likes of Short Interval Planning schedules, i.e., linking your big-picture plan to very short-term workface/field to-do lists.

Q: What are the current trends in project management? What about the future?

A: There is a convergence of several trends that we are tracking and addressing with BASIS. The combination of “brain drain,” knowledge management challenges, and digital transformation initiatives are all impacting the planning discipline, and they all overlap with one another. One of the primary reasons we created BASIS was directly related to these trends.
• Brain Drain: A skilled and knowledgeable set of resources that are retiring or simply exiting the workforce. This creates a knowledge gap for organizations. Bleeding into the next two trends…
• Knowledge Management & Digital Transformation: Organizations are looking to address this knowledge gap by implementing knowledge management processes all while dealing with digital transformation initiatives.

BASIS was designed to fill this knowledge gap by allowing organizations to capture the expertise of their teams and store it in an organization-specific Knowledge Library. As we stated previously, plans that are calibrated by our historical experiences and validated by the team have a much higher probability of successful execution. BASIS combines the pragmatic benefits of Artificial Intelligence technologies with the ability to leverage Human Intelligence (e.g., the expertise of your team).

Q: What can we expect from BASIS in the future?

A: Honestly, you can expect more of what we have done for the last 20 years. We will continue to innovate in the project management space and apply new technologies to the challenges we face as an industry.

Our objective has always been to improve the science of planning and making project knowledge more accessible and useful is the key. Everything we build into BASIS is in support of this primary objective.

Q: What do we need to do to start using BASIS on our projects?

A: If you want to try BASIS on your project, visit our free trial page on our site, and we will send you login credentials. You can also request a demo on our homepage, where a member of our team will work directly with you to demonstrate how BASIS can immediately impact your plans.

Activate Social Media: