Virtual Hackathon: Harnessing GenAI for Project Management in Life Sciences

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.

For the first time ever, three PMI® Chapters Communities of Practice (CoPs) focused on life sciences ( NJ , Germany , Belgium ) collaborated and joined forces with PMI's Thought Leadership team and corporate supporters to deliver a truly global and multi-disciplinary event on June 5th, 2025.

Our virtual "Harnessing GenAI for Project Management in Life Sciences" Hackathon brought together over 75 project management and GenAI enthusiasts from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical devices sectors to actively share, learn, and collaborate about how to use GenAI to manage product development projects.

(Hack alert - In keeping with our GenAI theme, this blog is written in part by AI with our team’s human-in-the-loop changes!)

The event underscored the growing interest in GenAI’s potential to transform project pipeline management (PPM) in the life sciences. Participants were encouraged to reflect on their attitudes and experiences along their GenAI adoption journeys - whether as trailblazers or as those seeking guidance - and to use the event as an opportunity to benchmark progress, learn from peers, and grow collectively to translate GenAI’s transformative promise into practical, actionable use cases tailored to our sectors’ unique constraints.

Our opening plenary featured a recap of our registrants’ characteristics – geographies (mostly Europe and the Americas), our primary work roles (program/project manager) and the primary product lifecycle phases we work in (development). In regards to GenAI – most of us are users and our attitudes about it are mostly optimistic.

PMI Thought Leadership then inspired our participants with an overview of valuable insights drawn from their recent global research into the evolving role of GenAI in project management, sharing advancements reshaping traditional workflows that enable PMs to drive greater efficiency and innovation.

Our breakout sessions opened for dynamic and interactive discussions centered on three guiding questions:

• What are you doing now?
• What’s working?
• What are your challenges?

Discussions emphasized competency development, highlighting critical skills project managers need to cultivate as GenAI becomes more prominent, such as AI integration, data analysis, and strategic decision-making. Best practices from discussions on challenges, opportunities and benefits were compiled, underscoring the importance of leadership buy-in, cross-functional collaboration, and robust infrastructure while addressing blockers like insufficient training and organizational readiness.

Our hackathon concluded with actionable next steps, including sharing more detailed insights through a variety of media (e.g., articles, videos, etc.) and fostering ongoing engagement within the "AI Hackathon Alumni - PMI Life Sciences Community" LinkedIn group.

A heartfelt thank you goes out to our team, supporters, and contributors who made this event possible. Much more to come – stay tuned!
Kamil Mroz, Claudia Campbell-Matland, Joann O'Connor, Sunny Hung, Benoit Schmitt, Joe Stalder, David Dalessandro, John Bufe, Jonathan Rice, Risa Inagaki, Reinhold Roessler, Eric Gustot, Emma Jaikaran, Bart Briers, Philippe Bernard, Archana Narasanna, Brian Majors, Christophe de Vleesschouwe, Emil Andersson, Ian Summers, Rupal Bhandari, Francesca Donofrio, Aliki Courmanopoulos, Aurora Gualtieri, Juliana Correa, Keren Deront, Kyela Bishop, Michael Bianchi, Samuel Pownall, Sergio Jardim, Shauna Mensah, Taiwo Abraham , Edivandro Conforto , Al Zeitoun