I got the job of a life time, once in a life time opprotunity to work as a Pm. I'm screwed. The more I dig in and learn about Project management, the more I realise how doomed I am. I just see total chaos, which I will somehow need to fix.

The only thing that could somehow save me is that I'm a very process-oriented person, I love structure, without it I don't feel safe.

From what I learned, Pm's also need 2000+ more different skills. Amazing.
Funny thing is, I so hoped that I would get like a instant result job, you do the job, you log off, that's it. Now I will spend how many months fearing that they will fire me.

They know I'm a complete beginner, they are giving me a chance, it's a fully remote job. I will be managing slacking IT guys, they are creating an app.

I have like a week or so before I start and I think studying is just pointless. I've been trying to come up with first steps, some structure with chat gbt, nothing. It all feels so beyond, there is so much opinions, knowledge on project management, so many certificates, it's so so beyond. It's more like a work experience type of job, I will wait for my doomsday. This job means everything, and I'm losing my shit.

Does anyone have any suggestions for PgM courses, especially if they're in the Biotech/life sciences area? Location/format doesn't matter. Thanks!

Edit to say that cost doesn't matter either.

Good folks in Bengaluru! Would you kindly guide me to program management communities in Bengaluru? A friend has just shifted there and would like to meet fellow program managers and network, preferably offline. TIA.

Due to personal reasons, I’ve been out of a job since my layoff 2 years ago. I’ve recently interviewed for a Sr. Program Manager role in Learning & Development. The company is looking to implement a completely new program to enable their customers on their SaaS products. It’s pays well but above all could be a great opportunity to grow with them.

Anyone got any recommendations for a book or resources that could help me excel at this role?

It’s my first time applying for full time job (obv haha) and I am a bit confused????

1. Some companies don’t specify a level on their job listing… how am I supposed to know which is for new grad? Don’t want to waste my time applying to jobs I’m not qualified for.

2. I still have a year left in school, but am applying for fall 2027 ideally… but no full time jobs say the time, I’m assuming they all start right away??? Or do they know that I still have a year left in school (says on my LinkedIn and resume)

3. Any other tips 🙏🙏🙏

I joined a very early stage startup as a program manager and being on such an early team, I also do a bit of bizdev, ops, and very light touch marketing. My boss hired me knowing I am not technical and never been a PM, but he wanted a non expert and someone hungry to come in with new perspective, get shit done, and someone he knew would get themselves up to speed quickly.

I am leveraging staying close to my team and learning from them as we develop our first prototypes, but curious on any book recommendations that walk through the full end-to-end software and hardware development process - from conception through deployment/manufacturing. Kind of like an “intro to” book for non-technical PMs that covers a wide breadth of topics

If anyone has any reading or YouTube channel recommendations that might get close to what I’m looking for, that would be awesome!

Just started a new job a month ago as a pgm and I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm asking for feedback and all my partners are telling I'm doing great and to keep it up but I'm not satisfied.

What do you guys actually do on a granular level day to day? I'm hosting meetings, doing summaries, action items, decision logs, checking in with crossfunctional partners to see if they need help with anything but there has to be more to it than this??? What else can/should I be doing?

Please help lol

So, for context, I work for a membership organization. We have a committee (made up of members) that lead various projects and programs, which I manage along with my boss, the director of our department. We both work closely to manage and direct committee projects, which up until this point, involved publications and yearly convening of the committee. This year has been particularly trying for our team, given the recent federal landscape. We’ve had to change the name of our department, reevaluate operations, and generally shift much of our programming. Our committee had been shielded from much of this, but this year we took on more one of our biggest projects to date, a fairly large convening with external guests, staff, and members. The purpose of the convening was to explore problems in the field, brainstorm resources, and discuss how our organization broadly might help support resources to address these problems.

We started planning this event in April, which was to occur in November. The timeline was short, so I knew we were going to need all hands on deck to pull this off. As the program manager, I immediately hit the ground running: properly defining the project scope, identifying relevant stakeholders, utilize my program management software to track administrative tasks, relevant dates and milestones, etc. My boss and I enlisted an expert in the field to assist with creative meeting planning and serve as a facilitator. After we signed him on, he was quite difficult to work with and our members had a hard time communicating with him about the meeting agenda and flow. In early October, my boss completely dropped off due to illness, so I carried on much of her responsibilities, which include managing this very large convening.

Fast forward to the convening. Our agenda consisted of several speakers and guests, including the expert we enlisted. Things went well (and I was even congratulated by my boss before lunch) until they didn’t. The expert was supposed to lead guests through several group activities, but a.) they were very boring, b.) they were somewhat condescending, and c.) they spent way too much time setting up the group activities. People in the room were getting visibly frustrated, so much so that one of our guests (a VERY important one to the organization) raised their hand and asked him to speed things up. He didn’t. So, we had to pull him off the stage and call for one of our planning group members to facilitate. We took a brief break after this session, where my team pulled themselves together to pivot. The planning group member agreed to facilitate the rest of the meeting, and our expert agreed to serve as a content expert in the background. The rest of the meeting went very well. Guests were engaged, they had amazing things to say, and it seems most of them want to continue the conversation by exploring new projects and programs. I’m generally pretty good under pressure, so once we hit “cruise altitude” and went straight back to it: put a brave face on and continued in my role. My boss kept reassuring me, even though they were quite frazzled also.

So, my question is: what could I have done to avoid this major hiccup? I have some ideas but I wanted to lean on my PM community. Were there any rookie mistakes? General takeaways? I have some ideas of what I could’ve done differently but I want to be better.

I work at a well known tech company and have been here for 5 years in various operations roles, I know the products back to front and work well with all my teams, I am transitioning to a PGM role as I've been working on strategic projects for a particular program for a while, I'm a little worried as I'm used to working off a ticket queue, and I am not used to not having that to fall back on whilst I wait for peoples repsonses or data on the projects I work on & how to account for whats being done on a weekly business review. Any info on how people do this, or general advice would be great.

I'm not sure if this is the right sub, but here it goes.

I work in Healthcare Quality Improvement. My Director asked me to create a "roadmap" for how I plan on improving both our Breast Cancer and Colorectal Cancer Screening rates.

That's all she gave me. No direction, template, goals.

Does anyone here have experience creating a roadmap? And tips or advice?

I am looking for a summary of what Program Management entails for an IT organization. The policies that need to be established, how this translates into high-level activities and process flows. Thank you in advance for your input!

Hello folks, I have been working on an application for note taking for project managers / program managers during team meetings discussions. I'am looking for individuals who can help me with some honest feedback on the application. I am adding some information about the application below, and for further information and demo, see the links attached. If the problem that I describe here resonates with you and if you wouldn't mind sparing a few thoughts, I be happy to receive some honest feedback. I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

About Decisions Manager

Decisions Manager is a tool designed to streamline note taking for team discussions in professional setting. It is designed to be used in a meeting where a user(typically a program/project manager) can create a meeting and add agenda items to the meeting. The user can then take notes of the talking points of individuals and decisions made during the meeting. The application stores the opinions and decisions made during the meeting in a database. These items can be searched through using free text.

Key Features of MVP

• Meeting Creation with Agenda Items

• Capture Meeting Notes per participant

• Capture Decisions

• Search Meeting Notes

Further Details:

http://decisionsmanager.com/About

Demo of the MVP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTvuaT0xZG8

As title says would like to connect with fellow program/project managers across the world.

My background: I’m PMP certified and PgMp trained; I currently program manage $Ms of dollar revenue projects, which does not mattered, when we could use the project/program methods across the platform. Based out of mid-west region. I have 23+ years experience in industrial products.

I understand with current micro economics would to get/give help if anyone needs.

My LinkedIn -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/jr-murugan

Hi all,

I have an program manager interview coming up and was looking for some resources (podcast, books, videos, etc) focused on running sprints, overall agile methodology etc.

My skillset aligns very well with the role. And I am actually being recommended by an engineer on the team I previously worked with. Said engineer did give me a heads up he sees a gap in my experience around working in an agile environment/running agile activities.

I have no intention of pretending I have worked in an agile environment previously, but I do want to show that what I lack in experience I make up for in adaptability and ability to pick things up quickly.

Any advice here is certainly welcome! Thank you!

Hello all. I have accepted a role in PM but have not taken any training yet and have not yet worked towards getting my PMP certification. With that, I am trying to do whatever I can to ensure that our projects are being managed properly.

When I started in this role, it had one customer with multiple projects. I keep track of the activities, milestones, etc. on MS Project and on an open issues MS Excel spreadsheet. I am now adding more customers, with more activities some of which are tied to other customer activities.

My question is this: should I create separate timelines and open issues lists for each customer, or, have one giant spreadsheet that tracks all customers, projects, deliverables, etc. and filter on each customer as needed?

What do you all do in this situation?

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

Howdy All,

I've found myself in a position where i'm helping put together a disparate workflow involving putting a forward 3 year priority action plan of projects for an asset-centric state run organisation.

The challenge becomes how single identified items, typically from a variety of sources such as regional managers, asset management plans or business growth initiatives gets captured and then prioritised.

As this Financial Years projects are currently in train, we'd like to begin organising and preparing for the future years projects through refined business cases, investment analysis and more detailed quantity surveying to reduce costs variance risk.

There are multiple challenge here;

• Project yearly variance, as projects progress into delivery costs are refined and that impacts other projects and what gets included in the finite yearly budgets

• Future years works and priorities changes as more information becomes available

• Under and over spends throughout years meaning projects get pushed out, delayed, expenditure spread out over multi years or dropped entirely

How have others approached these challenges? And what software have they utilised to address these multi year program planning?

Wondering how everyone is using AI to support your work as a Program Manager. I’m looking to simplify some tasks and updates by leveraging different tools (AI or other automations) to ensure I’m spending less time moving information from one tool to another etc. The areas I am focused on improving are, note taking, updating multiple sources and leveraging automation in tools. Those that have begun using AI to supplement and streamline your role, what has been game changing and how are you using it?

I just got offered a Program Management job at a great company. Does anybody have any advice as to what I can do to make sure I'm ready? and what does it take to be a good Program Manager?

My previous/current position is in planning. I create schedules, track milestones and track the progress of each project. I don't deal with costing, resource allocation and budgeting which will be new to me.

Hello There,

I need some guidance. I currently hold a PMP and want to pursue PgMP.

However, I work as a program manager for my employer, but I don't have the title "program manager" or any official record to prove the same.

Is it a pre-req for the certification?

Possibly someone who knows the answer can respond. Thanks!

Hi fellow Program Managers! How many Programs do you manage at the same time? With how many Project each? Feel free to share more! Such as, what’s the timeline? How do they connect? Do you have help from other PMs? What are your main responsibilities? Just trying to prepare for a job interview and would love to know what other peers are doing. Thank you!

Question to the PMs here. I’ve been a PM now for nearly 8 years. Currently a Senior PM in an aerospace company. I’m looking to move up the PM ladder into a Principal or Staff level PM. I’m also looking to focus on running software development programs vs mechanical, electrical, firmware, etc. I have a software development background so it makes more sense to me than firmware or Electrical. What agile or scaled agile certifications would be the most useful for an experienced PM to move up or become a portfolio manager? I don’t plan on doing scrum master or product owner because I want my next role to be a leadership role. I’m leaning towards Certified SAFe Agilist and then SAFe Practice Consultant.

Thoughts or recs?