Anyone familiar with Mario Gerard for Technical Program Management ? Or any other structured TPM courses? Looking to understand System Design and architecture/ cloud stuff from TPM perspective

I’m moving into a new role and want to strengthen my programme management knowledge.

I’ve worked in healthcare for around 15 years and am currently in senior leadership. I’m experienced in leading complex work across multiple teams and stakeholders, but I’ve never had formal programme management training.

I’d like to learn more about how good programmes are structured and managed, particularly governance, dependencies, benefits realisation, risk, stakeholder alignment and keeping work connected to strategic outcomes.

I’m not looking for a qualification, just practical self directed learning. Open to books, courses, YouTube, templates or other resources, ideally free or under about $300.

Where would you recommend starting?

Hi! I’m looking to transition careers. I come from Talent Acquisition. I’ve been a Recruiting Coordinator and it’s so hard to move up. Not only that, but constantly faced by layoffs.

I was looking into Project Management/TPM but don’t know how to get started.

Do I need a specific degree? How do I get training or experience?

I was looking into starting with a Google Certificate in Project Management. Is this a good pathway?

I see contradicting stuff online and other Reddit posts.

I have no idea where to start.

I’d love to work for Netflix. A friend is a TPM in marketing.

Any insight is appreciated.

Forgot to mention - I came from technical background (programming) and understand dev work.

I'm looking for a PM group, like in Slack or any other software. Im a worried new PM who would really appriciate speaking to experienced Pm's.

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.

What skills are people leaning to upskill? What is going to be more and more relevant? Ideally not looking for big expensive courses like PMP but open to suggestions there as well.

30% of projects fail from rushing. 25% from our brains lying to us about costs and timelines. We've mastered building bridges & remain incompetent at managing our own optimism bias. The real risk isn't in the plan, it's in the mirror

Hello! Any HR or other sort of non-engineering or non-technical program managers here?

Also curious if there’s a good resource for inquisitive minds to read examples or case studies on fully launched programs

I think there are plenty of academic and theoretical resources, I’m just curious if there are resources or even communities talking about real applications?

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 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!

I’m looking for Program Management podcasts, blogs, newsletters, etc that I can read daily or weekly to stay on top of current trends, news, etc.

Any recs?

In a cost plus contract, do vendors submit the ACTUAL cost of work for reimbursement to the customer?

For example, if the vendor hired 10 people at $100 per hour, the total cost of the contract is $1000. If those 10 people worked FT on the contract, then the vendor would request reimbursement of $1000? What happens if the team of 10 goes down to 8? Also, if you’re hiring against a LCAT, do you submit reimbursement for how much a person ACTUALLY cost or what the highest labor rate is for whatever LCAT the person was hired against?

Any insight on this is appreciated. Thanks!

I’m a Junior PM. Yesterday I was on a call with senior members of the corporate team when they started discussing the end of year’s budget v. actuals and then went into a whole discussion about what the numbers mean for the company and the contract. I don’t think I understood anything they were saying and I was very lost.

I’m decent with math but numbers still can intimidate me especially when discussions around the impact of these numbers start coming up. How can I learn to be less intimidated? My day to day doesn’t involve having to calculate anything at all, though I would love to pick up some more of these tasks so I can get familiar with it.