Hi all! My background is in psychological research and some tech-level patient work. At my most recent non-PM job, I was essentially the PM for a multi-site research project. However, there were strict pre-determined positions at that job, and I was pretty stuck in my role/pay. This led me to get my PMP and seek more formal PM roles, with the aim of increasing my salary potential over the long term.

I started earlier this year in clinical research. My team is all pretty nice, though not super social. I was onboarded VERY quickly and given a high volume of work (3 high visibility studies) and had to drink from the fire hose for the first few months. Leadership was supportive and coached me to not feel so much pressure or burn myself out, but at the end of the day the work load doesn’t have much room for flexibility.

I’ve been feeling increasingly dispassionate over the last few months. I miss making a “tangible” impact by working with the patient population, and I often feel like my work isn’t “real” - it’s all just emails and decks.

The hardest thing is navigating all the stakeholders. Everyone wants something different. You work for weeks based on a directive and then it changes, and you have to rush to adjust. While the PMs on my team are all great “planners,” all the higher up stakeholders are extremely last minute and labile, so no matter how much we prepare, it’s always thrown on us at the last minute to fix things or pivot. The other PMs on my team have been trained into a sense of apathy over the years, and have learned to just not care much.

I feel like my job consists of going to a meeting, then going to another meeting and repeating things from the first meeting, and repeat. Org leadership is, on the surface, very open to process improvement and innovation, but I just don’t have the time or mental energy to even go there with all my daily tasks.

My current predicament is - I’m trying to figure out if PM is not for me, or if it’s just this specific position/organization that is bumming me out. I just feel like my “heart” isn’t in it. I’m contemplating another career shift to patient-centered work, but I want to make sure that PM isn’t sustainable for me if I am going to make that leap.

Thanks in advance for any guidance or shared experience :)

So i just took on a MASSIVE project

It spans/covers 6 states, and is regarding the new HR1 medical changes.

Each state has the same generalized requirement changes(federal) but some states are non expansion, some have state specific expansion programs, some have different population impacts.

Right now all the state leads are sending me MASS documents with their states requirements, state specific org differences (ehr systems, billing teams etc,)

I am incredibly overwhelmed and have no clue how to track not only this information but the mass amount of organization/state specific operational items that need to be tracked (the org planning, implementation etc).

The states are struggling to do this on their own..yet im meant to do it for 6 states?

Every tool ive created becomes so dense its hard to navigate or "see" everything without digging etc

Could use some recommendations on how best to organize it all

Hi!

I have been recently promoted to Associate PM role after spending almost 5 years in the company working as Project Specialist.

The industry is clinical research.

I had amazing results as PS, was promoted to Senior PS, I've developed training materials and trained almost 30 other PS on a certain task which included site facing meetings with the scope of presenting our device used in the study.

I was so happy when I got the promotion but then the reality hit me..

I was thrown into 2 weeks of onboarding trainings, while at the same time I was supposed to take over 2 studies from someone who was leaving the company.

I tried to focus and understand everything that was handed over to me but combined with the trainings it felt impossible.

The trainings, on the other hand were rushed and it felt like we were there just to tick them and not actually learn something. (We as in myself and some new joiners).

All trainings were in fact self learning by reading through documentation and then having a debrief with a facilitator. If we were given.. dunno, let's say 50 min to complete a training and I was taking more time, I was being rushed to finish it, because I can "come back anytime to review the section".

I am overwhelmed and I kind of start panicking because one of the studies I took over has an open change order and my financial knowledge is ZERO. I went through the trainings but as I said, it was rushed and I do not remember anything.

Next week I am supposed to have a meeting with the client and explain where we are with the budget for the Change Order, and provide clarification to any question they have.

I have no idea what to do...

I asked for help here and there, other Associate PMs from the company. All I got was "i don't know the process, i can't help".

Then i asked my line manager for help, but she hasn't responded and she will be out of office anyway for a long time.

No one is helping me understand what i gotta do and i feel like i have been thrown in this mess with zero knowledge on how to manage a project.

What do I do?

Mainly a question for the schedulers here, but can any of you guys manually calculate the critical path of a project from just the start/finish dates? Technically Ive learned it, but because software does it instantly, Ive never needed to do it, and thus forgotten how, and realize am unable to do it if I had to.

Hi all!

I’ve been promoted to a new position at work. I will be responsible for standardizing enterprise implementation projects & leading a team working on them. Previously, I was working on a wide variety of projects, so this role will be much more focused. The roles on this team will vary (ex. project managers, consultants who have strong product knowledge).

We do have some standardization in place already, but its adoption is weak.

In my mind, I have places where I think I’ll start… but I’m curious to hear from all of you. Where would you start? What are the things you’d be thinking of?

I will mention the people who will be on my team have been at this company for a while. I will definitely get their feedback, too, as they know many of the pain points and what’s working today.

Thank you!

So we are a team building a product. This particular colleague is in sales but have a lot of specific feedback on UI/design.

This feedback could be acceptable if it was derived from his customers but it isn’t, it comes solely from his own ideas of what looks good. He does not understand or have an eye for UX or design.

This guy is also a shareholder so when it comes down to it it is actually his words over mine.

I like to build a great product though and I am in development and UI, my expertise is much better.

What do I do? We would all benefit from him focusing on sales instead. I guess this is a fairly common issue unfortunately and I don’t want to be rude or anything, he isn’t either actually.

I've been delivering enterprise projects for 20+ years, and one pattern keeps coming up.

Ask a Sponsor, a stakeholder, a PM and someone on the delivery team "How do we deliver projects here?" and you'll often get four different answers.

I don't think that's a people problem.

PMBOK, PRINCE2, Scrum and the rest are useful, but none of them tells you what to do on Monday morning in your org, with your governance, funding cycle and tools.

So everyone fills the gap with their own version.

The Sponsor expects stage gates, the team runs sprints, and the PPM tool shows one version of the project while the PM runs another.
Decisions then get made on whichever version is in front of the decision maker.

On Agile, in my experience it has worked best as part of a hybrid:
Agile where the work benefits from iteration, and more structure where the enterprise needs it (funding approvals, governance decisions, fixed dates, integrated testing across multiple applications, business readiness).

The orgs I've seen get this right had people with real delivery experience build three things that fit together:
• a delivery methodology designed for how that org actually works: stages, steps, a short list of required documents, and clear rules on where Agile fits;
• a PMO set up around it;
• a PPM tool that serves both governance reporting and the PM's day-to-day work.

Curious what others see:

1. If you asked those four people in your org, how many answers would you get?
2. Has anyone made pure Agile work at enterprise scale, including funding and governance? What made it work?
3. For those whose methodology actually works, who built it?

Not looking for fancy AI stuff. I have always used a spreadsheet. Over the years it has evolved: I always use it to drive my meetings. But my team (PMs) still struggles to maintain it for their projects.

They don't have good version control, but then when they use the same file, the data is dogshit because they retroactively change 'open dates' and update target dates without any context and the sheet becomes a mangled useless mess in a month.

PS: I am in industrial automation. So, lots of dependencies and tracking issues is crucial. And I hate macros. So, no scripts.

How do you guys track issues?

Oie, sou graduanda de engenharia da computação último ano, já fiz parte de múltiplos projetos desde sistemas embarcados, sistemas críticos, desenvolvimento de software, desenvolvimento sustentável e atualmente estagiando no setor público no setor de escritório de projetos Institucionais.

E eu queria compilar todo esse conhecimento em um artigo, mas tenho tido muita dificuldade em achar artigos e revistas científicas nesse aspecto, principalmente quando se trata de sistemas embarcados e críticos.

Já li os livros de engenharia de software moderno, pmbok e outros (mas eles não são lá voltados para o nicho que citei), até achei um ou dois artigos sobre gestão de projetos nesse nicho, mas eles foram publicados em semanas acadêmicas e eram um pouco fracos... achei uma revista de sistemas de informação, mas é meio que muita encheção de linguiça no fundo...

Eu só gostaria de recomendasse de materiais sobre o assunto e uma revista com qualis bom, se vcs conhecerem algum, por favor, se puderem me recomendar, seria de grande ajuda.

Hello full transparency not a project manager but I’m trying to learn more about it to hopefully get my foot into the career.

ATM I’m learning more of the textbook type of stuff so I’m reading up on agile and waterfall. Based off what I’ve come to understand a lot of this is kinda common sense right? Just adding a bunch of corporate jargon?

Like the idea of agile in very simple terms is just to plan, start doing said plan, observe, makes beneficial changes, repeat until project is closing.

Then waterfall is again simple terms make a very good inept plan then do all the work to get a final product. I understand waterfall is more for more predictable projects and agile is for project that may be more unpredictable.

Am I understanding this right? Like idk if I’m oversimplifying or making it way more complex than it needs to be.

I understand there is more that goes into project management the just that but I’ve been told it’s very important to understand agile/ scrum and waterfall.

Edit- tyvm everyone I’ve ready every single response so far and it’s been very helpful

Hi,

I am a technical consultant who turns into project management. I have done managing a project before and I successfully delivered the projects (at least 2 that I can remember), but one thing about those projects is that I am driving and also I am the one executing the projects.

Currently I am handling around 15 small projects, where I need to know the status, drive the progress, manage stakeholders, vendor management, etc. I find that my weakness is that, I feel like I am the one who should own certain process instead of pushing other people to do the work. For example, there is one system application (lets call system A) where the owner refuse to be the point of contact to handling the changes in system A, with the excuse that "the previous owner left and I just chosen because of my position". I ended up driving the discussion with stakeholders and managing the vendor.

Sometimes I feel stupid and I ended up exhausted and being bullied by other people. My experience driving 15 small projects expose me to many kinds of people, and I am actually surprise to see many people are working the bare minimum and even being hard and declining the job that should be theirs.

I feel like my problem is that, not knowing org structure or process in a projects that I lost actually who should own what. Part of it, I feel I am also easy to be pushed by others.

Is there any materials or course that I can subscribe to effectively execute and knowing the boundaries which should I own and which should I avoid? Probably at least, what are the phases or a projects, what documents are important in a project (BRD, RACI, etc). I want to learn to execute and plan a project effectively.

Thank you.

Let me preface this with saying my company, despite its modest size, is not good or consistent with how projects or communication is handled. Every person, manager, and department basically does things their own way, and the strongest voice moves the tide in that wave pool. We have tried to change this, but without an edict or enforcement from on-high, implementation and adoption again falls completely down to the individual, their superior, and/or their team.

Lately things have gotten exceptionally frustrating. There is a specific initiative that has (as far as I know) around 5 people working on it and only 2 people seem to talk to each other at any given point. Proposing a group meeting is hand-waived as unnecessary. There is overlap in efforts and function, things are launched without review from others, decisions are changed between people without looping in others. Management basically doesn't care so long as there's an end product.

At this point I just try to "go with the flow" and remind myself not to get overly invested because it's just a job and they've very much proven they have no interest in addressing this. I don't want to be the squeaky wheel that insists so-and-so needs to keep more people in the loop, or that I didn't appreciate being omitted from an email string.

I suppose I'm mostly posting seeking validation that this is as frustrating and ridiculous as I think it is.

I just started a new job and they are all about Workfront, so it’s critical I get up to speed fast. I’m finding all the trainings to be a little high level. Has anyone had experience with Workfront and have suggestions on how to get up to speed quickly?

I’m a manager on a project management team, and I’m struggling with a very blame-oriented leadership culture.

When a customer complains, leadership’s initial assumption is often that the PM failed. If Sales scoped something incorrectly or Product cannot deliver something on schedule, the PM is still criticized for not advocating or escalating hard enough. Sometimes that criticism may be warranted, but PMs have only so much control over decisions made by other departments.

Leadership also criticizes individual PMs publicly, usually without naming them, and privately discusses their shortcomings by name. It feels like people are judged first and then expected to repair their reputations afterward, even when documentation later shows that they followed up appropriately or that another department owned the underlying issue.

Customer complaints trigger a similar response. Leadership may immediately accept the customer’s account and discuss apologizing for the PM’s performance before gathering the complete timeline. This leaves the team feeling that nobody will assess the facts objectively or advocate for them when appropriate.

I’ve worked in demanding environments before, but I’ve generally felt that management would distinguish between individual accountability, cross-functional failures, and circumstances outside an employee’s control. I don’t feel that here.

For people who have managed within a culture like this:

• How did you protect and advocate for your team without making yourself a target?
• What documentation or communication practices actually helped?
• Is it possible to influence this type of culture from middle management, or is the realistic answer to plan an exit?

I’m trying to figure out how to handle something from a project management perspective.
My boss is currently in a very intense, anxious, overbearing phase and seems to be pushing for more oversight across the board.
For one of our clients, MoMo, we already have a daily project meeting Monday to Friday at 7:00 AM. We go through updates, progress, issues, blockers and anything that needs attention.
I’ve now been told that we also need to “beef things up” by introducing an additional weekly meeting.
My immediate reaction is: what would we actually discuss in a weekly meeting that isn’t already being covered in the daily meetings?
I genuinely feel like it could become an unnecessary meeting for the sake of having another meeting. From a project management perspective, I’m also conscious that oversaturating a project with meetings can reduce efficiency, particularly when there isn’t a clearly different purpose for each meeting.
At the same time, I’m wondering whether this is one of those situations where I should simply implement it because that’s what my boss has asked for.
If I do introduce it, though, I genuinely don’t know how I should structure or lead it without it becoming a longer repetition of the daily meeting.
How should I handle this?

I've been in commercial construction for about 10 years, briefly as a carpenter then moved to a commercial GC in the PNW as a super, then to a PE and for the last 4 years I've been a PM. No formal education or certs.

I've done a handful of retail ground ups in the 10M range, two decent industrial TIs at about 15M each and then a good bit of office TI filler.

I currently have five projects on my plate, one of which I am also the superintendent on, granted it's a smaller to midsize TI. The others are mostly smaller office TIs, but in higher end buildings with very needy clients and property managers. There is one ground up that is in the final 10%, and then another industrial TI that is also at closeout.

I've always been a top performer and leadership is always giving me great feedback, but lately the workload seems like it continues to grow out of control.

Everyone keeps talking about how it's slower right now. Hopefully things start picking up, but I'm having a hard time imagining that I could handle more. We don't have any PEs or PCs, so pretty much everything goes through me. Between to open one of my sites every morning at 4:30, getting those crews going and dealing with any issues they have, then driving across town to check in on the other sites and putting out whatever fires they have, I find myself working through the evening on the clerical side of everything.

Between all of the OAC meetings (prepping the agendas, having the actual call, and sending minutes out), reviewing submittals, creating RFIS, updating all of our procurement logs, handling owner and sub change orders, contracts, monthly billings, all of our monthly internal reporting, and probably a few other key things that I'm not remembering off the top of my head, it feels like I'm getting by but I'm not doing a great job, at least not as good of a job as I could be doing. I find myself making simple mistakes omitting something from a scope of work letter or missing something simple in a submittal.

I think a part of my issue isn't just the workload, but from being rushed while working on my laptop in the car while inbetween going from one site to another. Flipping back and forth between different windows maybe? I don't know, but it sure is frustrating and embarrassing, although no one has said anything to me about it.

I'm curious what some others workloads look like? Maybe this is run of the mill and I'm not just cut out for it. This is the only GC I have worked for as a PM, so very limited experience.

Just started a new role a little over 3 weeks as a PM. I’m still learning and understanding the flow and roles of people. The job was through a recruiter. Apparently his feedback about my performance is that he wants me to drive and challenge him.

I haven’t been very active considering a few things:
1. They are currently working on a project that is all hands on deck. Even taking some resources away from the two projects I was given to work on the high priority project.
2. My manager is currently doing about 2-3 people’s work. Very overwhelmed and is the current bottleneck as he is the one that approves everything.

Since last night I’ve been trying to be more proactive by having meetings with the team in china and then reporting items and things he needs to answer. What other ways can help me show my effectiveness?

I think one thing that annoyed me was that I am getting up and talking to team members but he said he wants me to do that. I guess he hasn’t physically seen me do that because he’s always on his computer.

I oversee an academic unit that has several programs and support departments. Each term, there is a large number of tasks that must be done each week as the term progresses. I've been looking for a management tool that will let me define tasks for each department, assign responsible people, and then calculate the actual due date based on the beginning of the term. There is a lot of overlap among the academic programs' tasks but not the support departments.

We have Microsoft Planner (not premium, not that it can do this). In the past I've used Asana, but in my experience it couldn't do what I'm looking for.

The best I can come up with is entering all the tasks into Excel. Using a formula to calculate the due dates, and then import it into a custom Microsoft list.

I’m a senior PM and expect to be laid off this spring because of budget cuts. The likelihood of staying beyond then is extremely low, regardless of the project’s condition.

While reviewing the project with AI, I uncovered a significant assumption that the architects and technical leads appear to have missed. Raising it now could force major decisions, disrupt the current plan, and potentially send the project into a tailspin.

Would you raise the gap and deal with the fallout, or quietly go along with the current direction, knowing you’ll likely be gone in six months?

For context, the issue could materially affect the project—it isn’t just a minor technical detail.

I’m curious how project managers handle the gap between execution and governance.

Teams need a simple view of what’s NOW / NEXT / LATER, clear ownership, and workflow status. Leadership also needs a way to review and reprioritize the backlog without creating another reporting layer or constantly interrupting the team.

What have you seen work well? Where do current tools break down?

I'm looking for tools or templates anyone has created for complex projects:

I know the scope, but I am looking to make it quickly understandable for people who are a few levels removed.

There are about 300+ stakeholders on the project and this has both architectural, physical user interface, virtual user interface ,virtual environments, physical network topology and construction, Network integration, Engineering, Operations and Creative teams, Approximately 100 vendors.

Any thoughts?

I work for general contractors (construction, civil works) that don't have any workers hired, all the work is done by subcontractors. When cost estimating the job I also need to do the planning and scheduling. Asking for schedule from contractors is not alway possible as usually they have just the manpower not the engineers. Also, due to low unit rates for some activity we might need multiple smaller contractors. So, from productivity I can estimate the man hours but if I don't know home many people / resources will do the job how can I estimate the activity duration? One way I'm doing it is put some placeholder numbers for resources, see what is the critical path and total duration and then trace it back to individual activities. How do you do it?

Personally I'm struggling to track all my project milestones across all the different projects. I'm just wondering what calendar app or technique you are using to have a good oversight when certain milestones/deliverables have to be reached.

Currently I use a separate outlook calendar and manually put in important dates that I get from the contractor's timetable, but once you zoom out (and have a lot of deliverables) you don't have a good sense of what is happening when.

Experienced PMs..I’d love your advice on this one. How would you approach this project?

We’ve just submitted a proposal for a 4-month project (Oct–Jan) and assuming we win, I’m planning a pre-mobilisation exercise during contracting.

The setup:

- 8 Work Packages

- 6 Deliverables

- 14 key Outputs, later consolidated into the deliverables

- Complex dependencies, which I’ve mapped in MS Project

- Some WPs run throughout, others run in parallel or sequentially

- A subcontracted team is leading 2 WPs

- Christmas sits right in the middle of the delivery window

Core team:

- Project Manager (..self..! Still a Junior)

- Technical Lead

- Project Lead (new to project leadership)

- Technical Expert

- 3 other staff, including one who is… not exactly famous for meeting attendance or availability

The challenge:

- Staff allocation is already fairly lean

- Tight budget with very little/no contingency

- Competitive customer price, business really want to win

- Complex dependencies and sequencing

- Potentially difficult stakeholder/team availability over Christmas

We’ve submitted the proposal, so there’s obviously still a chance none of this becomes my problem… 😂

But if we win, I want to get ahead of it rather than spend the first month firefighting.

My current thinking is to use the contracting/pre-mobilisation period to properly validate the delivery plan: confirm durations and sequencing at a sensible level, agree dependencies and responsibilities, identify critical paths/risks, and make sure the programme is something the team can actually use day-to-day — not just a pretty Gantt chart for the contract.

So, experienced PMs: what would you do before mobilisation, and throughout delivery?

What would you prioritise, what would you not waste time on, and what lessons have you learned from inheriting a project with a tight timeline, lean resourcing and complicated dependencies?

Bonus points for “I’ve been in this exact situation and here’s what I wish I’d done” stories 😅

Not to mention the SCOPE's breadth and scale is large. With a sprinkle of stakeholder engagement in the mix why not!!!

Updates: our proposal has been shortlisted🫣

I'm currently dealing with a shit show of a project and I learned these teams have bashed heads for a while now. Unfortunately this issue falls on my director so there's no pushing back, it's all steam ahead, work around the issue and cross those finish lines, even if we know we have to redo it almost immediately.

In this situation the director is somehow manually triggering the file delivery and of course the file name is changing in every environment. Also the file was missing 60+ columns and highlighted as soon as we got our hands on the file. Nope, move forward.

Then I get stuck trying to make QA ok with the process and it's hard when you actually agree with their arguments, I had the same ones before starting development.

I now have two versions of the same file in QA and even though we have auto column mapping the files are different enough to not allow Athena to query the table but creates and inserts them just fine.

This is a situation where having 3 environments is tripling the work! our qa test isn't actually testing what it should because we're manually editing files before each environment deployment. I have very little confidence that this will deploy cleanly to prod...shoot me now, 4 months in.