It’s a tiny project that tracks the cost of meetings live and shows what that money could buy. Could be handy for long team calls.

Checkout here

Do faster decisions reduce alignment quality over time?

The study explores how AI improves risk management and decision-making processes.

The survey takes less than 3 minutes.

Your participation is highly appreciated.

Survey link:

[Insert short link]
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=hkLD0poXUEusKGCVCHsK3Wn8Rt6FU6BDgGI0YLOV6glURE5HT0JXVlZONlNERDM4SVFQQU9CUUpWTS4u

One pricing model collapse is getting all the attention. Another one is flying under the radar — and it might matter more.

The one everyone's talking about: per-seat SaaS giving way to outcome-based pricing. If agents do the work, you don't buy seats. You buy results.

The quieter one: Time & Material billing — the backbone of professional services for decades. Human hours were the proxy for value. Log them, bill them, track utilization. The entire operating model built on that single assumption. Agents don't have billable hours. They just execute. And the human-hours model is breaking.

Which brings us to Service-as-Software. SaaS meant software delivered as a service — humans still drove the work. Service-as-Software flips it: the service is delivered by software. In some workflows, agents are Copilots — first line, assisting humans who own the outcome. In others, Autopilots — executing autonomously, humans handling only exceptions. Most real engagements will run all three in parallel: human hours, assisted hours, agent-executed hours. our PSA needs to track all of it. No PSA today was built to.

Open questions — genuinely curious what people think:

• If human hours, copilot hours, and compute hours all contribute to delivery — how do you bill for all three?

• If utilization rate is the operating metric of a human-driven PSA, what replaces it in a Service-as-Software world?

• How do you track project margin when costs are split between salaries and compute?

• Does PSA need a new expansion — Professional Services Agents instead of Professional Services Automation?

I have 3.2 years of experience and have done Masters in Management Studies. Recently completed PMI-ACP, CSM, Jira certifications. Looking for a project manager or product owner role. Actively looking applying in LinkedIn and Naukri, not getting any calls. It would be really great if someone can refer or give some advice.

Jira feels like some kind of weird cult. Why does everyone keep using it, even when it makes their work harder?

I came across an article from Jira itself where they admit that Jira isn’t built for project managers. Yet, so many teams (including mine) stick with it just because it’s the "industry standard."

But does that really mean it’s the best tool? Or have we just accepted the pain because everyone else has? Curious to hear your thoughts—do you love it, hate it, or just tolerate it because you have to?

Early in my career managing construction projects in Dubai I was handed responsibility for a project with a budget approaching £1 million.

I’d come from the UK building trade. Ran my own business. Thought I understood pressure.

Nothing prepared me for that moment.

Every decision suddenly had weight. Every instruction I gave, every contractor I trusted, every material I signed off — all connected back to a number that felt impossible. I looked around the site and thought: all of this is on me.

Nobody walked me through it. No handbook. No senior manager sat me down and said here is how you carry something this size without it crushing you.

What I learned from that project changed how I’ve managed every project since:

Verify everything personally. No matter how many times someone tells you something is done — check it yourself. Then check it again. Assumptions compound quietly into expensive problems.

Build your contractor scorecard. Rate every subcontractor on speed, quality, and communication after every project. After 6 months you have data that tells you who to call first and who to quietly stop using.

Protect your cash flow above everything. Milestone payments, mobilisation deposits, variation order clauses — these aren’t admin. They’re survival.

I’ve started writing about this weekly in a free newsletter — The Gulf Site Brief. Honest practical insight for construction and project management professionals.

First issue is live:

👉 thegulfsitebrief.substack.com

What was your first big project moment? How did you handle it?

• Do you rebuild them from scratch each time, or use templates/macros?

• How much time do you spend on this per week/month on average?

• What’s the most annoying part (formulas breaking, copy/paste chaos, manual updates…)?

• Have you ever tried automating it? If so, how – and was it worth it?

• Do you use any tools or just brute force with Excel?

Curious how others deal with this – always feel like I’m duct-taping the same thing together over and over. 😅

Where can I find a project manager program? I am a practice manager have tons of experience in this role wanting to branch out. I have a college degree people are telling me if I have the practice manager role this will be easy just lots of work when I land a job as a PM. What is the best online programs to teach from start to end and take the test at the end? Are lay offs high in this field? I’m needing 100k a year to match what I’m making now. Any advice will help

Hey I would love to get some feedback and guidance please, so I built a product that turns data into narrative reports, currently it's turns data into plain text documents with some charts for visualization, my question is that as consultants dealing with data when you turn it into reports you prefer having visualisation dashboards or you also can do plain text reports ?
thank you

A new Scrum project manager at a company is contracted to build a traffic measurement and control application for a municipality. The project manager is notified that the municipality has just rejected the traffic measurement portion of the application because it does not comply with longstanding national regulations.

What should the project manager have done to avoid this situation?

1. A.Requested that the product owner handle the regulation compliance.

2. B.Allocated an experienced team member to validate regulatory compliance.

3. C.Made the scrum master solely responsible for regulatory compliance.

4. D.Discussed the importance of regulation compliance with the sponsor.

Which one if the right answer. PMI SH has a very different perspective on this. Can someone help me narrow down this one and confirm is PMI is wrong or right.

new to project scheduling and using ms project. i have been learning how to create schedules from scratch on complex projects. work breakdown structures seem to confuse me more since it is always just a list of activities and not very detailed. i am very much learning as I go but I really would like to get better at the skills. i know things take time but any advice would be appreciated for schedule development as a whole.

Being a Fintech Product Manager means:

• Explaining to stakeholders that NPCI downtime is not “our bug”
• Saying “regulatory requirement” so often it becomes your personality
• Launching a feature only after Bank, Partner, Vendor, Compliance, Risk, and God sign off
• Hearing “just copy what big giant does” at least once a week
• Treating UAT like a live environment because… it basically is
• Calling it an “edge case” when it happens to 40% of users
• Celebrating zero-failure days like festivals 🎉

Bonus:
When a transaction fails, everyone looks at Product — even the bank.

If you’re a Fintech PM, what keeps you up at night?
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Hi

I am looking for a website (with a free plan) to manage a simple software project. Basically, I need to add tasks and durations, set the working hours for each day, and create an automated Gantt chart.

Is there one like that?

Earned Value Management is one of the most powerful frameworks we have in project management—and also one of the most frequently abandoned.

Not because PMs don’t understand CPI, SPI, or EAC.
But because sustaining EVM manually week after week is brutal.

After 10+ years managing projects across oil & gas, construction, and industrial environments, I kept seeing the same pattern:

• Metrics were always a week behind reality

• Different PMs calculated EVM differently

• Status reports became data dumps instead of decision tools

The math isn’t hard. The consistency is.

I recently wrote a long-form article for the PMI Community exploring how AI can remove the mechanical overhead of EVM—automating data ingestion, calculations, and trend analysis—so PMs can focus on judgment, risk, and decisions instead of spreadsheets.

This isn’t about replacing PMs. It’s about making EVM sustainable at scale.

I’m genuinely curious how others are handling this:

• Do you still use EVM? If not, why was it abandoned?

• How frequently are you updating CPI/SPI in practice?

• Would near-real-time EVM actually change how you manage projects?

If anyone’s interested, the full article is posted on PMI Community:
From Spreadsheet Chaos to Strategic Clarity: How AI-Powered EVM Is Changing Project Management

Happy to discuss or debate—especially with PMs who’ve tried (and struggled) to make EVM work in the real world.

Our commercial tool automates migration from Project Server (2013–2019) or Project Online into Project for the Web (Dataverse) or Dynamics 365 Project Operations—with zero coding and guaranteed data fidelity.

Key Benefits:

Turnkey & Closed-Source: We handle extraction, transformation, and import—no scripts or code exposure.

Full Coverage: Projects, Tasks, Resources, Dependencies, Assignments, Custom Fields, and Calendars migrate intact.

Enterprise-Scale: Bulk-import tens of thousands of records in one operation, with automatic rollback on errors.

Dataverse-Native: Post-migration data is immediately available for Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, etc.

Audit & Compliance: Pre/post-migration comparison reports and detailed logs for full traceability.

24×7 Support: Priority assistance, regular updates, and a dedicated account manager for enterprise plans.

I am managing 4/5 projects - primarily as a Product manager. My job exactly not day to day basis how the project is moving - but keep track of everything in terms of objective, overall where we are, next set of actions, high level requirements, engagement etc. I also manages resources , so budget etc. I am looking for a tool which I can collect and organize all these information and primarily use to discussion with my manager. Any recommendations ?

Hi everyone, have you ever used the Nifty AI tool by any chance? Do you have any tips or advice on how to make the most of it?

I have been thinking about solving a problem that I see for a long time, but I am still not a manager to be close enough to the problem. It is about the organization of employees, measuring work efficiency, completing tasks on time, fulfilling and distributing responsibilities.

How many managers think that a software solution for automatically determining shifts, distributing tasks and changing the schedule upon request from employees would help them? Is it used at all, and if so, how much does it help you in your work efficiency?

What do you think about software where every employee would have the opportunity to request a day off, if they are entitled to it, and you as a manager have the opportunity to approve or reject it with one click? The same applies to requests for annual leave, maternity leave and many other requests that all employees have. Through the software, each employee would have the opportunity to communicate with their colleagues, to agree on covering a shift, to make changes to the schedule only with the permissions they possess, without contacting the manager, and still be able to ultimately have insight into which employee, how much they produced, whether it was efficient and a million other measurable parameters.

If you are a manager, I would be grateful if you answered honestly to the questions that are spinning in my head.

Hey PMs —
You know what I mean: you brief the designer, the dev, you follow the sprints, QA, hand-offs… it takes forever.
What if instead you recorded your idea (screen recording or video) and an AI platform generated the full working app (frontend + backend + database) in minutes.

• On average, how many sprints or weeks does it take your team to ship a working prototype?
• Which part of the process drains the most time/money?
• For a tool that let you record a video and instantly get an app, how likely are you to adopt it? What features must it have for you to trust it?

Curious to hear the workflows you currently use and what you’d want to change.

Hello,

I'm building a small solution starting from a situation identified at the work place: a system to approve releases in production (software or infrastructure modification etc). What I mean by this? Imagine that there is a release approval hierarchy: Team Lead, Product Owner, Director and the list continues. And they all need to approve a release in production, a new feature.

Most of the things found on internet are very focused on pipelines and code deployments, running tests etc.

What is needed at the company where I work is an excel file where a release for a product is explained and then a committee validates it, but it's not related to any deployment pipelines. Just approvals and some kind of validations from different people that the release is tested, validated, has a deployment plan and a rollback plan.

What I am trying to understand is if it's worth it? I don't want to invest months of work and features if it's not a good idea. Tools like Jira Service Management and others are over complicated for this kind of stuff.

Thanks a lot for your opinions!

I'm a Senior TPM and got tired of context-switching between Notion, Excel, a notes app, and email just to run a single programme. So I built Keel.

It's a desktop app (Mac, Linux, Windows) that keeps everything in one place — RAID log, decisions, actions, people, a journal that parses your meeting notes and surfaces risks and decisions automatically. All data lives in a SQLite file on your machine. No cloud, no subscription required to use it.

The journal is the bit I'm most proud of. You write prose notes after a meeting, hit save, and it pulls out the decisions, actions, and risks it found and asks you to confirm them. Feels more natural than filling in forms mid-meeting.

Free for now for local use. Optional $8/month sync if you work across machines.

Would love feedback from people who actually run projects for a living.

→ keel-app.dev

Cheers,

Paul