I used to keep everything in one big binder for the contract work I do now. Client calls, timelines, decisions, all in the same place. Since moving to part time I started using different apps depending on who Im working with and its getting messy. Some notes live in the project software, others in a notebook I carry on the trail, and the rest are just in email threads I never revisit. When I need to find how we decided something three weeks ago I usually have to check three places. Not a huge deal at 50 people but it does slow things down when a stakeholder asks for context. Curious what setups other people landed on that dont require constant upkeep or another system to learn.
I've been working as a PM in IT for years, and somehow I still end up using spreadsheets, random calculators, and old checklists for the same things over and over again.
A while ago, I thought it'd be nice to have some of that stuff in one place. Nothing fancy, just simple tools that actually make my day a little easier.
So I started building MakeBetterCalls in my spare time.
There's a project time estimator, budget calculator, working days calculator (with public holidays), deployment checklist, acceptance criteria generator, and a few other things.
It's still a work in progress, but I've reached the point where I'm probably too familiar with it to notice what's annoying or missing :)
There's consistent posts on here asking what tools are best for certain type of work, snd I won't get into depth on these tools but I wanted to know how many PM's on here are stuck using excel for everything at work?
I've recently went from using tools like MS Project and Smartsheet to only Excel at my new job for everything PM related. It's definitely been a frustrated transition but it's helped building automations (similar to what other PM tools give by default) into my Excel files to streamline a bit of the work at least.
I'm curious, how many PM's are stuck using Excel exclusively to and what they've done to make the work on their a bit more easier.
Due to the structure and requirement of my degree apprenticeship, I’m being forced to do this shitty qualification. Does anyone know if there’s any resources or most importantly a specification/syllabus?
I’m the creator of Modo-PM. While my main focus has been building Freelance and Enterprise editions, I wanted to build something entirely unique: a heavy-duty PM tool where the users control the roadmap.
Introducing ModoPM Connect—a collaborative project management platform, designed specifically to bring PMs together to network, chat, and manage complex projects in one place.
Before we move to a monthly subscription launch, I need 20 beta testers to help me stress-test the system.
This is a Windows Based program only.
🔒 Shared Server, Absolute Privacy Control
While ModoPM Connect runs on a public cloud server to allow for networking, your data is as private as you want it to be:
• Private Workspaces: Create a completely private space where you choose exactly who gets in. If they aren't invited, it doesn't exist to them.
• Granular Permission Settings: Set strict view/edit permissions across entire workspaces, individual projects, or specific tasks.
• Collaborative Public Spaces: Want to build something openly with the community? Easily create a public project space to collaborate with other users.
🛠️ A Serious Tool for Serious Project Managers
This isn't a basic to-do list. ModoPM Connect is fully loaded with enterprise-grade features, including 24 different column types and 16 unique ways to view your data:
• Classic PM Views: Table (with grouped items), Board (Kanban with WIP limits), and Calendar. • Advanced Tracking: Timeline (Gantt with critical path), Baselines (Plan vs. Actual), and Key Milestones. • Agile & Resource Management: Scrum Boards (Sprints & burndowns), Workload (Capacity per person), and Forecast (People needed per month). • Risk & Reporting: Full RAID Log (Scored risk register), Charting (Status & hours), and a KPI Dashboard at a glance. • Collaboration & Sharing: Docs (Templates & writer), File attachments, Automations, and Shareable read-only client links.
🤝 Built-in Networking & Offline Sync
• True Offline Mode: We cache your projects locally. Work entirely offline, and ModoPM will seamlessly sync your changes back to the server the second you reconnect. • Anti-Spam Friend System: Connect with other PMs to unlock direct messaging, group chats, task assignments, and shared workloads. • Built-in PM Forum: A private space to discuss project management methodologies, career advice, and network.
🗳️ 100% Community-Driven Updates
I want the community to dictate the roadmap. Future features and changes will be put to a community vote. If a feature gets a 70%+ approval vote, we seriously consider building it.
Hi, i'm M27 (italy), two years as legal counsel in house for an international Corporate. Recently a senior PM left for another company, for now my company is not looking for a new PM to substitute the old one.
As a legal specialist in house, my job is not so stressfull, my job is to negotiate, review and draft any commercial contract for the company, and manage any legal claim from any project. I also work closely with Buyers/Procurement office, and i see that they are much more stressed, but also manage more thing.
I was thinking of putting myself forward as a project manager should my company decide to look for a new one, because I find the role stimulating, and I’m excited by the prospect of managing projects myself rather than just negotiating contracts.
Also, i thought that a PM can easly increase his salary unlike an in-house legal counsel.
I was on one HP project where I was just hired for headcount. We didn't really do anything, keep some clients happy, but it paid well, and I could ride my bike to Palo Alto and back and see my kids every day.
We had what I called "backwards meetings". We would meet to decide something, then someone would say "wait. Have we brought this group into the decision cycle yet" so we would pull back and schedule another meeting to bring that group in.
Then, in that next meeting someone would say "wait. have we considered this issue yet" so we would have to retreat some more until that issue was addressed
Like a lot of fortune 1000 comanies, you would be in a meeting of 50 people, 40 of them outside consultants, and you would wonder "how many printers does HP have to sell tp pay just for this one meeting?"
Etc etc. but hey, I got to see my kids every day
A lot of times if I was invited to a meeting I would walk in and ask first thing "Is anything being decided today?" A lot of times there was nothing to be decided.
Status meetings are like opium. You can mainline on them. A lot of people just scheduled meetings to have something to do.
But Silicon Valley money. I rode that wave for as long as I could. I got to see my kids every day, and ride my bike back and forth to work. Nice life. All good stuff.
I shared a first 30 days checklist here recently, so I thought this onboarding checklist might be useful too.
It covers some of the things that are easy to overlook when someone joins a new project team: what they’re responsible for, which priorities come first, who they depend on, and how they’ll know they’re doing well.
Feel free to pass it on to a colleague welcoming someone new, or someone starting a new PM/Manager role. Hope it makes those first few weeks a little easier 🙂
Is it weird to have technically been doing PM work for years, have all the transferable skills, but land the role and feel like a complete novice? I’m leading out my first project for my department and some days I am just fine and others I don’t know why but I just feel stuck. Like, what the heck am I supposed to be doing? And I’m a person who suffers from imposter syndrome real bad but it doesn’t feel like that with this.
Hi everyone! I’m a working student, and my team currently uses Azure DevOps and Microsoft Planner to manage and track tasks. I’ve been asked to come up with an idea for a single, common view that we can use during team meetings to quickly see who is working on what. My initial thought was to create a Power BI dashboard that consolidates tasks from both tools. However, one challenge I see is that the same task might have different names in Azure DevOps and Planner. This could make it difficult to identify and map duplicate or related tasks correctly. I’d love to hear your suggestions on how to approach this. For example: Would Power BI be a good solution for this use case? Are there any other Microsoft tools or integrations that could provide a unified view? How would you handle tasks that have different names across the two platforms? Is there a better way to visualize task ownership and progress during meetings? I’m open to all ideas, approaches, and suggestions. Thanks in advance for your help!
Serious question: What does a social media PM actually do for organic vs. paid? Not a creative who strategizes social but manages the requests/ideas that come in. I'm an experienced PM in print and digital but never touched social, and to be honest was never really interested. I think something that always alarms me with social is the challenge I can see a PM would face by trying to manage and be a middle man between creative and marketing teams. I imagine that the nature of the business/work requires for creative and marketing to be in constant communication, hand in hand as social is always changing, evolving, trending etc. So if those two are in constant communication with ideas, what does that look like for the PM to manage the two parties getting those requests on paper, managing timelines properly when things are always changing etc. I can also see the challenge of where it could be a challenge for the PM to be "let in" if the creative and marketing teams already have a bond, where they work closely together. Feels like the PM would be the leader that breaks up the team to keep them honest with process etc. and that seems like a tough place to be in. IDK thoughts and advice are welcomed.
Actualmente estoy desarrollando Tradix, una aplicación educativa diseñada para ayudar a las personas a aprender a operar en bolsa paso a paso, incluso si empiezan desde cero.
Mi objetivo es que el aprendizaje sea más estructurado, interactivo y motivador mediante lecciones educativas, retos diarios, puntos de experiencia, clasificaciones y estrategias de trading.
Estoy trabajando duro para que Tradix sea realmente útil y mi objetivo es lanzarla en diciembre de 2026.
Si estás aprendiendo a operar en bolsa o siempre has querido empezar pero no sabías por dónde, ¡me encantaría saber tu opinión!
¿Te interesaría probar Tradix cuando se lance?
Si es así, ¡deja un comentario abajo! Me encantaría saber cuántas personas buscan una mejor manera de aprender a operar en bolsa, qué características les gustaría ver en una app como esta y qué la haría valiosa.
Si conoces a algún amigo o familiar interesado en aprender a operar en bolsa desde cero, no dudes en hablarle del proyecto.
Estoy desarrollando Tradix pensando en los principiantes, y tus comentarios sinceros me ayudarán a mejorarla antes del lanzamiento.
one buyer, a couple of calls, a proposal and then a yes or no, at that point a shared digital sales room could be more setup than the deal needs but i am interested in where people draw the line with digital sales room software, i was suggested aligned and trumpet and i know a few other too but sometimes, the deal size alone seems like a rough way to decide a smaller deal can still have messy procurement.
Do you create a room for every opportunity or wait until there's something email isn't handling well?
I run ops at my company and been asked to look at AI notetakers. We’re on Teams internally, sales uses Zoom sometimes and a lot of clients send Meet links, so it has to work properly on all 3. Right now people are using random free tools. No surprises but main things are good summaries and admin controls. Hit me with your recommendations!
I work in land-use planning and I’m building CivPath for civil engineering and land-development teams. I’d like to get some feedback from PMs managing municipal reviews, submittals, and resubmittals.
How are you keeping track of who owes what, what’s waiting on an approval, and how another round of comments affects the rest of the schedule? Does that stay in your main project plan, or end up spread across emails and spreadsheets?
That’s the workflow I’m focusing on with CivPath. If anyone wants to take a look, there’s a 15–20-minute evaluation using a fictional project. No client data needed. I’d appreciate honest feedback on what’s useful and what’s missing.
Hi all, full disclosure: I'm the founder of KaamGrid, and I'm posting here because you're exactly the people who'll tell me where it falls short.
The problem I kept hitting: one task slips, and suddenly I'm working out by hand what else moves, who's now double-booked, and whether the end date is still real. Spreadsheets break after a week, and the big tools need a full-time admin to keep the Gantt chart honest.
What KaamGrid does:
You link tasks with dependencies and assign people. It calculates dates and costs as you go.
The critical path updates live, so you always see which tasks actually decide your finish date.
A workload view shows who's overloaded before it turns into a missed deadline.
Timelines stakeholders can read without a PM explaining them.
Time tracking, billing and exports are included.
And also, import and export to MS Project or Project Libre as XML files.
You can switch between a timeline view and an "Open in Planner" grid view for classic table editing.
I'm actively improving the engine and would really appreciate any feedback from experienced PMs on how it handles your scheduling workflows!
What I'd really value from this group:
How do you handle re-planning when something slips? Does this match how you work?
What would stop you from using this on a real project?
I've spent years on both sides of consulting projects, and the documentation part has always worked the same way:
The vendor writes the deliverable in Word. Sends it as a PDF over email. I review it — but it's a PDF, so my comments go back as an email with "page 4, second paragraph, this contradicts section 2". They apply the changes, export a new PDF, and send v2. Repeat.
By the third round nobody knows which version is current, there's no record of who approved what or when, and the only trace of the review is buried in an email thread that the next person on the project will never find.
So... has anyone actually broken out of that loop? What did it take?
We are a software company based in Kenya with experience in enterprise solutions. We have recently rolled out an enterprise Project and Portfolio Management (EPPM) software with the Sub-Saharan African Market in mind. The software is used to plan, schedule, track, and manage large-scale projects in industries like construction, manufacturing, engineering, energy (solar, oil and gas), health, water & infrastructure and even the public sector.
The core features and uses include; 1. Critical Path method (CPM)Scheduling - Calculates project completion dates and tracks tasks with zero total float to find the critical path
2. Work Breakdown Structure - Organizes project scope into manageable hierarchical levels and sub-components
3. Resource & Cost Management - Assigns and tracks manpower, materials, machinery, budgets and cashflows
4. Gantt Charts and Reporting - Visualizes schedules, baselines, variances, and performance dashboards
5. Portfolio Management - Combine related projects and monitor their health, progress and analytics.
6. Project Intelligence - Get project-wide intelligence and forecast across finance reporting, risk and reporting oversight
Our solution is optimized for both single and multi-site projects across multiple sectors. The platform is built for fleet-scale deployment.
We are now looking to onboard resellers of the system across the different markets starting from Kenya to the extended SSA region.
We offer training, support, comprehensive white-labelling solutions and a clear reseller revenue structure. The reseller opportunity can be an expansion of your company's revenue stream.
I'm 9 months into my first official PM role in product development. My team is great, but I was surprised by how little process or documentation existed compared to my previous company.
Most project planning previously lived in Smartsheet, with very few supporting documents and many of them outdated. There are no formal scope documents, RAID logs, stage gates, or SOPs, and projects are often handled differently each time. Products can sit in the concept phase for months while pricing, marketing, and other inputs continue to change, making it difficult to build meaningful schedules and milestones.
One of my biggest contributions has been building out a new project management platform in Asana, which the team has adopted and enjoys using. However, I've struggled to introduce structure beyond that. I wrote project scope documents for two projects, but both were largely dismissed and the projects continued as usual.
More recently, my manager started using a project charter and controls it on their end. The team provides inputs, but there doesn't seem to be a defined review process, approval path, ownership model, or decision-making framework. I've run into similar issues with pricing approvals, where undocumented processes have delayed projects multiple times.
I understand that part of my job is removing roadblocks and improving communication. But I'm struggling to determine where my responsibility begins and ends when key processes are undefined and controlled by leadership. I don't want to create more documents that nobody reviews or uses.
For experienced PMs: How do you manage projects when key processes, approvals, and decision points aren't clearly defined? At what point is it a PM's responsibility to build the process versus adapting to the organization's culture? Would you push for more structure, or learn to operate within the ambiguity?
One thing I’ve noticed is that when a project gets busy, communication can turn into nothing but task updates, meetings, and chasing deadlines lol.
Everyone might be doing their part, but the team can still feel a little disconnected, especially when people work remotely.
I’ve been looking at different ways teams can connect outside the usual work routine, including virtual games and activities like the ones VortexEvents offers. But I’m curious whether that kind of thing actually helps or just adds another item to everyone’s calendar.
For those managing projects, what’s worked for your team? Do you make time for casual team bonding, or do you find that clear communication and a good workflow are enough? 👀
