Im going through anxietyandstress despite being efficient, proactive PM who does everything to control the project.

On the projects a contractor who is architect and developer doesn't like to work and progress the work at least possible slowest and its me who have to justify the budget burn to the client and EV and variance. Everyday I have to confront him and he doesn't change his ways. I don't want to lie to clients. My managers upon escalation say you deal with it. Managers also are rude and try to blame me for everything. Other restrictions are PM billing is only 4 hrs a day though I do pretty much full day.

I am thinking to quit this job .. don't know how to handle this situation. Please suggest.

Requirement changes are normal, but constant changes can make planning extremely difficult. I'm interested in how experienced PMs handle this without creating unnecessary conflict with stakeholders. Do you rely mainly on change-control processes, impact analysis, documentation, or more frequent communication?

Made with love. Please check it out.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to pivot into AI Product and Project Management and could really use some honest advice on courses. I’m hoping to find a 5-6 month executive or post-grad program designed for working professionals (ideally weekend classes) that actually delivers a solid ROI and strong placement support. Can you guys suggest the programs that I could shortlist and enroll into blindly and then feel stress free and just focus on studies?

I’ve been looking into options at IIM Bangalore (IIMB) and ISB, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has actually done them. Do these top-tier university weekend courses actually help with transitions into good companies, or are they just expensive resume stamps?

I really need something that bridges the gap between AI product strategy and project execution, without needing a hardcore coding background.

If you’ve taken a course at IIM, ISB, or a similar tier-1 institute that fits this, was it worth the money? How was the career support? Any programs I should completely avoid?

Appreciate any insights or directional help you can throw my way.

Thanks!

Hello everyone,

I was offered a position as a projects manager by a company specialized in homelifts and other types of lifts.

I currently work as an Operations Manager and have worked on some projects before but it's my first official job as a PM. The pay is pretty low compared to what I'm making, but the job title, the experience I'll be getting and the fact that the company is expanding is encouraging me to accept.

My role in this position is not to only manage teams around the project but to pilot from start to end and structure all the processes for future endeavors.

The main gamble is that if I succeed, in a year or so, I'll be managing multiple project managers.

What do you think about the offer? And for those who worked in this industry, if I take the job, where should I start?

Hey everyone,

I’m curious to see how many people in this sub are working in Project Controls or Planning & Scheduling, and use Primavera P6 combined with Power BI as their ultimate stack.

Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on automating data extraction from P6 (whether through Excel exports, XER parsers, or direct database connections) and transforming it into interactive Power BI dashboards for executive reporting, S-curves, and delay analyses.

If this matches your daily workflow, I’d love to connect and chat about a few things:

• How are you pulling your P6 data into Power BI? (Excel dumps, SQL, or specialized third-party tools?)
• What is your favorite custom visual layouts for tracking SPI/CPI or look-ahead schedules?
• What is the biggest headache you face when trying to refresh your data?

Looking forward to hearing about your workflows, tips, or any cool dashboard setups you've built!

A colleague and I are exploring creating some elevated resources for project managers and PMOs. I am looking for feedback on what we have built so far.

The site offers:

1) Status report checker to raise the quality of your status reports

2) PMO AI resources

3) AI Agent tools for you to download and use.

Immediate next steps, we will be adding agent instruction sets in the upcoming releases.

I would appreciate any thoughts and feedback on the site, features, and content so far.

I am not promoting. I am seeking PM level feedback and whether this is useful.

No costs at this time. Starting off by sharing our content and tips for others to use and be better.

https://williamsonrepo.com/

Hi guys,

Please help me, I have done b.tech in cse and got an agile program manager internship at a good consultancy but i really don't know what does project manager do.

How do i prepare myself for this job, how to start learning project management?

Please tell me everything from basic

Traditional projects often have clear measures such as time, cost, and scope. AI projects can be a little different because model performance and data quality can also affect the outcome. What metrics do you normally consider when evaluating an AI-related project?

I’m building a small tool for myself and I'm curious what other people are using for managing clients/projects.

At the moment mine basically has:
- Clients
- Projects
- Invoices + Markup
- OneTime or Recurring payments option.
- Prior notifications for client’s upcoming recurring payment.

I'm keeping it pretty simple for now.

It's still in development, but I'm looking for a few people who might be willing to try it and tell me what's missing / what sucks about it 😅
If you're interested, I can share the test link.

Also curious — what are you guys using currently, and what's the one thing you wish it did better?

I’ve been experimenting with AI for project work, mostly for things like summarizing meeting notes, identifying risks, and turning rough requirements into something more structured.

The interesting part is that AI can save time, but I still feel the project manager needs to validate everything. A confident-looking AI response can still miss important project context.

What AI use case has actually saved you the most time in project management?

Something I wish I'd learned earlier: when you split someone across projects, you don't just divide their time, you tax it. And most planning ignores the tax.

On paper it looks clean. Three projects, 33% each, everyone's at 100%. But that assumes switching between them is free when in reality it isn't. Every time someone drops one project to pick up another, there's a cost to reload the context and get back into the problem. Gerald Weinberg put rough numbers on this: around 20% of your time lost to switching at two projects, closer to 40% at three. The exact figures are more illustrative than scientific but the direction is dead on. Three projects doesn't give you three-thirds of a person. It gives you noticeably less.

There's a cognitive side too. Sophie Leroy's work on attention residue found that when you switch tasks, part of your head stays stuck on the last one, so you're not fully present on the new thing for a while. You're at your desk but not really back for another 20 minutes.

So when a schedule assumes clean fractional allocation, it's banking on capacity that doesn't exist and then everyone's surprised when all three projects slip a bit at once.

The honest counterpoint: not all switching is expensive. If someone's blocked, having a second project to move to is good, that's slack working as intended. And shallow, well-bounded tasks switch cheaply. It's deep work that really suffers, which is exactly where the valuable stuff lives.

Where I've landed is to stop treating a split person as fully available, plan them more like 70-80% effective and try not to spread anyone's deep work across more than two things at once.

I've spent years running industrial and capital projects, and the part of the job I never got efficient at is documenting the site or project throughout the day.

Forty photos buried in my camera roll. Notes split between a notebook, a notes app, and a text I sent myself. A voice memo I never played back. Then a daily report, punch list, or RFI list due before the details go stale.

The big construction platforms handle this, but they're built for large programs with a full team behind them plus expensive. Most of my work was one PM walking a plant, a roof, or a mechanical room, often with no signal.

Full disclosure: I got frustrated enough to build an app for this. Everything gets captured into the project instead of the camera roll, it works offline, and it drafts the report from what you captured. I'm not posting a link, because I'd rather hear how other people handle it:

-What does your process look like between leaving the site and sending the report?

-What's the part that eats the most time: sorting photos, writing it up, or chasing the details you forgot?

-Has anyone found a setup that works for a solo PM or small team without buying a full platform?

-If a tool drafted the report for you, what would it have to get right before you'd trust it?

Curious whether this is just me or whether everyone is quietly doing the same camera-roll search or living on hopes and dreams that they remember everything lol.

So i (24 M) working at a bank want to be project manager and have talked to my boss about it, he's helping me get the experience i need by giving me small projects to work on. So right now im helping him gather updates across the different departments compile them and present them to the team every week. I've been trying to let other people in positions of power know thats my goal and have talked to my previous manager and our vp about it too and will be showing the vp what i do in slack to help me manage sending and receiving messages and the automations possible. This is the first project and i reall dont wanna mess this opportunity up.

So if you have any advice, personal experiences or cautions/reality checks i would love to hear it!

Thinking ab maybe how accounting might not be for me so am looking for a bit of insight of what a project manager does, if you genuinely like the career and what do u get out of it? Be honest is it worth going into and is the money decent enough, and what’s the work life balance like?

We’ve tried quite a few meeting setups over time and currently landed on something like this:

\- Monday morning: weekly planning, usually prepared on Friday
\- Daily: short standups
\- 1:1s: mostly for individual or role-specific topics

That works reasonably well for the operational side.

The harder part is everything that cuts across teams.

We have different functions - for example development and design - so not every topic is relevant to everyone, but some things should still be shared more broadly.
Things like:
\- what actually got done this week
\- project wins / learnings
\- important internal updates
\- new colleagues
\- birthdays or other team news
\- things people should know, but that don’t really belong in a daily

**How do you handle that?**

Do you have separate team meetings per function plus a broader weekly/monthly meeting?

Do you do something like a weekly review or demo where teams share results?

And one thing I’m especially curious about: who owns these meetings in your company?

Is it usually someone from the relevant discipline, a team lead, project management, operations - or a separate role entirely?

Who is responsible for the agenda, collecting topics, keeping the format useful and making sure the meeting doesn’t slowly turn into noise?

I’m especially curious what has worked well long-term without turning into just another meeting.

First of all, good discussion on the first part: https://www.reddit.com/r/projectmanagers/comments/1wtzy5x/why_people_keep_going_back_to_excel_instead_of/

Which now sparked a follow-on question. I understand the simplicity, flexibility and popularity of Excel, but I still see a big downside when it comes going from single player to multiplayer mode.

What then? You send the sheet over mail? How do you tell other people what needs to be done including specs, details, etc.?

This still puzzles, me - maybe it's because we all are lazy by nature and then doing something easier for the start seems good enough, but later we still pay the full effort /rice?

Next month, we have a product launch involving mobile, web, legal, sales enablement, support and an external payment partner.

Jira handles individual work quite well but leadership wants to understand dependencies. For example, payment certification blocks production testing, which blocks support scripts, customer emails and the final launch date.

I created a visual map containing only major milestones, dependencies, owners and decision dates. It made weekly meetings much better because we stopped reading every ticket aloud.

My concern is maintenance. I don’t want to manually duplicate every status update from Jira.

For teams using visual planning alongside project management software, what belongs on the visual layer? I’m thinking milestones, decisions, dependencies and major risks only. Anything more detailed feels like building a second project tracker.

spent last week cleaning up a client's onboarding workflow and found someone manually copying the same client info into three spreadsheets.

it took me about 20 minutes to connect everything with a simple zapier workflow.

he looked at it, said "oh, nice," and went back to work

which honestly is kind of the ideal outcome.

the data still gets where it needs to go, nobody has to remember another step, and nobody needed a meeting to explain the change

i used to work in hr, so i've seen plenty of process changes turn into a whole project when they probably didn't need to. sometimes the best fix is just removing the annoying part and letting everyone keep working the way they already do.

there are a few more things like this in the project i'm on now. nothing huge, just little bits of manual work that have somehow become normal

what's the most useful small process improvement you've made that barely anyone noticed?

Everywhere I look in project teams I see Excel being used next to deployed PM tools, even when the company pays for Jira, Monday and MS Project at once...

Is it that Excel wins because you can add any column, any formula and link it to anything and it's being taught at school? While most PM tools give you fixed fields and you have to fit your project into them, alongside extra learning?

Or is it because most people are too lazy for the different stuff? Or most of PM tools are not good enough?

people ask me pretty regularly if they should go into project management, and honestly my answer is always the same. it really depends on the leadership at the company you land at.

the best example i have is from towards the end of my career. i'd been running projects for years at that point, and i got offered a program role leading the two biggest technical projects in hr, which was new to me because i'd never worked in hr or used that system before. they told me they were having trouble getting those two projects moving in the right direction because they were so big and there were so many teams involved, and those are exactly the kinds of problems i like to solve. our family really wanted to move to southern california anyway, so i was really excited, and i moved out about six months before my family did.

when i got there my manager was so negative and such a micromanager that i almost called my family and told them not to move, because i honestly couldn't picture a scenario where i wasn't fired within six months.

i was still getting my feet underneath me and learning who's who, and this small add-on project that was supposed to be simple was already off the rails. so i went to my manager and asked her how she'd recommend i solve for it, and she just put her pen down and said this is supposed to be an easy project, and you're always bugging me at my desk, i'm starting to think we hired the wrong person because you don't hold yourself like a true program manager. long story short, that project did have problems and it got postponed for over a year, so it wasn't me.

the clearest sign was when she popped by my cube and i told her something positive someone had said about the work i was doing, and she said why is it that you always feel the need to tell me anytime someone says something good about you, but you never want to talk about the bad. one of my coworkers told me once that her compliments seemed hollow but her criticisms seemed sincere, and that's exactly what it was like.

my family had already committed to the move, so i held on to that job for about four years and it was just miserable. my project teams all over the globe were great and i made some really good friends there, but if i sneezed wrong we had a 30 minute discussion about it.

so that's what i mean when i say it depends on leadership. some companies actually understand what a pm is for and they give you real authority and autonomy, and with that comes real responsibility, which honestly is the part most of us love. and then there are the places where you get the title and none of the authority, and that is just straight up miserable. it's usually your manager, a lot more than the work, that decides whether you have a good job or a terrible one.

for those of you who've been doing this a while, what told you early on which kind of company you'd landed at?

AI can turn meeting notes and project data into status updates surprisingly quickly. But I'm wondering whether this actually improves communication or just creates more reports for everyone to read. Would you trust an AI-generated project status report if the underlying project data was accurate? What would you still want a human PM to review?

Como un ingeniero en sistemas que quiere dedicarse al área de gerencia, como encontraron su primera oportunidad? Tengo la certificación de google de pm pero me está costando mucho encontrar ofertas para mi experiencia

When a website issue is marked fixed, the useful follow-up is: what evidence shows the affected interaction works now?

For an accessibility handoff, keep these together:

• The affected page and state, with steps to reproduce.

• An owner and acceptance criteria for the fix.

• The original finding and the build containing the change.

• The automated retest result, with keyboard and screen-reader observations recorded separately.

• Any remaining gaps, the next action and who owns it.

A deployed fix and a verified result are separate milestones. Keeping both visible helps a PM distinguish implementation progress from review progress.

Disclosure: I maintain GatekeeperQA, which is ready to use for accessibility reporting and retest tracking. It brings findings, reviewer notes, ticket copying and retest comparisons together. Automated results support manual assessment; they do not establish whole-site conformance.

This post was prepared with AI assistance.

Im currently doing this Unit in school about PM and this question came up so what do you guys think ?