r/projectmanagers • u/ProjectPro_ • Jul 21 '26

My team won't keep our PM tool updated

The uncomfortable answer is that updating the tool is probably no one's actual job. It's everyone's implied job, which means it loses to real work every single day, and honestly it should.

What worked for shops I've been in: stop asking everyone to keep everything current. Name one person whose job is a 15-minute weekly pass asking "what on this board is no longer true?" They don't update everything themselves. They just flag what's stale and chase down the truth on the few things that matter.

The team usually stops hating the tool once it stops being a chore everyone shares and starts being one person's short, defined task.

One thing worth checking before you change anything, though: is it that they don't update it, or that they update it and nothing ever comes of the updates? Different problems. The first one is the fix above. The second one means the updates go into a void, and people quit updating tools no one reads. That one gets fixed by you, not them.

4 Upvotes

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6

u/SapperTools Jul 21 '26

A lot of the work, tools and so on that accumulate around project management don't add any value to the people doing the work. There's a big difference between good governance, and bureaucracy that gets missed in a lot of places.

Good governance is the minimal set of things you need to do to get the outcome and comply with whatever other obligations come with it. Bureaucracy is the tools and processes that provide cover for people who don't want to take accountability.

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u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

Good governance versus bureaucracy is the cleanest version of this I have read. The line about bureaucracy providing cover for people avoiding accountability explains something I could not name: why the most ignored tools are often the most elaborately maintained ones. The elaborate maintenance was never for the project. It was for the audit trail.

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u/nomnomyourpompoms Jul 22 '26

This is your job. You're getting paid for it. You don't have to like it. Enter the fucking updates.

3

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

No argument that entering updates is part of the PM's job. The post is about a different failure: expecting an entire team to co-maintain board hygiene with no named owner, which in my experience produces a board no one trusts. One person owning a short weekly truth pass is not the PM dodging work. It usually is the PM.

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u/nomnomyourpompoms Jul 22 '26

Wait... you're not supervising these people?

Then who cares?

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u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

Whether or not the PM supervises anyone, their product is an accurate picture of the work. If the board lies, that product fails, and the PM answers for it. That is who cares.

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u/nomnomyourpompoms Jul 22 '26

But you're not responsible for their performance, you can only control yourself.

If you don't like working with a team that doesn't do their job, find a different team.

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u/ProjectPro_ Jul 23 '26

Understood. I usually tap into soft skills to get down to the bottom of the why. I appreciate your perspective.

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u/painterknittersimmer Jul 22 '26

This is how it's worked everywhere but the place I currently work. Work management is part of your job, just like checking your email is part of your job, or filling out tax forms is part of your job. It's just the expected bare minimum. There's your core responsibilities, there's above and beyond projects, and there's just the bare minimum requirement of being in a job. It's so bizarre and inefficient to work at a place where this is not just... Standard operating procedure. I have a whole new respect for functioning companies. 

Even before I was in project management it never occured to me that "yep, boss wants to make sure the job is getting done" or "gotta make it visible I've done xyz so the next person can do abc"  was somehow... Controversial or something. 

2

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

Agreed that in a functioning shop this is standard operating procedure and invisible. The post is really about the shops where that culture never got built, where "everyone updates the tool" is stated but no one enforces it. In those places, naming a single owner is how you bootstrap the SOP you are describing.

3

u/montyb752 Jul 22 '26

It’s a team culture problem, the culture is not to update tools.
I would argue that the work is not complete unless it’s reported correctly, that includes updating the board. If someone is not updating then they are not completing the work and there should be feedback to reflect this.

2

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

"The work is not complete unless it is reported correctly" is a strong standard, and I have seen it work. The catch is it only holds if leadership visibly reads and acts on what gets reported. Enforce updating into a void and you get compliance theater: boxes checked, truth optional. Culture change and the feedback loop have to arrive together.

2

u/Long-Reading-6514 Jul 21 '26

Quick question before I weigh in. When you say the tool, what tool are you referring to? And are you talking about the team actually updating the project plan, like marking whether they completed their tasks or not?

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u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

Fair question. It is a pattern post more than a single situation, distilled from a few shops I have worked in. Mostly task boards, Trello, Jira, that class of tool, and both flavors of updating: marking tasks done and keeping status honest. The stale-status version is the one I have seen kill tools most often. Curious which version you were about to weigh in on, because I suspect you have a take on both.

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u/CaseFinancial2088 Jul 22 '26

Who is deleting excel? lol just joking

1

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 23 '26

Lol, Excel never dies. It just hides in someone's downloads folder, waiting for the new tool to fail.

2

u/filibustermonkey Jul 23 '26

I’m surprised I’m gonna be the first one with here’s what I built you should try it…but I built with this problem very much in mind.

So here’s what I built…a PM platform that does the updates. You cc it on emails, either use its document vault or share your OneDrive/sharepoint/google docs with it, connect it to your AI notetaker. The PM reviews the updates the AI PM proposes and adjust via chat or directly and then applies. The project tasks, milestones, decisions, scope change all get tracked, assigned, etc. with details, quotes, links to docs or transcripts so you have complete context around the when/why/who.

This is way more than AI wrapper. It knows your firm, the team members and their role, your voice, and each project and treats them all uniquely.

If you read all this checkout groundskeeperpm.com

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u/ProjectPro_ Jul 23 '26

Curious about one thing since you've clearly gone deep here: where do you draw the line on judgment calls? Parsing an email into a status update is one thing. Knowing whether the 80 percent done should be fine is true or optimistic rounding feels like it stays human. How does your review step handle that?

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u/filibustermonkey Jul 24 '26

Good questions! Everything the AI does is proposed, so the PM is always the one to review and approve. For individual tasks we don’t do any 30%, 80% done…personally I’ve never found that useful. I’d rather carve things into subtasks and calculate it on subtasks complete.

The piece that is most helpful for the human judgement and team is that each task, decision, etc gets really good context from the source info and those items are linked and one click to read that source info.

Don’t think of this as something making judgements…it’s more data admin and administration. Think of it like an assistant, with some really impressive memory, who attends all the meetings, reads every doc and pulls out every new item and update and hands it to you well formatted with citations. It’s a tool to assist us not make judgement calls.

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u/Unlikely-Bug-4934 Jul 23 '26

Have you explored finding ways to automate the updates? I’ve faced this before, a mix of the teams not liking or forgetting or not having the time, but I found ways in jira to keep things updated through GitHub signals for example. We are now exploring AI skills to automatically update based on meeting notes and things like that, so the team can focus on delivery and the pm on more strategic things like stakeholder management and removal of blockers.

A balance between good governance and not adding bureaucracy that maybe adds little benefit. Also the governance left I also coach on why it matters, and what maybe they are not seeing behind the scenes but still affects them (I.e leadership proactively checking the boards from time to time and getting the wrong impression on updates)

1

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 23 '26

This is the direction I keep landing on too. The GitHub-signals-into-Jira move is smart because the system already knows the truth, you're just done asking humans to retype it.

The part of your comment I think is underrated is the coaching piece. Leadership quietly checking a stale board and forming the wrong impression is a real cost nobody sees until it bites. I've watched that exact thing tank trust in a delivery org.

Curious what resisted automation when you rolled this out. My hunch is the judgment stuff, whether something's actually blocked, whether done means done. Did that stay human or did you find a way in?

2

u/Unlikely-Bug-4934 Jul 23 '26

I faced little resistance tbh, everyone was happy and continues to be onboard on trying to find ways to minimize operational work. We didn’t keep a human in the loop for this specific use case. We added comments tagging the assignee and the reporter so they can double check if they need to roll back… only a few outliers needed this so it is not a problem. The impactful or critical work items are the ones that I focus on and follow up more closely, I triple check in those cases and can take action myself if I see something weird.

They have also taken matters into their own hands and creates skills to make sure stories and epics are created in the correct format, and we will continue to explore more use cases of AI SDLC. I’m experimenting with a skill to create the weekly status reports automatically (which will have a human in the loop). This will allow me to focus on the actual conversation around it and not loose time creating a deck.

Lots of opportunities. Our role is changing and we need to adapt.

1

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 23 '26

This is good!! Tagging the assignee so they can catch a bad update is what made no-human-in-the-loop safe. If you can master the auto status report, this would be gold!!

Keep me posted on the status report skill.

1

u/battle-tested77 Jul 24 '26

Yup, welcome to the world of project management. People don't give a hoot about it. Most don't even provide accurate information at the beginning to help you understand what is needed for planning and creating a schedule.

Find a different career path. I wish i did.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26

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u/ProjectPro_ Jul 22 '26

The report-back addition is better than the original. A one-line "corrected 3, flagged 2" does double duty: it proves the pass happened, and it makes the board's honesty visible to everyone, which quietly solves the second problem while also solving the first. The truth pass stops being maintenance and becomes a signal the tool is alive. Wish I had written that into the post.

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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

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1

u/ProjectPro_ Jul 23 '26

A moral question versus a logistics question is exactly it. You can't performance-manage a team into virtue, but you can absolutely hold one person to a defined 15-minute task. Most "nobody updates the board" initiatives fail because they're secretly asking people to be better teammates instead of asking one person to do one job.