Well, I figure I‘ll post here as I’m exhausting all my other options.

Im one month into my first formal Project Manager role at an engineering/manufacturing company and I think I bit off more than I can chew. I have an engineering background, but I’m brand new to project management as a job.

I was assigned 4 projects and told to “manage these projects,” but I haven’t gotten a clear definition of what my responsibilities or deliverables are supposed to be. The projects are already ongoing, and the engineering teams are competent and work well together. They seem to manage much of their own technical work, discuss issues, make decisions, and assign actions. Im trying to understand where I can add value without creating unnecessary process or duplicating what the teams already do.

A couple of things I’ve noticed:

• My manager wants the projects to move as quickly as possible. I’ve been helping remove small information bottlenecks—for example, an engineer needed product-size information to specify a machine, so I tracked down the information and got it to him within a day.
• My manager also mentioned that engineering can sometimes work with blinders on. Engineering timelines change frequently, and those changes can affect other departments. I’m not sure the impacts are always being communicated across the organization.
• I’m wondering whether I should focus on cross-functional coordination. Letting stakeholders know about what’s happening with these projects, as well as letting the engineers know when other changes in other departments affect them.

I have a 1:1 with my manager coming up, and I plan to ask what he expects me to own, what deliverables he wants from me, and what success should look like over the next month. I want to go into that conversation with some ideas.

For experienced PMs, especially in engineering or product development:

If the engineering team already manages its own work effectively, what should the PM be doing to add value?

Is cross-functional schedule coordination a reasonable area to focus on, or am I missing more fundamental PM responsibilities?

How would you get your manager to define expectations when the initial direction was simply “manage these projects”?

What concrete deliverables or habits would you recommend establishing in the first month?

I’m not looking for a textbook description of project management. I’d appreciate advice from people who’ve dealt with this in the real world. As of right now Im spending every day and night stressed and wondering if I’ll be fired.

Hi, looking to reddit for some inspiration as I'm currently lost on what to do and how to position myself on trying to change industries (and possibly role) after recently losing my job.

I'm a Senior PM (was on £65K+ and hold the relevant PM qualifications) and my career to date is almost entirely within the Defence industry delivering new equipment and new capabilities (i.e. really niche) mostly in waterfall. Due to a change in personal circumstances, I am no longer eligible for clearance (i.e. can no longer work in Defence) and have moved to a location (for family reasons) that has mostly PM jobs in construction/utilities.

Based on the jobs available, my current vertical knowledge is practically useless and whilst I have the horizontal skills, I no longer have the industry knowledge/experiences to meet the job's requirements/prerequisites. Due to the long time I spent in one industry, I am unable to write my resume/CV in a way that would make it of any interest to a non-defence job.

So I think I need some help in the following:

• How/what resources can anyone recommend for me trying to write my resume/CV to demonstrate my transferable skills in a industry I've never worked in as I have no other industry knowledge/experience? What industries have lower vertical knowledge requirements?
• As a Senior PM, what roles (e.g. risk manager, PMO, scrum master) would I be more likely to be successful in transitioning to? I don't mind starting from lower although junior/entry-level PM jobs are basically non-existent where i live. I also cannot spend 2-3 years re-training.
• Is it worth considering contracting in today's market? I have no idea on what contracting involves so will be new to me.

I ended up on their mailing list and I have only tried Microsoft Project which I found NOT user friendly.

I really am most interested in scheduling and updating the gantt with dependencies when needed

I’ve been in project management a long time and lately I’ve been trying to figure out which AI tools actually help vs which ones just look cool in a demo.

Some things have stuck for me. I set up a few Copilot agents for my team to help with program stuff, and that’s been useful. Other things I tried for a week and dropped.

I’m curious what’s working for other PMs. What do you actually use? What did you try and give up on?

We’re a media production company, and a while ago we set up an internal startup unit. Besides our core content work, we now build products related to media production and distribution.

To make this work, we went with a matrix structure. People keep their main roles and reporting lines, but they also join cross-functional teams depending on what each project needs.

In practice, things look great at kickoff. A few weeks later the project team quietly dissolves and everyone drifts back to their home department. Someone has an urgent deadline in their main role, someone else gets pulled into a big client project, and so on. Before long the cross-functional team exists only on paper.

This isn’t a lack of support from the top. Leadership is involved at every level, up to the CEO, and people are genuinely interested in these projects. It just keeps happening naturally, every time.

So I’d like to hear from those of you who’ve dealt with this. How do you keep a matrix team together after launch? What actually stopped people from sliding back into their core roles?

Hey everyone,

My team recently evaluated project management tools to find better single source of truth for our work. Since we rely heavily on Slack, a good Slack integration was one of our main requirements.

We compared tools like Asana, Monday, Trello, Airtable, Coda, Wrike, Teamwork, Linear, and Jira.

The biggest thing I noticed was the tradeoff between ease of use, project management depth, and Slack integration. Some tools were great for adoption and simple task tracking, while others offered much stronger dependency management, reporting and planning.

For teams that have gone through a similar evaluation, what ended up being the deciding factor for you?

Adoption, integrations, dependencies, reporting, or something else?

Pretty much the title . I was a new grad.

I’ve been doing client project work for a few years, and clients give feedback in different places.

Calls, emails and random WhatsApp messages all carry requests that often contradict each other, and then I have to piece everything together.

I tried forcing everything into one email thread, but clients kept replying on WhatsApp. I tried weekly recap emails, but the team had already built the wrong thing by the time they went out. Clients push back on anything that feels like a process.

What has actually worked for you with clients like this?

Need to renew my PMP soon and lost access to my old hub.

Hi, what news, YouTube channels, podcasts, books, media are you following to stay up to date with project management? I noticed I'm barely following any and I'd like to change that.

Is the customer interessed if the project is going on quality ? Is asking how many problems are open, if the documents are reviewed, reporting problems, participating in milestones ?

idk where the right place is to go for this or if this makes any sense but I need help. ive spent hoursss on this and have gotten basically nowhere (I.e.., I start creating a hub but then hit a roadblock).

I started an operations role on a two-person team, managing a partnership with an organization and came in a little while after the partnership had begun, but it's still fairly new and there is no centralization, automation, or organization or anything keeping us together.

We need a central space that keeps everything together and helps us track assets, our tasks, what they owe us, activation/project details and schedule, etc.

Neither of us have any help and don't know how to use most of the resources we have or know how to automate and can't find help with it. We use Microsoft 365 and can request some other approved tools to use. For now we're doing alright and have had 0 issues but we could be a lot more together. Research has brought me overly complex methods and processes we don't need.

Any advice for beginners would be incredible. I'd love integrated platforms if possible (e.g., if I check off a project/task, it is checked off in my notes/assets). I know what we need and have a vision for it, but im so overwhelmed and frustrated that idk if im explaining this well but I just don't know where to begin.

So I recently started as a part time PM for a small business. The owner knows it’s my first time as a PM and also that I’m new to this field. I’m 1099 for now, so I bill her by the hour.

The thing is, I’m slow as hell. I spent 8 hours over yesterday and this morning building, proofing and correcting a maaaaaybe moderately complex purchasing spreadsheet for a client proposal. But it’s not rocket science, and I know my boss would be way faster. Time just vanishes even though I’m going as fast as I can.

On the bright side, I’m never bored. But I’m worried that I might not ever become appropriately fast at the work. She is being understanding since I’m new to the tasks (it’s my fourth week), but I sense her patience waning. Any experience with this sort of thing? If I were on salary/set hours I would care less simply because I never had the same level of detailed time tracking required.

Worth noting: I’m definitely not bleeding time checking my phone, emails, zoning out, taking breaks, etc. I’m purely on task the whole time.

With AI becoming capable of reverse-engineering software, do you think this could seriously disrupt the SaaS industry, eliminate existing products, and lead to even more mass layoffs for project managers in tech?

Example of the destruction: PhotoCraft which is a photoshop clone that is now avaliable for free because someone reverse engineered the software.

I am working with a team on an analysis based on the AIAG-VDA handbook, and we have encountered some ambiguities that we cannot resolve. Do you apply a specific rule in your analyses—such as assigning critical or special characteristics when the severity rating is 10–9 or 8–7? What do your internal instructions say about this? I notice that, despite having reviewed the training manual, our team holds differing views on the matter.

Something from my last discussion here stuck with me.

A few experienced PMs pushed back on the idea of automating milestone acceptance. Their argument was that obtaining approval, verifying deliverables, and protecting the project commercially are fundamental PM responsibilities.

I agree, and I think I framed the problem too broadly.

But I'm curious about what happens after that judgment has been made.

Say a client formally accepts a milestone on Tuesday.

The deliverables have been reviewed, any exceptions documented, and the necessary approval obtained.

Now the acceptance needs to be reflected in the project records, supporting evidence attached, finance notified, and the appropriate invoicing or delivery handoff initiated.

Depending on the organization, those steps might happen automatically, through a defined workflow, or through several emails and someone following up.

None of that necessarily requires another acceptance decision.

What interests me is whether anyone actually measures the time and effort between a formal project decision and its downstream completion.

For those managing multiple client engagements, what tends to cause the most friction after acceptance has already been obtained?

Missing documentation? Unclear ownership? Finance queues? Or does the process generally work without much intervention?

I'm trying to understand where the administrative work actually accumulates, rather than assuming every manual step is a problem.

I know I am just a project manager with no technical knowledge. How do I go about making sure what will be “in scope” and “not in scope”. This will my first PM role doing this. Do I bring in the technical people to give me the scope and stuff.

My ultimate goal is working towards creating a scope document. Thanks in advance for any help or guidance as we don’t have a PMO.

A month ago, I embarked on a journey to learn Project Management, and I've come to realize that merely securing a highly-rated and well-compensated position isn't sufficient. My ambition is to integrate a technical skill into this path. Consequently, I've resolved to delve into Data Analysis and fuse these two disciplines: PM + Data Analysis. I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this amalgamation and whether it will broaden my professional prospects.

Hi Everyone.

I’m starting a new project management role in construction specifically in the commissioning. I don’t have PMP nor other certifications. I have run small projects myself that are $20k but nothing larger at a large scale. I was wondering if folks here can guide me on what I should look into and wanted to learn from folks that have been in the industry for awhile. Any suggestions would be helpful to be a good PM. (Ex. Doing meeting minutes with attendees with action items, etc)

I’m going to do my PMP but that would be a year from now. Just need some information now so I can be successful in my new job.

I just started a new job on Monday as a Project Manager for an Ad Agency. They have a university as a client and I was warned the client was crazy.

Now. I inherited the project 3 months in. Idk what was promised. I just have mostly the start dates of each "course" and I know we need organic and paid social media posts and videos.

But I was never onboarded or trained. My boss won't respond to my questions or requests. The old PM was a mess and the files are a mess.

New projects and requests keep piling in. Meanwhile, I still don't know the process, goals, or priorities. They basically just said "here, feed the AI transcription of our calls about this project into AI, and have AI train you."

Am I doomed? Do I jump ship or is it salvageable? The red flags also include: they're hiring me as a contractor instead of an employee to save money, but the pay is ok and the job market is shit. Also the job is flexible hybrid and in a co-working space, but I showed up today and no one (not even the boss was there). (It was just the boss and his partner there on Monday and Tuesday, the rest of the employees work remotely).

I know the last PM quit. I really wanted to have a good job and try to make it work. How long do I give myself the chance to figure things out and how long do I stick things out to see if I'll make it?

I wish I was starting a project from zero... Not inheriting a mess.

I work in field sales and execution. I'm increasingly of the opinion we have a glaring need for better task management. I'm part of a 7 person team (technically comprised of two sub teams) that typically juggles between 5-10 different "objectives", at a time. In addition, we regularly get pivoted with "Fire Drills". Then there are events that get thrown in the mix too. Sometimes, it feels like we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Don't get me wrong. Things get accomplished. But not without enduring levels of stress that could be avoided with better planning and communication. We still hit our goals. But I wonder how much more successful we could be if our workflows were both more comprehensive and more efficient. Tracking progress mid-objective and follow up tasks, in particular, are always sore spots. It's not uncommon for in-progress tasks to be in a status where we are "waiting" for outside parties to complete their side of things. These are areas where I feel like things fall through the cracks more than we may want to admit. 

I really want to get my team on board with utilizing a PM tool. I'm fairly literate with most common coding languages. So, I'm comfortable with taking on any involved set-up and integration processes. But the more intuitive and easy the user side of things are, the more likely they are to actually adopt it. i'm trying to decide the best platform for our needs. I think getting our company to eventually foot the bill is very possible -- if we can show proof of concept. Until then I am looking for applications with free tiers. We also tend to do the majority of our work on iPads. So, bonus points for interfaces that function well in a mobile environment. 

We already have enterprise Microsoft accounts. So, Planner is available to us. However, it seems very bare bones? It strikes me as more of a dressed up to do list than a true PM tool. Jira might be overkill for our needs? It's hard for me to tell without committing time and diving in. Trello sounds like it could be a good compromise. I don't understand why it's free tier seems significantly more limited than Jira's though? I'm still doing more research on Nuvro, Asana, ClickUp, Kantata, Workfront, Monday, and Tempo. Any suggestions and feedback anyone has to offer is appreciated.

Hi,

I've been working at a medium sized MSP for the past 4 years. I started as project coordinator and I'm now essentially senior PM.

I've decided to leave for various reasons. I'm underpaid, the lead Delivery manager who was managing the PMO retired and now we report to the COO who knows nothing about project management, and they promoted the laziest and worse PM in the team to lead just because of seniority. All of this happened in the span of 5 months while the company is growing fast and we are busiest as ever.

I can see they are making stupid decisions and will start losing clients but I can't really say anything because I know nothing will change. Already some issues with clients have started arising because of insufficient training of the newer members and lack of oversight and no one bats an eye.

In general I have low self esteem which I'm struggling with but I know I'm doing a great job as a PM. I currently handle most of our onboardings which are pretty complicated as well as a big chunk of our biggest and most complex projects. Senior management is praising me but only with words. In practice, I got no promotion even though I'm operating at a higher level than my position but I keep hearing you and the lead PM are on the same level or it's you and X this and you and X that.

Yet I find myself thinking sometimes if maybe I'm not good at all but in a sea of idiots I'm less of an idiot if that makes sense.

I've made the decision to leave. I know I have to. I'm mentally exchausted from the workload and dealing with idiots. I have nightmares about work and I'm very stressed but on the other hand I'm thinking.. what if I'm really not good and I fail miserably in a new job?

Especially going from an MSP where you deal with a larger number of projects so there is no time to do all the things a PM is supposed to do.

I guess I'm just looking for some opinions.. Especially if you've moved from that type of environment to "regular" projects and what is it like working for companies with a more structured PMO?

Hey, we're looking into process mapping/workflow capture tools. We're trying to automate manual workflows, but the blocker is we don't know what's happening because we don't have anything documented.

Tried: Lucidchart, Drawio, Miro, Google Docs, etc.

Recurring issues:

1. SOPs become outdated quickly
2. Most people "don't have time" to draw their workflows, so most manual work never gets uncovered or documented

What's working for others? anything to automate workflow capture/mapping?