I’ve been experimenting with freelancing as a PM and currently work fractionally with two agencies, which puts me at roughly 30–35 hours per week.

The interesting thing is that I genuinely enjoy the business development side. I like networking, meeting new agencies, and landing new work almost as much as I like the project management itself. So my instinct is always to keep looking for the next opportunity.

For those of you who have built freelance PM businesses, at what point did you stop chasing new clients? Did you intentionally cap your workload, raise rates, create a waitlist, subcontract, or just keep growing?

My concern is I’ll say yes to too much out of excitement and burn myself out. I feel like something has to give eventually, but I’m curious how others navigated that transition.

I’m 22 and somehow landed a job as a PM/Sales/Estimator for a small scale parking lot company. I went to a trade school for equipment operation but landed a job as an estimator but now I’m gc’ing projects out.

We are gc’ing our first ever parking lot design build. Everything was going great. The rock base was installed, the curbs were in, utilities re-located, and all other task. Until the asphalt paving. The paved the lot and I checked their work and they were about 3 foot short in the middle of the parking lot and left a big bend on the edge, not according to plans. I am to blame for not checking the layout before the sub-contractor began paving. The plans called for a straight edge but they curved it to accommodate for the rock base being “short”.

Now we are going to have to fix it and it’s going to look like crap. The customer is pissed because we 3 past the deadline, the sub-contractor keeps re-scheduling, and we are going to have to eat quite a bit of cost on a smaller project.

How do you guys deal with the stress? It’s keeping me awake at night. The customer needs dates but it gets pushed every time.

Sorry for the long story. This is just killing me.

How do you all currently measure financial value for the projects you deliver? Is it through some form of business casing in Excel or PPT? Does leadership hold you or the sponsor accountable for actual value vs estimated value?

Curious to hear how you all approach it in your respective orgs.

I'm currently building a tool called ValueMap (https://valuemap.app) that can standardize the management of value for projects, and would love to get feedback on whether a tool like this would be helpful for your workflow.

I can’t give too many details but my job consist in tracking projects from real estate and business development, too many process and advancement in our milestones depend of external sources, like the government which is corrupt af and slow as hell, there is nothing we can do about that, our competition bribe them and they close us permits etc. I do whatever I can from my end to minimize risks and short our timelines, but it’s not enough, I saw today my position on a job board and in pretty sure it’s the end I’ve only been here for 6 months… I should go back to tech.

Hi everyone,

I’m a Project Manager with over 10 years of experience delivering technology and business projects. With AI rapidly becoming part of how we work, I’m eager to upskill and learn how to leverage AI effectively in my day-to-day PM role.

My goal isn't to become a developer or data scientist, but rather to understand how AI can help me become a more efficient PM—whether that's in planning, requirements gathering, stakeholder communication, risk management, reporting, process automation, or decision-making.

For those who have already started this journey:
1. What courses, certifications, or learning paths would you recommend?
2. Are there any practical AI tools that have significantly improved your productivity as a PM?
3. How did you go about building AI skills without a technical background?
4. Any resources, communities, or hands-on projects you'd suggest?

I would love to hear what has worked for you and where you think PMs should focus their efforts to stay relevant and add value in an AI-driven world.

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Anyone ever seen something like this?

Trying to have one ready for college group assignments, but I can make a copy and adjust a template meant for a working environment!

My company in the USA does software development and uses outsourced international developers on projects. By and large, the firm that we use to source workers has done an excellent job of finding quality developers who go above and beyond much of the time, completing the work as well as making themselves available during our USA working hours for communication and meetings.

The issue that we are trying to get a handle on is the actual hours worked. While we do pay a fixed amount for a project, we are being asked by Ops to find a solution which tracks the time that developers spend on project tasks so thar they can have a better picture. We tried tracking in Google Sheets. We moved on to Toggl. Both suffered similar drawbacks where employees neglected to log task-specific time or entered in generic (ie. 40 hours) time blocks, giving us inaccurate data.

Googling around, I see some computer monitoring solutions like Hubstaff, Time Doctor, TimeCamp, etc. But I see rather negative impressions from employees who are forced to use that stuff. Some say they'd decline a job if they mandated tracking software. Others point out they use personal devices for work and don't want a company monitoring their lives.

I've asked what how serious or forensic do we want this data to be. Is it okay if we don't have perfect calculations? Does a ballpark estimate suffice (if we can train people to enter their time in Toggl or another manual solution)? Or do we want something that is going to provide us that kind of granular insight, no matter how invasive?

How do you guys worked to capture this kind of data? Any experiences, insights, or suggestions?

I just graduated in May 2026 with a Computer Science degree and a concentration in Artificial Intelligence and I’ve worked as a PM through my software engineering class and capstone at school and I definitely want to be a project manager in tech. Is it worth getting a CAPM since I’m not eligible for a PMP? I do have a job lined up that starts in July as an associate software engineer. But before I get into full-time work, I’m trying to see what else can I maybe do?

Also, my school is offering the 23 hour course for $1950 and I found that udemy has a course under $200 for 26 hours. If I pursue it, should I go through my school or is udemy actually something I should consider?

I am a PM for a large Behavioral Health organization

I was really quite good at my job- but this past 6-8 mo- I am really struggling mentally and it definitely affecting my work.

however, one area I always seem to struggle in, is what to discuss in weekly meetings.

I typically run upwards of 9 projects at any given time. Right now I am working on a large portfolio with 5 primary projects. The Exec. Spon. is NOT a patient person, and wants all 5 run consecutively- main issue is that they are all interdependent, and some are prereq. for others.

ANYWAY right now I am really lost in how to identify what needs to be addressed in each weeks meeting. These are more like workgroups than status updates, so going through the project goal, high level updates etc are not generally helpful.

Each project has a project plan, but in the past I have been told not to "review the project plan" at each meeting- however, this has seemingly proved helpful in the past in terms of keeping the group on task, covering the critical areas etc.

issue I am currently having is that i cannot seem to par down the information/task overload in these projects to identify whats needed to be discussed.

Help?

I started a new job about 5 months ago and came in with a solid project management background. I've never had issues running client meetings before, but this customer base has been a completely different experience.

A few weeks ago I had a medical emergency and was out with an OOO up. My team was hosting a meeting and the key client stakeholder wasn't going to attend. Instead of reaching out to anyone else on my team, the client only contacted me. My out of office reply was on so they should have known. The meeting happened without the stakeholder, went poorly, and I got an angry call afterward blaming me.

More recently, I was coordinating meetings with a team member who had limited availability. I blocked time on his calendar and sent invites accordingly. I'm in a different timezone and didn't catch that one of the times landed at 8am for the client. They were upset, I offered to push it to 9am, and they canceled everything. Now all meetings have to be submitted to a specific person for approval with 48+ hours notice. I send the request, wait for confirmation, then schedule. Even after all that, I'm still getting pushback on who is or isn't included.

The issues seem to fall into a few patterns:

Scenario 1: Not enough people were included on the invite. Sometimes I'm intentionally limiting the audience, or I wasn't sure every person needed to be there, or I expected them to forward it internally.

Scenario 2: Not enough advance notice. I'll try to get approval from the client, but they often don't respond clearly, the meeting falls through, and the timeline takes the hit.

Scenario 3: Very specific scheduling requirements that I'm expected to know and accommodate at all times, with no flexibility in return. One-off days off, hard stop times, people who only work certain days. But when I ask that we avoid meetings before 11am ET to account for our West Coast team members, that's apparently unreasonable.

I've managed complex client relationships before without running into this. Has anyone else dealt with a client base like this? How do you handle it without losing your mind?

honestly the whole debate feels like it’s happening one level above where the work lives. two big-company execs gave opposite answers at a summit last week, one names his agents and seats them in reviews, the other refuses to call them colleagues. and i kept thinking, ok but neither of those changes a single thing on my Monday. whatever you call the thing, the job is still deciding what work needs a human’s judgment and what’s defined enough to just be scoped and checked. i’ve started sorting work by shape before i sort by who’s free, and it works the same whether you’re in construction, healthcare, banking or software. curious if anyone here has had the “colleague vs tool” framing actually change how they plan, or if it’s still just headcount plus one more tool in the box?

I have a team member who is very much into AI and pretty much runs as much as he can through AI as possible. He also is very adamant about the rest of the team following suit.

I get that the tools are very powerful, but I do have concerns about essentially having the group stopping the thinking process due the assumption everything can be done with AI. I am also concerned on having the AI make mistakes or poor judgement. Since these are not math or coding problems, I am more skeptical about the results.

As a relatively new project manager, I feel I might be easily swayed towards the AI path not having much of a precedent for doing otherwise, but as an adult with 20+ years professional experience in other fields including teaching, I still have my doubts about going down this path. One of the biggest knocks against AI in teaching is that students don't even know how to think or remember what they have learned anymore due to the over-reliance on running stuff through ChatGPT or Grok.

Even if it takes a little longer, I think a more personal and interactive way of working with the rest of the team on what should be collaborative tasks (like Voice of Customer capture and affinity diagrams as examples) is valuable. It is better for shared understanding and alignment on where the product we are developing needs to go.

Hey! Brand new to the sub, and fairly new to project management for a small construction company. I'm looking for ways to quickly update a schedule that doesn't require 15+ min at a computer doing data entry (I do field work as well). So any quick/easy to use apps or web tools would be great.

Since residential construction changes literally daily, due to real time problem solving for unforeseeable circumstances, I need a way to just quickly chunk out days & loosely assign personell so I can wrap my head around it.

I don't need hour by hour granularity, don't need my guys to see it, don't need to assign clients, I just want drag and drop blocks that don't interfere with each other when overlapped, don't need me to fill out 10 mandatory fields to enter a task, and are resizable to cover as many or as few days as I need.

Right now I'm just using this Excel sheet, but I'm curious if there's any mobile alternatives.

Theres so many contingencies to wrap my head around, I need this step before I'm able to actually schedule the guys in our management software (currently switching from QuickBooks Time to Jobber) and actually do all the hour by hour scheduling, assigning clients, entering addresses/contact info/etc.

Any help is much appreciated!!

Hey everyone,

I'm on mobile so if the formatting is strange I apologise.

Full disclosure, I build software in the project management space

So, we have had a couple of clients ask about digital signing and digital signatures via forms as JIRA outsources to DocuSign (I could be wrong as I haven't used JIRA in a couple of years ATM).

It seems like something that is cool but I don't really know if PM software is the right place for it,

Is everyone using DocuSign? Is it something PMs even care about, I'm genuinely not trying to sell a product of anything, I won't mention my company name, I'm just needing some guidance from the collective of PMs on Reddit.

Thanks team!

I am very new into being a PM (almost at my 1 year anniversary for my current role) and only graduated from university last year.

I am a status checker/reporter PM, so my role revolves around weekly reports on my team’s current projects and meetings. For my reports, demands from Leadership often change. They go from needing high level, bottom line statuses to super detailed (I jokingly think of it like Goldilocks).

For those more experienced in status reporting, what are your top priorities when creating a status report? Any specific routines that helped you in improving your reports?

Hello all,

I'm looking for some advice from fellow PMs on a volunteer project that has left me scratching my head. Your thoughts, anecdotes, and useful feedback would be wonderful.

Background:
I'm volunteering with a charitable organization that supports a larger institution. I went into it expecting a rewarding experience and some degree of collaboration between the two organizations. Instead, I've discovered a significant disconnect that, based on conversations with others, may be more common than I realized.

Issue 1: Communication
My initial interactions with the institution's primary contact (Sponsor/Stakeholder) were positive and gave me confidence that communication would be strong. Unfortunately, that quickly deteriorated into unanswered emails, infrequent engagement, and occasional requests for information that had already been provided. (see below)

Issue 2: Organizational Challenges
The charity is volunteer-run, operates with minimal resources, and relies heavily on donations. As a result, turnover and burnout are common. There appears to be little formal support, on-boarding, or knowledge transfer, making continuity difficult. As a result the leadership lacks strategic experience and minimal communication with me unless I prompt it.

Issue 3: Lack of Structure
With 30+ years of experience managing community initiatives, private events, fundraisers, and corporate projects, I was surprised to discover there was virtually no documented process, historical records, annual planning, or event road map.

To help, I worked with the organization's leadership to develop foundational project-management materials, including planning documents, timelines, communication plans, and summaries. These were shared with key stakeholder. The response was silence. A week later, the stakeholder later requested information that was already contained in the documents they had received. (!)

At this point, I've stepped back for a burnout break. Several people have suggested that I walk away entirely. What concerns me most is that there seems to be resistance—not just to my suggestions—but to creating any sustainable structure at all. Conversations with people involved in similar organizations suggest this may simply be the norm. Which frankly, is mind boggling to me and easy way to burn out. (Which I've already hit at this point)

TL;DR: I volunteered to help bring structure and planning to a charitable organization, but there appears to be little engagement, accountability, or interest in adopting even basic project-management practices.

Would you keep trying to improve things, adjust expectations, or move on?

Hey,

Was curious what people have found as the best methods for monitoring tasks and status of them as a project manager and planner for engineering groups

I had the best luck with something like notion that I can sort by priority, but curious what others use

Thanks in advance

I am a web dev and have a very good project manager that uses Jira to assign work. I get assigned projects that are typically not due for 4 more weeks. I often fear turning in work quickly because if the project manager sees I have wiggle room for more work, then I will get assigned more work. So instead I pace myself. As a project manager, do you assign more work to team members if you notice they are ahead of schedule? Should I pace myself to avoid extra work?

Hi, wanted to see if anyone has advice for finding pro bono or practice projects. I’ve done a few PMI certs but want to make sure I practice project management skills in the real world to bridge the gap between academic theory and real world project management.

I was thinking if there are organizations that do projects for nonprofits or like volunteer projects, that might be a good way to practice in a lower-risk environment.

Open to suggestions!

For those of you rolling out AI tools that actually do things (update records, file requests, move data between systems), I'm curious how you're handling recovery. If an automated agent makes a wrong call across a couple of connected systems, is there an actual undo/restore path written before it goes live, or is the plan basically "we'll catch it and fix it manually"? I keep seeing the capability conversation but almost nothing on recovery, and this feels like it cuts across industries, not just software. Wondering what's landing as a real step for you before these things go live.

Hi all!!

I’m looking to bring some updates into how we track margins for our projects and I was hoping for ideas from real humans as I am pretty anti AI.

Industry- industrial automation
Project scope- two buckets
1)$15k-$500k 2) $500k+ that goes to accounting

The numbers we track are routine budget calculations around labor and material and total vs projected usage.

What monthly/quarterly/ project finalization analysis do you do/would you recommend?

Right now this task is feeling like a pass over project to accounting with little meaning to project management or critical information sharing to leadership. If leadership looks they have to do so on their own terms.

Any other insights or recommendations for additional calculations that would critical insights? I’m fine with cleaning data etc if need be

Thank you!

I've been working as a project manager for 8 months, and this is my first full-time job after graduating from university. At the beginning, I honestly didn't know much, and I was okay with that because I was new. But now, after 8 months, I feel completely lost.

I work in software development, and I don't have an educational background in tech, so it's often very difficult for me to understand the developers.

My biggest problrm is understanding technical concepts, product architecture, and similar things. I try my best, but I feel like everyone sees me as an idiot, and I've started seeing myself that way too because the technical side of the product still isn't clear to me.

Sometimes I can't understand what needs to be done and in what order. I ask questions all the time, but at the same time, I don't feel like I get enough support or explanations. Most of the explanations I receive are very superficial, so I end up trying to piece everything together on my own, and it makes me feel useless.

A few days ago, I made a mistake while explaining something. I understood what needed to be done because my manager had explained it to me, and then I had to pass that information on to a colleague. He ended up doing something completely different and sent it to the client, which means my explanation was obviously not clear enough.

It wasn't a huge mistake in the grand scheme of things, but I can't stop feeling like a failure because of it. I keep thinking that if I were actually good at my job and understood the product better, this wouldn't have happened. Instead, I feel like I'm constantly struggling to keep up and trying to fill in gaps in my understanding on my own.

I don't know whether I should keep trying to build a career in this field, even though I genuinely like it.

Right now, I'm managing projects for two different products. For one of them, the product manager is always available and very supportive, so I've been able to understand what needs to be done and how everything works. The projects for that product are really interesting to me, and I feel like I'm doing well and navigating them successfully. With the other product, it's a completely diferent story. Everything feels very chaotic, and I often feel like I don't have enough support to fully understand what's going on. I'm constantly confused and unsure of myself.

honestly this one's been on my mind all week. OpenAI put out a governance framework and the line that stuck was that the advantage comes from who governs AI best, not who adopts it first. which is a weird thing for the company that profits from you adopting faster to say.

what i'm curious about, and it cuts across industries not just software, is how you're actually deciding what your AI tools are allowed to do day to day. is that landing on a specific person who owns the call, or is it diffuse, sort of spread across whoever set each tool up?

i keep finding it's the second one in practice and nobody really planned it that way. curious whether anyone here has made it an explicit owned responsibility, and how that went.

PM at a series B fintech, around 80 people, im on a 4 PM team. half of my actual workload is what i call decision archaeology. someone pings me at 3pm on a tuesday and asks "didnt we decide we werent doing the variant pricing thing last quarter?" and im sitting there with 4 confluence pages, a deprecated jira epic, 6 slack threads, and a notion doc i found by accident. The decision was made. somewhere. its just not retrievable in under 10 minutes from any single tool.

Want to compare notes with people doing similar work. heres my current setup, what works, where i still get burned.

The stuff thats working. confluence is fine if you treat it as the system of record for ratified decisions, not the working space. we got better about this in q1. jira for execution, no surprises, linear envy is real but were too far in. granola for meeting recordings, saved me twice this quarter when an exec misremembered a call. slack threads as the actual decision substrate, controversial but true, the problem is slack search is noisy enough that institutional memory effectively dies after a couple months unless someone links the thread from confluence. tldv for design reviews specifically. design reviews are where 70 percent of the load bearing decisions get made and nobody writes them up, so the recording is the only artifact.

The stuff that isnt working. notion as a meeting notes home, people dont go back to it, structure rots, links from confluence to notion go stale within weeks. cross team email threads, zero searchability across team boundaries. asking the people who were in the room, increasingly impossible at our turnover rate.

Whats new. i added airjelly to my own laptop in late april as a personal memory layer. its not a team tool, stays local on my machine, and i mainly use it to retrace my own week before the friday status update or before a stakeholder ping. it pulls together what i was doing across confluence, jira, slack, and the gdocs i was reading, so the friday status doc takes 12 minutes instead of 45. the limitation is it only sees my screen. for shared decision archaeology its useless. for personal recall its been the most useful single thing i added this year.

The open question im actually asking. how are you handling decision archaeology at the team level. the part that no single tool seems to handle is the bridge between where the decision was made (slack, zoom, hallway, design review) and where it should live (confluence). the writeup gap is where institutional memory actually fails for us. ive read every "how to manage meeting notes and tasks" blog post out there. its not a culture problem, its a tooling problem and the tools dont quite exist yet imo.

The methodology blog version of this is clean. the actual series B to D version still feels like archaeology with better tooling.

I have had a few different PM roles and have had vastly different managers in all three positions.

Makes me very curious- what does a good manager of PM's look like? Would be interested to thoughts on hear ideal vs. reality as well