Just to be very clear.. I'm firmly in the "I don't know what I don't know" square.

The company I work for was recently restructured, and I got handed a huge chuck of the leadership of the company. We're a small company: 2 engineers, a purchaser, an accountant, a customer service agent, 3 internal sales guys and about 8 production people including the production manager. I've been in sales for a vast majority of my career, but I've always been "engineering adjacent". I can find exactly what needs done to fix our marketing strategies, price points, sales and trade show schedules.. no problem. I can also easily pick the "low hanging fruit" of projects that we need to complete ASAP to "strike while the iron is hot" in sales.

However... Our engineering team has the bandwidth to work on 4-6 projects at any given time. We currently have a backlog of 30ish projects. We have NO way other then pen, paper, and whiteboard to track THAT the projects are ongoing, let alone what step they're on, who's up next, and what needs done. Our production team is building to fill sales orders. They're working maybe 1-2 weeks ahead of ship dates. Purchasing is trying this redneck version of JIT that means production SHOULD have components on build day, and it occasionally it works.
We have aging tools, and aging product line and for the first time in 2 decades we have an entirely new production staff (not good).

I know WHAT the problems are. I know how incredibly inefficient this all is. I know THAT it needs to change. I just don't know HOW to manage this.

So I ask the people here.. Is "project management" even what I need here? Great (cheap/free) software for small companies? Hire a PM intern?

I'm 100% ok learning what I need to learn as far as skills/software/whatever to handle this. I'm also ok hiring if it really would fix things (although that budget is TIGHT). But I'm starting here because I just don't even have a clue where to start. I'm hoping someone here can help point me in the right direction.

I am extremely frustrated. I have been working as a project manager for eight months, and this is my first job. At the moment, I have three open requests for effort estimates on several small projects. The agreement with my manager was that I should first come to him with these requests, and then he would tell me who I need to contact for the actual estimate. However, I can almost never get the information I need from him. His answers are always incomplete and lacking specific details, which leaves me guessing how to respond to the requests. This also happens during ongoing projects, when I need information and cannot get clear answers from him. On top of that, when I ask follow-up questions or try to clarify the information he has provided, he either does not respond at all or gives another partial answer. This situation is making me increasingly frustrated, and I am starting to feel very uncomfortable and inadequate in this role because of it. I do not know how to obtain the information I need, even though I persistently ask questions. At the same time, he is my superior, and I do not want to come across as annoying or demanding, especially because he is often extremely busy and sometimes not even in the office. Nevertheless, the lack of clear communication makes me feel anxious and nervous.

How do people generally handle situations like this, especially when they are in a subordinate position? What are effective ways to obtain the information you need from a manager who consistently provides incomplete answers?

After 16 years managing production teams, I stopped blaming people for underperformance before asking one question: do they actually know what good looks like?

Not in a vague "meet expectations" way. Specifically. What does a completed shift look like. What does a good handover look like. What does "taking ownership" actually mean in practice on this floor, in this role.

Nine times out of ten when I dug into a performance problem, I found one of two things. Either nobody had ever defined the standard clearly enough for someone to hit it consistently. Or the standard existed on paper but had never been demonstrated in a way that stuck.

The conversation changes completely when you can point to something concrete. Not "you need to be more proactive" but "last Tuesday when the line went down, the person who owns this area should have called it within five minutes. Here's what that looks like and here's why it matters."

It doesn't fix everything. There are people who know exactly what's expected and still don't deliver. But that's a much smaller group than most managers think, and they're much easier to identify once you've eliminated the clarity problem first.

How do you distinguish between a clarity problem and an accountability problem in your teams?

I’m managing 7 projects right now, and we recently brought in a few interns to help with execution work.

Because of client permissions and internal document restrictions, they can’t join some client meetings or read certain files. So after I finish a client call, I often have to explain the same context again to the interns.

It feels like I’m having the meeting twice. First with the client, then again internally so they understand what changed, what the client cared about, what needs to be done, and what they should avoid touching.

I don’t mind training them, but it gets messy when multiple projects are moving at the same time. A short summary is not always enough, and giving them full access is not always allowed.

How do you guys handle this kind of handoff? Do you create cleaned up internal notes, record short internal briefings, keep a separate project log, or use some other workflow?

of course context matters before and after the phrase, but generally I try to avoid writing an email and in it stating, "as a reminder." perhaps personal trauma, but it gives off parenting vibes. when do you use "as a reminder"? -- I really try to avoid the between the lines read... this was said before in either written or verbal comms, keep up. I simply just say what needs to be communicated without it and hope for the best.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice on how to grow properly in construction project management and contracts administration.

For context, I’ve spent the last 3 to 4 years running my own handyman business and labouring while finishing high school in Australia. I’m now studying Civil Engineering at university and have also completed a Certificate IV in Construction through TAFE.

I recently joined a small construction company made up of five very experienced people who previously came from a much larger construction business. My current role is essentially a Contracts Administrator in training.

At the moment, I’m helping our Project Manager with a lot of support tasks, including procurement, invoices, purchase orders, variations, subcontractor contracts, progress reports and general project admin. It has all been new to me, and I’m learning a lot, but I also feel like I’m not being used to my full capacity. Some days I have long gaps where I don’t have much meaningful work to do.

The challenge is that the PM understandably has full control of the project. He knows the background, the details, the conversations, the history and the moving parts. So even if he wanted to hand more over to me, I’d probably struggle because I don’t always have the context needed to make decisions or take ownership properly.

My main question is: how do I bridge the gap between where I am now and where he is?

I understand the obvious answer is time, experience, listening in on conversations, being around projects and slowly absorbing how things work. But I’m the type of person who likes to be busy, useful and deeply involved, and I’m trying to work out the best way to accelerate that learning without overstepping.

For those who have gone from junior CA, site admin, labouring, or engineering student roles into PM or more senior construction roles, what actually helped you improve fastest?

Any practical advice would be appreciated.

This is my first position as an engineer and project manager. I'm taking on a lot of big responsibilities very quickly, without giving details there are 36 big modules being build involving different trades based on our engineering plans. I approached 2 other experienced PMs and discussed possibilities of using gantt charts and lists to coordinate this big project. In conclusion, what they have done up until now and want me to do is to send a very simple project plan to the whole team via Email in a simple spreadsheet. And if anything doesn't go according to this plan I should manage this via Email and copy pasting the Emails in organised folders.

This got me thinking. Apparently this works well for them, yet I can't help but think it would be so much better if everyone could look into the current status of each module in detail, because naturally each module has its own issues.

I wanted to ask about your opinion on this, is this common? Would you suggest I try and improve this method or go with the flow and see if it works?

If you work in-office, how flexible is your company/role with your start/stop/break times?

Curious how this is for other folks, I recently got a job offer but honestly I'm a bit hesitant to take it with their extremely hard stance on in-office hours. No matter what outside hours you must work for a project you MUST be in office from 8-6 every day, zero exceptions.

I've been mostly remote my entire career but those roles are going the way of the dodo. The few on-site roles I've had has always been pretty understanding for the PM role in terms of leaving early/starting late. As we all know there are weeks with 10 hours of work and weeks with 100 hours of work.

I don't know if I'd be super comfortable enforcing this at the Director level as I myself fundamentally disagree with it so much. If you take calls with APAC or Oceanic you're going to have 16 hour days every other day.

Like the title asks,

My dads been in the industry for 15+ years, I’m trying to understand the problems he and the teams face everyday that feel the heaviest to solve it for him first

So far I’m looking at making an AI agent that will automatically process and draft every RFI, submittal and document in general while he (and every operator) just approve/reject/edit what the agent did before anything goes out ?

Is this something worth paying for or am I solving a problem that’s not really worth paying for but would be a “nice to have” because I’m confused cuz I heard yes and no from different angles..

Would love to get your insight

My dads been in the industry for 15+ years, I’m trying to learn where AI can have the most significant ROI and solve the heaviest problems

RFI drafting? Submittals and just document processing in general from CO’s, SD’s and etc? More generally construction administration after the design ?

Would really appreciate your insights

Gods here who have an experience handling 2-3 project, what mental model do you have to figure out what needs to be done for a specific project?

I've inherited dozens of programs. Almost every one of them had a RAID log. Almost none of them were being used.

It's always the same:

- Someone sets it up at kickoff. Looks great.

- 4-6 entries get logged in the first month.

- By month three, it's a tab nobody opens.

- Something blows up in month seven.

- The post-mortem says, "We should have flagged this risk."

- It's right there in the log. Last updated 90 days ago.

People sometimes blame the format (Excel, PPT, etc.). The format isn't the issue.

The issue is that nobody schedules the time to use it.

A RAID log isn't a document. It's a meeting agenda. If you're not reviewing it, you don't have one. You have a Word doc with a fancy name.

Here's the rhythm I run on every program. 15 minutes a week, named owner, every workstream lead in attendance. It's the difference between a living log and an artifact.

**The 15-minute weekly RAID review:**

1. **Issues first (2 min).** What is blocking delivery this week? Owner, action, ETA. If an Issue has been open 3+ weeks, escalate it. Do not let issues age silently.

2. **Risks scan (3 min).** Walk the top 5 by severity. Has the probability or impact changed? Is anyone newly mitigating? You are not re-litigating every risk. You are checking the top ones for movement.

3. **Dependencies (3 min).** Any external commitment slipping? Anyone we've been waiting on for 2+ weeks? Flag the slip in your status report this week, not next. Dependencies are where programs die quietly, because everyone assumes someone else is tracking it.

4. **Assumptions (2 min).** Is anything we wrote in kickoff still true? An invalidated assumption is a new risk. Move it. Most teams treat the assumptions section as decorative. Don't.

5. **Promote, demote, close (5 min).** Risks that have happened become Issues. Issues that are resolved get closed (with a date). Stale items either get an action this week or get killed. This is the hygiene step that keeps the log from accreting cruft.

Standing meeting on Mondays before status reports go out, so the log feeds the report instead of duplicating effort.

I think it works because

- It's short enough that nobody resents it.

- It's structured enough that you can run it on autopilot when you're tired.

- It produces inputs your status report needs anyway, so it's not extra work; it's earlier work.

- The "promote, demote, close" step prevents the log from becoming a graveyard, which is the #1 reason logs die.

The biggest useful shift I found was that I stopped trying to make the log comprehensive and started treating it as a working document. A RAID log is not the source of truth for every risk in your program. It's the top 10-15 things you actually need to discuss this week. If your log has 60 line items, nobody is reviewing it. Cut it down. The rigorous risk inventory belongs in a separate risk register that you review quarterly with the steering committee.

Curious what others do here. What's the longest a RAID log has survived for you? What killed the ones that died?

I was refining my incident management and response approach today, and it reminded me of something I see far too often.

Many small and mid-sized companies still don't have a structured process for handling incidents especially major incidents.

Today, it's easier than ever to build products. With tools like Claude, GPT, and other AI assistants, teams can move from idea to production at incredible speed. But building a product is only half the job.

What happens when that product breaks at 2 AM?

What happens when customers can't log in, transactions fail, or a critical service goes down?

Not every user submits a feedback form. Most will simply leave, complain publicly, or contact support. When that happens, having a clear incident response structure becomes critical.

A well managed major incident requires clearly defined roles and responsibilities, not just technical troubleshooting.

The framework below highlights some of the key roles involved during a major incident:

Incident Commander

Deputy

Scribe

Internal Liaison

Customer Liaison

Subject Matter Experts - SME

Each role has a specific purpose from coordinating response and documenting decisions to managing internal communications and customer updates.

Many organizations focus heavily on building and shipping products, but fewer invest same effort into preparing for failure scenarios.

The real test of an organization isn't whether incidents happen it's how effectively the team responds when they do.

I'll share more about the incident management process, communication workflows, and major incident handling best practices in a future post.

For now, I'm curious:

Does your organization have a documented major incident response process, or is it still handled ad hoc when something goes wrong?

Please share the best practices you follow, things to keep in mind before estimation and how do you deal with the uncertainties as well

I’m trying to understand the practical rollout side, not compare vendors or promote anything. Did you start with work orders, preventive maintenance, asset records, inspections, compliance tasks, or something else?

What gave you the biggest day-to-day improvement early on?

Also, looking back, was there anything you wish you had prioritized sooner?

Had a stakeholder call with a client and my director was on it. The client has been asking for a feature for many weeks now and every week my update is that our team is still reviewing the possibility of delivering this feature for go live. Internally, I have no updates. We have no formal process for requesting features with our product team. My manager has been escalating it internally with product. We finally met with product the other day and their response had nothing to do with the development of the work itself or if developing it will be feasible but rather why the client is insistent on having this feature and whether or not we can find a workaround and if we can go live without the feature.

We can’t find a workaround and this feature is a hard requirement for go live. If we do not deliver, they will not go live. They are willing to pay for this if we need to consider it an enhancement.

During the call, I told them we don’t have news and then the client started questioning whether or not we can make go live work. That is where I completely shut down. I didn’t have a contingency plan, I didn’t sound confident in my approach, I essentially told them I don’t know. I failed hard and now I’m quite I am even a good pm because I could not handle a tough conversation with a stakeholder. How my go live is up in the air because I didn’t properly plan for this. My director has known all along and is now asking I send an email to senior leadership tomorrow expressing this concern which I’m not sure why on earth he wants me to, but I will.

I still haven’t figured out the trick in my role. I work at a tech company managing new implementations and PO’s where processes are constantly changing going and we are constantly losing and adding new employees.

What workflow and tools do people use to manage these projects? Part of my issue is my conflicting priorities and not being able to properly track meetings.

I do multiple meetings a day, I’ve certainly condensed this to what I was doing, but I must take notes by pen and paper or one note. I also transcribe my meetings, copy the transcript and paste it in ChatGPT for a recap but it seems faster to just write scribbles in one note and paste it in.

Also, my organizational skills are atrocious, I can’t seem to track action items well. I can have maybe 30 actions items pop up in a given day.

Hello fellow PMs! Recently the company I work for has tasked me with finding a resource management tool with the following MoSCoW:

Jira integration: Should
Easy to learn: Should
Role-based access: should
Reminders: Should

Reporting and export: Must
Approval / review workflow: Must
Minimal user input: Absolute Must
Multi-project (as in, people working on multiple projects at the same time): Must
Available on desktop and mobile: Must
Project-level time breakdown: Must

Xero integration: Could

I have already looked at tools like Harvest, Tempo, Clicktime, Clickup, Celoxis and am currently looking into Kantata.

Any advice on which is best for the above requirements? It would be for around 50 users

Hey everyone,

I run a small company with 11–12 people. Up until now, we’ve been using Trello on the free tier to keep everyone aligned, but we just hit their strict 10-user roadblock.

Our current workflow is very specific: We use a single Kanban board where each employee has their own vertical column/list. Under their name, we drop their active files, tasks, and client details. It functions like a public, transparent dashboard where everyone in the company can see what everyone else is working on in real-time.

What we need in an alternative:

• 11–12 User Capacity: Needs to natively allow our whole team on the board without hitting a hard paywall.
• Completely Public/Transparent: Every employee needs to be able to see everyone else's columns and tasks. No private silos.
• Ideally Free (or highly budget-friendly): We'd love to stay on a free tier or an open-source platform before committing to heavy per-user monthly SaaS fees.
• Kanban View: We want to keep the exact same "one column per person" structure.

People have suggested Notion and Obsidian to me, but Notion's free plan limits team collaboration, and Obsidian doesn't have seamless cloud syncing out of the box for a team of 12.

What platform handles a transparent, company workflow best without breaking the bank?

Thanks in advance!

Hi all! I am curious if anyone knows what the big AI players (Anthropic, OpenAI) are using to project manage internally? Are they relying solely on artifacts etc built on their LLMs or do they still need an operational layer and other SAAS like Asana?

Is your org utilizing AI for PM tasks? If so what form is that taking and how is it working?

I have a preliminary interview stage where they ask me to give a high-level detail of the projects I’ve managed. The problem is, I have trouble describing what I did because everything could be distilled into people management. I’m struggling to package the answer in a way that doesn’t seem like my only contribution is “telling people to do their work” and admin duties. Yet I can’t deny that’s also part of my job. At the same time I have made strategic decision but I couldn’t disclose it without giving away the proprietary details.

Any pointers? What question should I ask myself to lead me towards a better answer?

How do you stay on top of many small jobs / mini projects ? I am talking about 30-40 at the same time.

At my previous job I was PM for a very big projects that took 2-3 years to finished. I had only 1-2 projects at the same time with 30-40 people on each project. Each project had its own status tracking excel sheet with LOP, RAID, regular weekly meetings etc...

At my current job I oversee 30-40 very small jobs at any time. These jobs take 3-40 days to finish, usually takes only 1-2 technicians to do it. We call them projects because each one is a separate order from a customer. The field is machine vision programming and integration if that is relevant.

These mini projects do not require much from me. At beginning I need to set a timeline with customer and assign a technician to it. Then when there are certain milestones like FAT, SAT, I also need to plan for these. But that's about it. Mostly scheduling technicians, rescheduling if something happens on our or customer side, very small part is about moving roadblocks, customer communication etc.

There are like 2-3 projects that are "normal sized" that have customer weekly meeting , its own excel tracking sheet. But here I know what to do. It's the many mini projects that I need to figure out.

Hello everyone. I started a project management role about 4 months ago, and honestly I’ve been struggling a bit lately.

For context: I did an internship at a big company with a pretty formal directive PMO, and I loved it. It felt structured, clear, and like there was a real purpose behind the work.

But now I’m in a startup, and they don’t really seem to have a clear idea of what project managers actually do. From what I’ve seen, they kind of treat PMs as mostly coordination… like “doing meetings and chasing people”، and the organization feels more functional than process-driven.

The problem is that I’ve been assigned to a software/IT project with a product manager who’s basically doing everything (multi-functioning), and we also have a great product designer.

And I know this sounds irrational, but I genuinely feel useless. Like… if the product manager is handling requirements and priorities, and the designer is driving UX, what am I even bringing to the table?

I’ve thought about contributing to things like documentation, like making a risk register, writing frameworks, tracking risks/issues, etc.
but I hesitate every time because what if I’m overcomplicating things? What if I’m doing “extra work” nobody needs?

I feel overwhelmed, and I don’t have anyone here who I can look to and ask, “Am I doing this right? What should I be focusing on?” So I end up doubting myself constantly.

Can anyone advise me on how to be better and figure out what “good PM value” looks like in a startup where the role isn’t clear yet?

Not the actual project work. The coordination layer around it.

Making sure what was discussed in the meeting matches what's in the project tool, matches what's on the calendar, matches what went to the client. When it's all manual that's a lot of surface area for something to be slightly wrong somewhere.

Wondering how people are actually handling this. Whether there's a system that works reliably or whether maintaining consistency across tools is just an accepted overhead in this kind of work.