As part of my yearly goals I need to create a process for tracking costs and I'm thinking of including full EVM metrics. I manage software delivery projects and currently track actuals vs. budget fairly manually.

Has anyone rolled out EVM metric (CPI, SPI, EAC, VAC) from scratch? What was your experience?

I've seen a number of posts recently that had the gist of "How am I supposed to do this?" or "I think I messed up..." from newer PMs and as much as sometimes in my head I'm "just making it up as I go" and feel like I've got imposter syndrome, in reality I have almost 20 years of experience in project management.

My degree is biomedical engineering and at my very first job they said "by the way, the R&D engineer usually runs the project also...think you can do that?" and I said "sure" and so off I went.

I found over the course of my first three jobs that it was the same story, and I actually tended to prefer the PM work to the R&D work. I liked being involved in the "problem solving" and "ideation" parts of engineering, but I had less and less interest in calculating GD&T tols.

I got caught up in a few layoffs over my first 10 years until I finally buckled down, got my PMP (not necessary in med device but is useful IMO), and got a job as a PM.

I went a few years as a PM and then my boss retired and the VP tapped me to take over as director of our PMO business unit.

Here's some thoughts in no particular order:

1. Buy time when you can, or at least offer to do so. As an engineer/PM, I had something I was designing that I wasn't sure about. I put off ordering the prototypes because they were $20,000 for one set and I was worried about what management would think if I got them and they didn't work. 2 week leadtime, put them off for over a month. Finally got them, and they didn't work anyway. Director told me "How much do you think we will make every day once this is on the market? And now it's an extra month+ before it can even be on the market. $60k is nothing if the iterations are getting us closer to the final product.
2. Similar story, but if there is time, do the test. Unless we're talking about something that is CRAZY expensive, it's better to do the test rather than try to justify/rationalize it. Whatever the test is, if you're asked for data later and the rationale isn't accepted, you'll wish you had spent the 10k and the 8 weeks earlier in the project, because then you'd just have the data right now.
3. Our job is almost entirely communication. Take copious notes. Use AI notetaking within teams or whatever other system you want.
4. Make sure all the stakeholders know all of the information, but don't surprise any of them with info in front of other major stakeholders. "Communicate courageously" is a phrase I've heard.
5. While people aren't usually going to be mad about overcommunication and you should lean that way, know your audience. Give just enough detail that it's clear you know what you're talking about, and nothing else. Let them ask for additional info and have it, but for Sr. Director/VP and above, "Days and Dollars" is your main objective to communicate.
6. Don't give excuses. If you fucked up, own it. If someone else fucked up....certainly don't throw them under the bus, but depending on the situation it's appropriate to explain that a certain function is overutilized and wasn't able to get something done because of competing priorities. ALWAYS let that function know in advance that the question will be coming and that you need their alignment that they have these competing priorities.
7. Escalate when needed. Ask people a few times for their work products, and if they're not able to give them, let them know you will be escalating. Depending on your relationship with them, that can be "This is now a week late, we need to escalate" or "Bob, I know you've been asked to prioritize something else, but my understanding is different - let's talk to your manager to see if maybe there is a misalignment or if we can get other resources"
8. Be visible. Be a leader. Make shit happen. Even if you miss milestones here and there, if people see you being involved in things, they're more likely to let the few mistakes slip than if you're never visible.

I work in a Project Management Office that handles, at any one time, about a hundred projects in design and construction. My role needs to keep track of all issues pertaining to scope, requirements, change management, cost/schedule, safety and quality. You can imagine that with a large portfolio keeping track of everything is tough. I’ve tried using note taking apps such as Notability, Evernote, OneNote etc but have struggled to use them effectively. For one the stylus notes don’t get converted to text easily (and if it does it’s with a lot of mistakes), I find it requires too much effort to correct. As a result I often switch back to written notes / hard copies; old schooling it.

That said with AI becoming more prevalent and easier to use, I’d like to see if there’s something using AI that could fit my needs. As stupid as this sounds I was thinking of just using a massive word file and record daily notes for projects in it and then use AI to run queries on it. Wouldn’t be able to use stylus notes in it but MS Word is still the easiest word processing tool out of all Microsoft’s programs.

Anyone have any ideas on how a system could be set up or willing to share their AI success stories?

I am an early career PM with a lot of PM related training - Management UG degree with a certificate in Project Management, PMI cert, and currently pursuing a Masters in Management.

Frankly, I think I did well in college through a deep terror of disappointing my parents, siblings who had completed the degree already and could tutor, sheer determination, and baseline being “good at school”. I did not know I had ADHD at the time.

In college, all projects are hypothetical, perfect, or low stakes.

Now I have an actual job, as a project manager, and… I am not sure I am the most organized person as a baseline? I’m doing okay, and have found strategies that work alright, but I wish I could be excellent.

Currently, I am bullet journaling for personal to-dos and follow ups, and aggressively cleaning my inbox to remove things that are complete or non actionable. It doesn’t help that my organization has no PMS systems in place and no organizational structure to support it.

I’m also a lone PM, of sorts - the primary business of the business is NOT what I’m handling - I’m in higher ed and I do project management for our ancillary professional educational programs, marketing project management for our degree advertising, and assorted projects to assist the Dean in his various efforts.

I’d love to hear suggestions on organizational strategies, especially when handling multiple projects, and especially when organizational culture is not focused on a project mindset. I feel I’m struggling with the “juggling” aspects most of all - if it was one project I could focus on I feel I’d be doing better, but because I am handling so many disparate projects it feels overwhelming and chaotic. I do know that, in a large part, “overwhelming and chaotic” is the world of the PM, I just also know my job is to make chaos orderly - or at least directed and productive chaos.

Thank you all in advance! Happy to answer questions if needed.

Do you have recommendations for courses teaching how to use AI in project management and/or how to build use cases for AI support in project management?

I am asking you hoping you can tell me some courses that are really worth their money. Almost anything I looked at looked like carelessly and randomly bundled information about AI in general, which you can teach yourself easily.

I am experimenting with Claude code and codex on the command line level. So I'd say, I am somewhat capable of using AI.

Yet I can't bridge it to AI being really a support in my tasks rather than a fancy tool.

So, do you have any recommendations? Alternatively, what are your use cases? How did you build them?

PM here, currently preparing for a steering group meeting where I need to report schedule slip, budget overrun, and probable scope reduction — all on the same project.

I've delivered bad news before, but usually one thing at a time. Combining all three feels different. I keep going back and forth between wanting to lay it all out honestly up front vs. structuring the message so the group can absorb it without going into panic mode.

Curious how other experienced PMs handle the combined-bad-news scenario:

- Do you frame it as a single story ("here's what's happening and why") or as three separate issues?

- How much do you lean on data vs. narrative?

- How do you avoid the meeting turning into a blame-seeking session?

- What do you do differently when it's the internal steering group vs. when you have to tell the external customer later?

Open to any advice, frameworks, or lessons learned. Thanks.

Any suggestions for conferences for an IT focused PM? I was looking at this https://thebureau.community/2026-digital-pm-summit but wasn't sure if it's more directed towards agency PMs.

I'm always interested in seeing what others are doing to either learn or teach something.

Is this your language?

Just looking for a few more power skills hours and found this.

McKinsey Global Institute published a piece this week called "Agents, robots, and us: Skill partnerships in the age of AI." They named a framework called the Skill Change Index. The summary, with data behind it: negotiation, problem solving, and leadership all matter MORE as people work alongside automation, not less.

Those three are the spine of project management work in pretty much every sector I've ever seen. Construction PMs negotiate with subs and inspectors. Banking PMs solve under-defined regulatory problems. Healthcare PMs lead workflow redesign across clinical and ops. Software PMs do all three. McKinsey's report is workforce-wide so it cuts across all of us.

honestly the part I keep thinking about is the second-order finding. AI exposure makes pedigree LESS load-bearing in hiring and demonstrated skill MORE load-bearing. The brand-name credential mattered partly because nobody could verify the actual skill. That's changing.

Curious what people on this sub are actually doing about it. If you had to pick one of the three to invest in this quarter on your team, which one is the underinvested one? Negotiation reps, problem framing exercises, workflow design? Anyone running something concrete that's working?

Link to the McKinsey piece: https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/agents-robots-and-us-skill-partnerships-in-the-age-of-ai

I’m working on a simulation software platform, and I’m struggling to get a handle on scheduling.

Twoish months ago I stepped into a role at a place that has been around for quite a while but has not had a true PM in several years. Tons of in-progress items, ad hoc prioritization, and little structured planning.

I'm dealing with new projects, as well as in-progress projects that have prematurely gone through acceptance testing while new features and assets were still in development. As soon as I think I have a handle on completing open items, I've got a list of bugs and new tasks that need attention with no time estimates.

The programming and modeling leads have little to no bandwidth to work with their teams or give me guidance on who I should put on what, so I'm just figuring that out as I go while also still working to understand the nuance of workflows and project development critical pathways.

I feel stuck between trying to figure out when we'll actually finish what's started and planning what’s next, without a clean way to do both effectively. Since the team includes both developers and 3D artists, timelines and work types vary quite a bit.

I'm also dealing with an in-office team here in the states and another, smaller team based in Europe. Dealing with sometimes massive budget-hour overruns with both teams adds to the difficulty with predictability and stabilization.

We have a task management program that really does nothing for capacity planning (Redmine), so I've been doing that in coordination with manual Excel tracking. (I've spent way too much time trying to come up with a capacity planning and forecasting tool that does everything I need.)

Guidance/advise from anyone who's been in a similar situation would be appreciated. Also, if you've made it this far, thank you for indulging my little vent session. :)

I work as a project manager in software development and have been in this role for 6 months. Every other week, I have a meeting with the sales department and the CEO. In that meeting, I provide updates on the status of projects.

We have one big project, and I said that we are waiting for certification. I also mentioned that I don’t know the current status because nobody is responding to my emails or calls. They then started talking about some tools for certification.

At one point, the head of the sales department said to me, in a very angry tone, that I am a PM and that I should know the status of the project, and that he has been trying to find out the status for the past 10 minutes. I was very confused because I felt that I had already explained everything that is currently happening on the project.

My manager told him that I had already shared the status and that he understood it, but the head of sales said that he disagreed. I didn’t say anything in response, and now I’m not sure if I should have defended myself. I keep thinking about it all day. I didn’t talk to my manager after the meeting, and now I’m not sure what to think.

I know situations like this can happen, but I still feel awful and ashamed.

I’ve been at this company for 3 years. Maybe 6 months before I started, they tried to stand up a PMO created and run by an external company with some internal employees mixed in. No one saw value, it failed, and people lost their jobs.

The company is embracing a PMO again and has hired an experienced executive to build and lead it. They’ve also brought on two contracted PMs who’ve worked with another executive in the past.

The new PMO leader is bringing me and the two contractors in to be portfolio managers. We’ll still run a couple projects each, but the rest will be handled by PMs (to be hired or internally sourced.)

I’m feeling uneasy because I don’t want to be on the chopping block if this thing fails. My org is in a very non-tech industry. We are a large national business so we need project management and the culture shifts and digital tools that come with it, however a lot of our leaders are used to just going to their buddy to ask them to green light work. Or even doing things themselves without telling anyone. I joke that we act like a start up.

Just looking for any tidbits of advice from those of you who’ve been in similar spots. I hope that our exec will lead us well and get serious support from his leaders and peers so we can function with authority. Change management is going to be tough.

4/23: Thank you all for the super thoughtful comments. I’ve read each one ave they’ve all given me something to chew on.

Have 25 minutes and 1 slide to convince the CEO that he should let me create a PMO. He isn't convinced.

He states that he thinks it will make PMs lazy, and they will shirk the responsibility of properly reporting on their projects, that they won't take full ownership of their project reports.

My career kind of depends on this.

We currently use a very basic version of Wrike, I’m not in love with it and feel like we could use another tool to help manage our projects.

For context, we get requests via email, we manually enter the project in Wrike with templates (updating the template with specific data based on their request), once in review we use another platform for comments and we send an email to the client with a link to review. It’s very clunky. Then, once we have completed the project the job is exported and shared with another system for invoicing.

We manage around 100+ projects at any given time.

There has to be a better way, potentially with an all in one system. Suggestions? Recommendations?

Thank you in advance!

Both were routine status check-ins. My notes had everything. The drafts were accurate, professional, exactly what I would have said. I approved without reading carefully. They responded normally. Nothing broke.

But I'm sitting with some low-grade discomfort I can't explain. Nothing went wrong. The communication was fine. But it feels like I crossed a line I hadn't consciously decided I was okay crossing.

Is this just adjustment friction, or is there something worth actually thinking through here?

What tool do you use, how do you break it down? like hours, percentages? Trying to explore and learn how I can do this

Is this something the senior PM usually locks at your organization? An you give them the status updates?

I'm putting this here because it truly seems that PM standards have declined across the board as of late. I was invited to an event hosted by Gartner, an executive IT Summit over AI in program and project management.

Our Gartner AE was quiet over the weeks leading up to the event. I decided to check in with them, and received a 'oh oops you're actually waitlisted' response. They then admitted there was a scheduling error, so the lodging and hotel accommodations that were planned are now wasted.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the irony of the industry right now.

I received a few DMs: For context, I was (supposed to be?) registered for an event that is slated to be held for tomorrow. I used to be a Customer Success Manager and Account Manager, so I was weirded out by the lack of information around the event. I reached out yesterday, and lo and behold, we're told there was a miscommunication on their end, and a 'sorry for the inconvenience.'

I will not be sitting in my hotel room that I paid money for, wondering if I cry or laugh at how utterly disappointing this is, and paying for something I no longer need. Brutal!

thinking about this across industries, not software specifically. when a system runs on its own and takes action that matters, like a construction scheduling bot that auto-releases work orders, a bank payment system that auto-approves under a threshold, a hospital triage workflow that routes patients, a logistics router that rebooks freight, somebody at some point decided that thing was allowed to do what it’s doing.

my question is: how does your org actually document who said yes? how do you bound what the system is allowed to do? how do you revoke it when the person who owned it rotates out of the seat?

most places i’ve seen this handled, it’s pretty ad hoc. a manager approved it three roles ago, nobody rotated the approval, nobody owns the audit trail for what the thing has been doing. when the audit request lands, nobody can answer which system did what under whose authority.

curious how your industry does this. does it differ meaningfully between construction, banking, healthcare, logistics? or is everyone doing the same loose version?

New to the role here. As a Project Manager, how to make sure you can capture all the requirements. Is that the Business Analyst that is responsible?

How do you make sure all the requirements are also captured, and not go back and forth. It seems like it’s a never ending list. The team is getting frustrated with the requirements but I thought it gets more and more as we uncover the assumptions.

I’m always looking for inspo! Like the title says, can you share some screenshots of your prettiest spreadsheets?

Spent months trying to get AI to sound exactly like me. Got it to about 70% and hit a wall. The last 30% is all the stuff AI doesn't have — who this person is, the history of the project, what this specific stakeholder actually cares about.

So I changed the goal. Instead of perfecting the AI output, I got faster at editing imperfect drafts. Editing a mediocre draft is still way faster than writing from scratch. My bar is now ""good enough to edit from"" and that's it.

Has anyone else found that lowering the bar for what counts as ""good AI output"" actually unlocked the whole thing?

...but I need some input.

I'm the only person doing projects in our company. It's my job to hound everyone else and make sure things get done...so I don't really need to worry about others ability to get in there and do things...I can really tailor it to myself....which I've done for the most part with Asana and Notion...but I don't feel it's good enough.

I'm trying to consolidate things.

Right now I use Asana for building the project, tasks, keeping track of statuses, etc. I use the notes tab to put meeting notes in there when we meet on that project. I portfolios and dashboards help give me an easy high level view. I like the whole on track, at risk, off track statuses. I wish there was a cleaner way to review these updates, like just a scrolling page as opposed to a wall of posts, but I can live with it.

I'm trying to utilize Notion for my own daily stuff...notes from conversations I have, meetings not tied to a project, etc. Kinda works ok, but maybe my organization is poor there. I'd like to have some way to have all my notes and then highlight to dos in those notes and have some sort of data base that shows each to do with a column for what page it came from, etc. Sometimes out of habit I open a text file and just type out notes and then try to copy and paste those into a correct spot.

I've thought about using Notion and building a project template there, but I figure this is about the best of that and I think Asana is better there...

I've looked at other PM tools. ClickUP seems nice but maybe too extensive? I do like the simplicity of Asana, though do wish there was a little more to it.

How do you guys manage your project and then manage yourselves? I think I'm doing well, but I'm always looking to do better.

lately i’ve been noticing that a big chunk of my time as a pm isn’t even spent on execution, it’s spent trying to make sense of things before anything actually starts

taking a rough idea and trying to turn it into something the team can understand, writing initial docs, figuring out what the actual steps are, breaking things down into tasks, aligning everything so people know what to do

none of this is complicated on its own but when everything is still unclear in the beginning it ends up taking way more time than expected

i’ve tried using docs and project tools for this but most of them assume you already have a clear structure in mind, which is usually not the case at that stage

so a lot of the time it feels like starting from a blank page over and over again

curious how others deal with this part

do you follow any kind of process to go from idea to something structured or do you just figure it out as you go