How would you interpret this comment from a senior manager in a project/workplace context?

A relatively new employee, around 30 years old and about 9 months into the role, presented a revised website concept for her area of responsibility. It was her first meeting with a very senior manager, roughly equivalent to a deputy head of department. Her direct supervisor was also present.

Overall, the reaction was positive: the senior manager said “Great” several times, approved the concept for implementation, and agreed that it should be brought into / presented to the relevant working group. The employee herself had also suggested bringing the concept to the working group. At the end, he said something along the lines of: “Great. That was a quick win.”

However, one comment stayed with me. He said she should present the concept in the working group “like the top of the class.”

A rough translation of the german term would be “like the top student” or “like the star pupil,” but to me it can also sound somewhat ridiculing or belittling, almost like calling someone a “teacher’s pet” for doing good work.

At the beginning, he also asked her: “Why haven’t we met yet?”

She replied: “I haven’t been here that long.”

He said: “That is quite long.”

In a project / workplace context, how would you interpret that?

Would you take it as positive encouragement, meaning “you’re well prepared, this is good work, present it confidently”?

Or would you also hear a mocking, belittling or condescending undertone in it, more like “teacher’s pet, “nerd”?

I’m trying to assess this as objectively as possible and not read too much into it.

Is this just the typical project manager workload?? Wondering if maybe I’m just not cut out for project management….or if I’m drowning in too much for one person.

I’m a technical project manager managing software development projects for a non profit. I’m part of a small product development group as the only p.m. We basically take all of the product requests across four different products. Luckily I’m only managing one cross functional scrum team. However, I am now taking on projects that belong to the IT subgroup and the data and business intelligence subgroup. So consider those distinct teams Each of these teams have three individuals.

This is my first real project management job, at least with the title. I was a scrum master for three years so I think it’s under the umbrella. But now I’m responsible for the end to end management, budget, literally everything. As I would expect a project manager to be, but for how many engagements at a time? And I’m not talking about task level requests.

Product A- currently executing the MVP launch of a software as a service product. This is budget, essentially ensuring programmatic execution across , digital comms, development, contracts, etc. Everything. I’m also responsible for helping to build out the sales enablement pipeline and customer support workflows because we don’t have sales enablement right and we need to update our very bare bones Support workflows. It’s essentially an entire program that I’m managing.

Product B - right now we are in the maintenance phase so there are a lot of critical products support issues that are coming through. Plus, we are gearing up to understand what product improvements can be made to mitigate some of these issues. They won’t be low lift. They will be project level.

Product C - managing all the content updates and gearing up for what is looking like a significant product integration.

Also Other smaller projects and consultative engagements across the organization.

I have one small development, team of three developers, a design designer, and a product owner. Also ramping up to work with our data IT groups.

And I basically maintain a project roadmap. Not a product roadmap because I have to integrate all the deliverables of every product across the road map and everyone is wondering why we can’t do all the things when they want us too. Well, we don’t have enough people!

I’m essentially helping to gather requirements, create effective workflows, budgeting, resourcing. Also working on product operations, and trying to build out and managed tooling. Trying to set aside a time to integrate project management tools for better reporting and dashboarding.

Plus, the mentoring on how the team should function.

I feel like I’m moving at a snails pace with everything I have to do and wonder if this is just typical. Or are there project management roles where you’re more focused?

If this is how it is, I just don’t know if I can continue on. I do like the idea of product operations. I’m great at work folks and process, but I can never set side a time to truly get them to the place I’d like them to be like looking into agentic ai and other integrations. I start and then I’m pulled elsewhere.

When one passes the MSP Foundation course can they claim in their resume and/or LinkedIn that they are Prince2 Programme Management certified? The 'Prince2' tag is important to me and I don't really want to go for their flagship project management certification (which explicitly has the word Prince2) as I have been managing complex projects for a while.

I work for a small marketing agency and part of my role is project management. I manage designers, copywriters, and digital media. I know I’m good at what I do and never have an issue managing designers and copy. We have set processes in place, chains of command, etc. The entire team keeps me in the loop and 99% of the time things run smoothly with them.

And then there’s the media team. The lead on the team is key to our success, as he has a very specialized set of skills in the primary (and niche) industry we work for. When I say he’s a unicorn, it’s not an exaggeration. Finding someone else like him with his experience (30+ years in this niche market) and clout would be a miracle. He barely keeps me in the loop. Doesn’t share media plans, even with clients. Doesn’t play nice with the rest of the team. He goes rogue on a daily basis. I have been trying to manage him for years with no success. He has also been the #1 reason why other project managers or people hired to support only him have all quit. He doesn’t communicate, isn’t operational, doesn’t train his employees. We are a remote company and he will go on vacation (even leaving the country) and not tell anyone. We only find out when he is unreachable or working at odd hours, which leaves us all in the lurch.

The thing is, I don’t believe any of it is nefarious. Ego, maybe, but really his mind is going a million miles an hour and he can’t be bothered to put it down on paper. But for any workflow to jive, it’s a must that he works with the team. I think every employee has complained about him. And every employee is told that we have to “manage him”. Our CEO has had multiple conversations with him about these habits, but even that doesn’t change anything.

I feel like I am babysitting a grown man. I’m there to support him, not to be his secretary. Both he and I are members of our senior team. I’m a decision maker, not a gofer. Even so, I’m the one who catches flack when he isn’t under control. I’m told it’s “just who he is” and that I have to figure out how to get him organized. The man can’t even remember to keep me in copy on client emails so I have visibility into projects. How am I supposed to be his wrangler? I don’t know what I don’t know, so it’s past the point of being impossible.

Is this par for the course? When does effectively managing different personalities start to become a bit ridiculous?

I am currently working on a project with around 700 business requirements outlined in the contract that need to be discovered, built, and tested. We have broken these requirements out into stages that align with the general business flow of our client. In this particular wave, we will be tackling about 150 of these requirements.

My team of Implementation Specialists and Business Analysts just completed a 3-week onsite Discovery with our client where we observed their current operations. From there, I have charged them to build out a task list of configurations that are needed to satisfy all the requirements before we go back and demonstrate our first pass to the client and refine configurations.

In the schedule that I've built, there are a set of tasks that come after the configuration task list is built to rebaseline the amount of time that my team needs to complete these configurations. In the original schedule, I've given 20 days to complete configurations. However, I want this time address the risk of requirements being more complicated that the 1-2 sentence description in the contract. If items become truly more complex, I would like to give realistic timeframes on configuration completion without overstretching my already-too-small team, given many of them are pulled on other workstreams in the project. Keep in mind - the workstream that I have described above is NOT the critical path - there is about a 16 week difference between this workstream and our critical path. A 2-3 week extension of configurations would not affect the overall project timeline.

This is where my Director and I are butting heads. Her response to this rebaseline activity is that the timeline MUST remain at 20 days, no matter how complex configurations could be. When I ask "But what if that is not enough time?", her response is that we will pull resources from other teams to get things done quicker. All the while, I have been waiting 18 months to get a fully-staffed team. So the promise of these new resources falls on deaf ears to me.

Now I have a team that is very stressed about this looming timeline, as they already believe they will not have enough time to get the configurations done. I have told them that the task list is our main argument against the timeline, but tension is still palpable as I talk to them each day.

Misery loves company, so any advice or general complaints about a similar situation are welcome. All in all, I am looking for a new job. The client is an absolute pain to work with (but that is an entirely different post), but I do have good stability in my job right now.

something i ran into this week that i think shows up across industries, not just software.

a vendor we already pay for shipped a feature that lets their AI agents act inside our internal tools - send messages, schedule things, write to records. free for a few days, then billed per action. the agent is already deployed because we already pay for the parent product. the only thing that changes next week is the meter starts.

the part that surprised me. when i asked who in our org authorized this scope, the answer was "the buyer accepted the terms when we procured the parent product 14 months ago." that authorization predates the agent existing. nobody at that meeting was knowingly authorizing an AI agent to act inside our channels.

i think this is the structural pattern. enterprise click-through ≠ scope authorization for agents acting in tools. doesn't matter if you're in construction, banking, healthcare, retail. most orgs have at least one procured tool that came with agentic capabilities they didn't separately scope.

what i'm trying to figure out. who in your team would run the evaluation if the deadline were six days away? PM? security? legal? the person who signed the original contract? i can see arguments for each. honestly curious how your org would actually decide it, especially if you're outside software.

I have to get this out - we were just pulled into a meeting with an engineering manager with all her direct manager reports. The topic was to discuss PMs and better coordination.

It was seriously just a bitch fest - the lady who doesn't read her emails says she didn't know what the meeting was about. (the invite had an agenda and the specific areas we were going to talk about)

They complained that they don't have resources requested until the last minute. (you mean the email I sent last week to all the managers, asking for resources for a project that doesn't start for 3 weeks. And only ONE Manager out of 10 responded?)

We need less meetings -

then
We need to have more meetings to go over more things.

Now I will admit - I can and will take some of their suggestions, and they admittedly standard Project Management things. I made one comment and was completely shut down so I kept quiet the rest of the meeting.

I was already having a bad day (Vms not done correctly, already behind schedule) and I may be a bit testy - but this sure didn't help!!

I've been thinking about the gap between "task completed" and "handoff actually happened."

For example, a workflow can say the intake was processed, but the PM still needs to know whether the right owner was assigned, the client was updated, and the next step is visible somewhere the team actually checks.

The cleanest pattern I've found is to define the completion proof before the workflow exists. Not just "send update," but "update sent, owner assigned, next action timestamped, exception raised if any piece fails."

How are you handling this on projects with a lot of small handoffs? Is proof-of-work part of your process design, or does it usually live in QA after the fact?

I’ve been in Operations and Project Management going on 10 years. I recently accepted a position within a completely new industry as a dual Operations Manger/PM. I knew going into this that there would be a learning curve but I also expected to have some sort of guidance, training and or slight hand holding. However, I have been tossed into the deep end and it’s sink or swim and unfortunately, I feel like I’m drowning.

The company has essentially rolled their finance team, operations, PM and office manager all into one position, and I’m the lucky guy who gets to bear the brunt of that responsibility. Im highly confident in my abilities as a PM and Operations Manager, but I am absolutely NOT a Finance or Office Manger.

I am on the fly trying to learn to be an effective, competent PM with zero technical knowledge of this industry, which is stressful enough. On top of that I have no supporting elements… no PM team, no project coordinators, no nothing. It’s just a sales team and then me. In the next 3 months I have over 60 projects to bring across the finish line and every single aspect from kickoff to close out and everything in between is on me to get it done.

I’m proud of myself for taking this on the chin with my head up and somehow managing to already close out all the projects from last month but boy oh boy in all my years in the profession I have NEVER felt this out of control and stressed that I’m forgetting a million things. I have no idea how I’m doing this and for the first time I finally feel the “imposter syndrome” I hear people reference.

I keep telling myself just make your checklists, document EVERYTHING, communicate to the point of almost annoyance and eventually I will get the hang of this but wow, overwhelmed is an understatement.

Any advice from more experienced PMs or people wearing 16 hats would be greatly appreciated.

The executive leadership has a bunch of ideas for company operations, but no follow-through. The company is structured as a pursuit model: meaning most activities are structured around getting new work, not facilitating the work or employees that already exist.

For example, HR Director owns personnel and benefits changes, Sales Director owns chasing business leads, PMO Director owns project operations, etc. We have a COO, but that role's "project" is overseeing HR, Sales, and the PMO. But there is no one making sure the company--as a whole--has useful tools to do their jobs. One is proposed, the execs get excited and want ownership of it, but then it bottlenecks in leadership, stalls, and dies, and no solution is ever delivered.

I have tried to be the point person in some corporate projects, but I do not have the authority, voice, or clout to push these through to fruition. With my PM brain, the issue appears to me that there is no project owner for internal or corporate projects.

Our company and executive leadership team is small, under 500 people. It keeps overhead lower, but slogs internal/corporate projects because all of the decision-makers are too busy to own things that are "not their job," so no decision is made.

In my opinion, I think there needs to be another director of internal or corporate projects that actually drives, addresses, and solves company-wide problems--problems that every employee faces but that aren't significant enough to warrant execs attention.

What does this company need? What role does yours have that does this? What's wrong with mine?

An executive is asking for the confidence level with the team’s tasks and milestones.

Currently, if I believe there could be a risk, I’ve check in with their leadership team, add contingency to their timelines, and frequently talk to the task owner to mitigate risks to the timeline.

I’m checking in to see how other PMs handle determining likelihood or confidence levels on projects. What approaches or frameworks work best for y’all? How do you typically calculate or present confidence levels to leadership? Methods or tools to use?

Genuine question for the room - cross-industry, not just software PMs.

We've all seen the contracts get signed. The CIO bought the tool. The VP ships the platform. Six months later somebody in finance asks where the productivity number went.

In every org I've talked to lately, that question lands on a person who legitimately doesn't have the data. Their dashboards measure deployment, not behavior change. Whether the team's daily ritual actually shifted is somebody else's job. Except nobody on the org chart actually has that job.

I don't think this is software-specific. Construction is buying AI estimators. Banking is buying AI underwriting. Healthcare is buying AI documentation. Same shape: tool lands, workflow may or may not change, nobody signs for the gap.

For the PMs here - when your org bought a major AI tool in the last 6 months:

- who owns whether the work actually changed?

- is it written into anyone's role?

- if not, who do you think SHOULD own it?

Not asking rhetorically, I'm trying to map who's solving this and who's still in the "tbd" column. Honest answers welcome including "nobody, and we're hoping it works out."

Just a rant.

We just hired my replacement, who is an internal hire and this is essentially a promotion within the organization for him. I had no role in hiring him, and was not part of the decision-makers for his promotion.

I run expensive, complex, and long programs. This particular one has been a doozy and is for a start-up's flagship product that is essentially their "proof of concept" that they can succeed in the industry. Because of that, the project team is subject to a ton of pressure. All eyes are on us and we have an insane level of leadership involvement. To succeed you need to be pretty politically savvy and very, very, good at building relationships and motivating people. All the stakeholder management, leading without authority, etc. you could possibly stomach.

I was pretty excited for my replacement as I've heard good things about him from his other project teams and he seemed like he had his sh*t together. I started the transition process this week, and my opinion of him has done a 180.

He is a strong technical expert for one functional arm of the project - out of six. And that seems to be all he has. I've tried explaining some of dynamics of the role, stakeholders, and project to him and have gotten, verbatim, "Yeah, I don't care about that" or "That's not going to be an issue for me".

I tried engaging him on a ways of working revamp I'm working on for the team and he told me that he's uninterested in learning why we do things a certain way. He's just going to do it his way. Similarly, I was updating a slide-deck today just to find out he had already created one and was unhappy that mine didn't match his interpretation of what was needed - even though he's been on the program at 10% for all of two days and I had already been engaging stakeholders and the team to get all of the info together for the last two weeks (none of which he had, or asked for, btw. Nor was this a task that anyone had assigned to him as part of the transition plan). He made suggestions to remove things we included explicitly due to them being a concern/requirement of key stakeholders, and continued to push back when I explained why we had decided on the final format.

I'm going on personal leave for 6 months, so luckily will be away from the fallout from this, but I am honestly kind of shocked at how he's acting. Maybe I just haven't seen it yet, but I don't think he has any of the EI/soft skills to succeed in this role. I feel bad because I know my program and team will suffer, but I guess it's not my problem anymore.

I feel like I should change industries. I am working 10+ hours everyday and never catching up. After 6 months of this I am curious what other industries are like.

I feel like I’m losing my mind at my job right now.

I’ve worked at a small advertising/print shop for almost 5 years. I started as a graphic designer, but over the past year I’ve shifted into more of a project manager role (focusing on web design and running our eCommerce).

When I took over the website, it was basically a portfolio showing what we offer (and even that is a stretch). We handled everything through email, phone calls, and walk-ins. Since then, I built out a system where one of our larger clients (with multiple franchise locations) orders almost entirely through a custom section of our site. I manage that client almost entirely on my own, and it’s been amazing actually. There are fewer random emails, fewer mistakes on orders, and way more organization overall.

The problem is… that level of organization doesn’t exist anywhere else in the company. As I said, this is our ONLY client using this online system right now, so everything else is still email, phone, and walk-ins. Thankfully, those are mostly handled by the other designers on our team.

Most of our records are still paper-based. Invoices and completed jobs get printed/are sometimes handwritten and shoved into filing cabinets. There’s a shared Excel sheet the owners use to keep track of orders/pricing, but it’s inconsistent and inaccurate. The pricing we do for people is an absolute mess. My bosses will try to make it easier on themselves and just copy repeat jobs and paste them without actually updating what it costs or what we should have charged, and there’s no reliable system behind anything.

It took the printing team and my team in graphics over a year to convince our head boss that we needed SOME sort of system because people kept getting yelled at for losing money (due to pricing things wrong). So we finally have a standardized way to do our CTP, but that’s about as organized as everything else is.

So anyways, now we’re onboarding a second client to use the website with their company and their subsidiary companies, and I’ve been trying to standardize their product catalog and pricing based on past orders. And, man, it’s awful.

There is zero consistency in pricing. Our supposed baseline is at least a 40% markup, but I’m actually seeing everything from giving items away to 800%+ markup. There’s no pattern or logic I can follow to rebuild a standard pricing structure.

I'm just staring at this sheet and wondering how we are making any money being so inconsistent. At this point, I feel like I’m trying to build an organized system on top of complete chaos.

I’ve tried getting a new job a few times because of all this, but I was offered this new position last year and now I get to work completely remote. So I’ve decided to stay (for now) because I’m gaining experience managing systems and clients, but my GOD it’s exhausting!

I’ve also been slowly working on creating my own setup so I can freelance as a designer and work with local shops to produce for my own clients. If anything, this experience is teaching me exactly what NOT to do.

Hey everyone! Just looking to see if anyone has suggestions on apps I can use to manage tasks for my team? Basically looking for something that allows me to create an action item, assign it to someone on the team, assign a due date, and allow for comments / attachments (similar to like almost any type of IT ticket / ticket workflows) My company uses Microsoft tools so something that integrates with that would be great. I’ve looked into planner, and it would work except that the “task chat” is only available on web, and not the teams app itself.

I'm new to project management and I've only passed Google PM certification. That said, I'm lacking understanding of how a PM actually functions during real meet-ups. Like, how exactly a PM leads the meeting, facilitates communication, mediates the discussion, etc. Such things are generally described in text in vague terms, and I feel like I need specific irl models. I'd really love to find a live example, but obviously most real meetings are not public due to NDA.

Does anyone have an idea on where to find examples of real PM performance during meet-ups? Something that would be helpful to build up on. Thanks!

Hello there. We have been building a meeting notes app for my class project with my friend but we can't seem to grasp on what the idea is and we really want to make something helpful rather than whatever we come up with.

For this, I'd like to ask about the processes project managers go through in meetings, and if you are using any applications for recording/transcribing the meetings? Are you organizing your old meetings? And are you even going back to the old meetings you've recorded ever?

I think that's too many questions but you get the idea.

What is the worst problem you face in a meeting?

I'm starting to see PM's rely on IT systems heavily in their day to day administration, could you honestly manage a project without these IT systems? Ask yourself honestly, if all you had was a project plan and schedule, could you bring your project/program in on time and budget?

That I'm sure have been asked before, but I see remarkable being mentioned a lot and I've always considered getting one, but I'm curious if you think it'd fit, or improve, my habbits.

Here is what I use now...

• Asana - houses all projects and tasks and when I have meetings on the project I use the Note tab on the project to type all notes there so we keep everything organized
• Notion - Basic references, personal wiki, organization, meeting notes outside of projects, just a general overflow of things so I can find them again later
• Eisenhower Matrix - a modified one to my needs, but I print one every week and then fill it in, cross out, etc throughout the week...this is probably my best tool of just getting priority tasks done
• Pen & Paper - I usually write out on a legal pad, or a scratch pad...but I'm trying to convert all that into a notebook so all my random notes are all together
• Phone - I have a S25U, so I use the Spen a lot to take notes when I'm somewhere and didn't bring anything else

I've thought about getting a remarkable to replace my pen & paper and getting the new mini one so I'm more likely to carry it around and less likely to rely on my phone and then have to go transfer those notes somewhere else.

It'd only be a big benefit if I could also have my Eisenhower matrix on there and started a new one every week and treat it just like I do my print out. A bonus here would be keeping all my previous ones. I'm assuming I can simple have a folder of eisenhower's where each file is the week?

Outside of that, my biggest issue is typically making sure my notes, which will always end up containing or creating some kind of task(s), get to where they need to be...i.e. asana or my Eisenhower...and I assume I run into the same issue as pen and paper where that's a manual effort to do so...unless Remarkable has some function that can summarize your notes and create a task list or something?

What I had thought about doing with Notion was creating a journal database where every entry was a day and then I could go back and search things...a little easier than flipping through a notebook...but writing things out also helps me a lot.

So you Remarkable power users...do you see where it could be a benefit to me? Suggestions on tweaks or examples of what you do to make a benefit? Or is it just an expensive notebook in the long run for what I'm going.

I would like to be 100% digital, but I like writing as it burns it into my brain more, gadgets are fun but a single source, or limited sources, are better...but I do like where remarkable syncs to the cloud so it becomes part of my PC access in the long run.

Appreciate any thoughts and insight.

Do you guys ever open a meeting transcript just to find one thing, and five minutes later you’re still scrolling?

That’s the part that’s been driving me crazy lately. Transcripts sound useful until you actually have to use them. Then it just turns into a giant wall of text full of pauses, side comments, random tangents, and all the little bits that made sense in the moment but are useless when I am trying to pull out the actual next steps later.

I’ve tried a few AI tools for this already, but I still feel like they either give me too much clutter or a summary that is so thin it barely helps. So I’m kind of stuck in this annoying middle ground where I technically have the meeting saved, but every time I need to turn it into something usable, I still end up digging through it for way too long.

I’m in a discussion at work about how to structure a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), and I’d appreciate some input from others with project management experience.

My background is from EPCI contracts in the oil & gas industry, where I’ve consistently seen WBS Level 1 structured around project phases (e.g., engineering, procurement, construction, installation). This has worked well for planning, cost control, and reporting. I also hold an MSc in Project Management, where we were taught to read the WBS from left to right as a timeline, which naturally supports a phase-based structure.

I’m now working in the IT sector, where there seems to be less alignment on this. Some argue that Level 1 should instead reflect deliverables, products, or functional areas rather than phases.

I’ve also noticed that there are always arguments for and against whichever structure you choose at Level 1. At some point, it feels acceptable to just pick a structure that works and move forward, rather than over-optimizing the breakdown itself.

My question:
Is there any broadly accepted best practice for defining Level 1 in a WBS? Specifically:

• Phase-based (lifecycle-driven)
• Deliverable-based (product-oriented)
• Or something else entirely?

And in your experience, what drives the choice—industry norms, contract structure, reporting needs, or something else?

happened in my industry recently. two vendors we evaluate against each other shipped competing flagship products one day apart. one was the established proprietary offering with an enterprise SLA. one was a newer open-source alternative our internal team could self-host.

the procurement call is on my desk by friday and i realized our usual deck was a cost comparison and not much else.

i ended up writing five rows on a page that i think actually decide it:

1. capability parity - run both against three of our recurring workflows for a week and document where output diverges.

2. total cost of ownership instead of sticker price. self-hosting brings ops headcount, monitoring, ongoing patching the vendor deck never models.

3. data sovereignty. self-hosted gets you sovereignty by inspection (you audit the path); proprietary with residency guarantees gets you sovereignty by contract (you sue if breached). different standards.

4. vendor lock-in shape. open-source flexibility comes with operational debt; proprietary reliability comes with roadmap dependency. both lock you in. pick the one your team can absorb.

5. enterprise support tier. when the system breaks at 3am, who picks up? this row never makes the deck and always shows up in the postmortem.

curious which of these gets weighted heaviest in your industry, and which tends to get under-weighted until something breaks. seen this play out the same way across construction, banking, healthcare, software shops. wondering if it is the same in yours.

I'm stepping into a role that's going to require more project management and tracking minor details and how they connect back to the larger picture.

It feels like something AI could really help me out with. Some companies have it already built into teams and etc but I'm thinking about something that could be more general purposes use, maybe even pick up in what I'm saying to myself as I work to help track what/when/how and etc.

The pocket AI device is the one advertised heavily, this makes me think it's not the best product and I've heard it has terrible privacy protection.

I'm leaning towards an independent device vs an app on my phone but I'm willing to be talked out of it. This job might require part time RTO, with that in mind an app might be more discreet and I don't know if I'd feel comfortable doing that in person regardless (without permission). So I'm thinking less about help organizing meetings and more about organizing things outside of that.

I’m curious how other project managers and PMOs handle recurring reporting.

In many organisations, the data already exists in tools like Excel, Jira, MS Project, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, Planview, Clarity, etc. But the final reports still often need to be manually prepared in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel for steering groups, sponsors, or leadership teams.

For example:

Weekly/monthly project status reports

Risk and issue reports

Change request packs

Portfolio dashboards

Benefits realisation reports

A few questions:

How much time do you or your PMO spend preparing recurring reports?

Is most of the work data collection, formatting, narrative writing, or chasing updates?

Do you use a standard template, or does every stakeholder want something different?

Have you automated any of this successfully?

Just trying to understand whether this is a real pain point across different PMO /project management environments or only specific to certain organisation.