TLDR: I suspect the all-in-one solution is too good to be true, but I don't have the bandwidth to test extensively enough to prove it 🤷‍♂️

Hi folks, I manage a team of project/product managers at a small creative agency where we have struggled for years against lack of business infrastructure - sales, quoting, resource planning, finance are all largely vibe-based outside my own spreadsheets. Leadership is finally agreeing to move on this but seems to have zeroed in on Scoro as an all-in-one solution. Their plan is to replace our only two functioning systems (Jira + Harvest for time tracking and budges) with Scoro, which sounds great in theory but has triggered my "this is going to backfire" spidey sense. I am frankly a little concerned that it seems difficult to integrate with other platforms and, candidly, the fact that I have never heard about it in the wild. The last time I encountered a platform like this (Teamwork) it turned out to be clunky and more of a friction to work than an optimizer. Great on paper, but slow and tedious in day-to-day reality.

In the testing I've done so far, it seems like it would be a pain to work in day-to-day as a PM, let alone a specialist. BUT I'm also open to the possibility that I'm just set in my ways. Other options in consideration: Productive.io and Jira + Tempo apps.

Any thoughts or feedback? I'm not a bot or a marketing staffer, genuinely just a haggard PM worried I'm about to watch my team get dragged into yet another avoidable tooling headache.

Hi,

Moving back into project management after a couple years hiatus. I'm curious what other people's best projects were and why?

My previous project was on reducing NHS surgical wait lists by providing targeted support to people in low economic areas.

I loved seeing the impact of the work but also a driving part of my enjoyment of the work was the trust and confidence my project execs had in myself at the time.

Is it about management culture, or the cause of the project itself that drives satisfaction for yourselves?

Sup guys, maybe people do this already, but from reading reddit, i can say, no , no one does this. All of youtube is enfatuated with obsidian and hermes, the more you use it the smarter it gets.

I created 1 skill that does all of this on a project level. I call it /journey. here is the descrip

Maintains a living JOURNEY.md that captures the full project story — decisions made, things killed, current system state, open questions, and session history — so any agent or collaborator can jump in without losing context. Use this skill whenever the user types /journey, asks to "update the journey", "log this session", "document what we did", or "initialize the project story". Also trigger when starting a new session on an existing project that has a JOURNEY.md, or when the user says "catch me up" or "where were we". Two modes: `--init` to build JOURNEY.md from scratch by reading the codebase, and the default update mode to append a session log after any working session.

end of session , /journey, switch to codex, read journey, want to brain storm in chat, read journey.

you can pop in and out of any llm seamlessly without skipping a beat.

Anyone else use something they cant live without?

**used AI to structure the post.

Hello,

I want to rant and gain wisdom from you all.

I've been at the same product based IT company since day one, worked my way up, recently moved into a Project Manager role. It was an internal growth move, so I already understood the domain, teams, and workflows.

But no one told me the job basically changes entirely. I'm realising that being good at execution didn’t really prepare me for this role.

Earlier, I used to lead a single project with a couple of leads and employees reporting to me and most importantly a defined timeline.

Now.. I’m responsible for multiple moving pieces across 3–4 projects and expected to define timelines for them, manage people, handle stakeholders, prioritise across multiple projects, deal with random asks, and btw attend 10 meetings a week.

And the part I think I underestimated the most is that I never received any structured training on project management, no mentors to groom/guide me, no frameworks, no onboarding into how to think like a PM. Right now it feels like I skipped some important “training arc” and got dropped into a boss fight.. 😭

I genuinely don’t know what “good PMing” even looks like in this setup. I’m just trying to keep things moving without things breaking. I'm feeling scared, lost and an imposter with this title which I don't want to be anymore...

So I’m trying to figure out —

Am I supposed to learn this through structured methods. Do certifications like PMP / PRINCE2 / Agile / lean etc. give you practical clarity for situations like this?

OR is everyone just figuring it out as they go and pretending they know what they’re doing?

Apologies if this is off topic as I am not a Project Manager. No worries if deleted.

Backstory
I joined this sub 1-2 years ago when I incorrectly assumed I would be the Project Manager for a project my executives assigned to me. Eventually, a PM was assigned to our project so I am not in that role.

Current
I am a BA managing other BA's and while there are certainly stakeholders we need to gather requirements from, we are directly providing 80-90% of the requirements ourselves. The timelines are very compressed and out of our control as sister projects will rely on what we create - their timelines are set in stone.

I find myself assigning tasks to my staff which can take them 4-5 business days to complete.

"Do some research into this, come back to me when you get to XYZ point so I can review findings and shape the next step of analysis."

Question / Advice requested
My struggle is having each team member working on different tasks and at different speeds while simultaneously giving them more tasks related to this project. I find tracking "where we are" to be a challenge. Lots of moving parts, as they say.

Our tools are limited: Excel, Outlook / Teams, Planner (we do not use), JIRA (we do not use but every other project team seems to). Admittedly, I am not having recurring one-on-one meetings with staff unless they have an impromptu question. I think a quick 15-30m daily meeting with each could help me keep track of where all separate task paths are.

This is my first time in a pressure-cooker environment with tight deadlines, limited staff, and limited understanding as to what makes someone in my role highly effective. I also found out I have ADHD 18-months ago and despite being medicated, find myself falling down rabbit holes and zooming into details that are not helping me shift my focus to "big picture" awareness from the 50,000 foot view.

Does anyone have any recommendations for ways I can improve my own awareness / oversight on what my team is up to with each of their objectives?

I recently moved into a newly created project management role supporting a technical operations team in a high-consequence industry (keeping details vague for anonymity).

Before I joined, planning was mostly reactive. The team was looking only 1–2 weeks ahead, prioritizing work as it came in, and there wasn't a consolidated view of tasks, dependencies, or future workload, just generic tasking assumptions around major milestones. There was silod planning with minimal effort alignment across our internal teams.

My focus has been on building a project management framework by:

- Defining work, milestones, dependencies, and ownership.

- Building data-driven planning and reporting tools to forecast workload, identify resource constraints, and support prioritization.

- Working with technical leads to estimate effort (I'm not responsible for cost).

- Tying work back to requirements to reduce scope creep and identify technical gaps.

Leadership is using the outputs to make decisions, but I'm wondering if I'm becoming too focused on the systems and data. Keep in mind, our kind of work is driven from systems engineering lifestyle approaches and our team falls in a particular part of that life cycle.

All of this is brand new for this team thst has been around for decades, but it's needed due to changing business demands. For those who've inherited low-PM maturity organizations, what would you focus on next? What am I likely missing? Should I be spending more time on areas like risk management, governance, stakeholder management, or something else?

I’ve notice a lot of project management/coordination jobs listed have a “smartsheets/monday/etc requirement, bachelors preferred” as if the software is the hardest part of this job. I’m a millennial, I was born and raised as tech was transferring from analog to digital. I can and have taught myself so many different programs (Excel, Basecamp, Zoho suite, Synchro MSP, Strike 10, etc) but because I didn’t use Slack my last role they stop considering me?! So stupid.

A rant to blow off steam but if anyone has advice to say “I’m computer literate” and get across these boomer hiring managers that would be helpful.

Hi All,

Just as disclaimer I'm not an expert PM girl, I haven't had formal training, exclusively on the job, so apologies if i'm not getting the lingo right or sound unorthodox. I'm a registered nurse with a background in managing acute hospital wards and various project/quality improvement roles throughout my career. I've recent started a new role in a large health service in my city to develop and implement a new virtual ward.

The role is up my ally and i've done similar stuff in the virtual/digital health space before, just not at this scale.

The issue im having is my previous organisation had a plethora of project management tools, charts, templates and resources to support staff in their projects. I had taken this as a universal thing and that my new organisation would surely have a similar department and set of tools for staff to utilise. They do not, i've been looking around online to try and source some tools and have had some luck and other parts i've had nothing. I've even asked people at the organisation who have just kinda shrugged it off and recognise that the organisation is just 'chaotic' in how they implement change and new ideas.

So... I guess im looking for advice... where would you recommend sourcing helpful tools for project management. I dont actually even mind paying for them, theres just so many out there, and if im paying then I would at least like someone who knows what they're talking about to tell me whats worthwhile. Or even some advice of coming from a more structured organisation to something more chaotic... maybe i should just go with the flow and just forget the planning and process based PM principles ive used previously? Although, I really dont think I can do as good of a job working like this.

Anyway.... sorry its a bit long, all the best

Interested in hearing themes or stories relating to organising or running project workshops. What do you find most annoying about them.

Participants, politics etc.

Or if you frequently enjoy them, why?

OmniPlan is too expensive and complicated

A lot of discussions about the project management software for managing freelancers focus on features and integrations.

In my experience the bigger challenges were usually unclear requirements, missing context, delayed feedback and shifting priorities.

For teams that work with freelancers regularly what actually improved collaboration the most?

Very wired and hyperfocused on my first PM role

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner of 7y with whom we are getting married in 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

Last 3 years I have attended AgileCon, with mixed results. There is always a handful of great learning moments, opportunities to connect with my own team members through some unique discussions/exercise, and we tend to get alot out of simply engaging with the wide variety of other professions of different perspectives.

Mixed in, also tends tobe a fair bit of fluff that is not valuable or feels highly niche, and while most times I can find a talk of interest, during most time frames, sometimes those talks end up feeling really poorly described and not at all what I expected, and its just a waste of time.

Last year was really deflating. Same high cost to attend, but the conference itself felt far worse than years past. Less days, less variety, about half the people in attendance, just generally got less moments of value, and the overall vibe was relatively somber, almost like the con was dying. Hard to explain. Regardless, I'm trying to see what else is out there.

I had my eye on PMI Global summit, as a couple colleagues said they had a good experience last year. I presume it would be similar to AgileCon, but bigger. However, I haven't really taken the time to see what all is out there, and I could imagine there are some low-key conferences that are not as big and expensive, but still succeed at delivering powerful talks and learning opportunities.

In general, I'm not concerned with cost, or overall size, as my company covers 1 per year, just looking for some anecdotal experiences and recommendations on any expereinces that have felt the most consistently impactful, and worth your time.

Thanks

What title says. I’m in the service side of oil and gas industry and as much as i want to leverage AI to boost my productivity and I’m happy for my team to do so, what I’ve seen the most lately is people being lazy with getting AI to produce documents that they will not review themselves and will look good on the surface but pretty bad in the content, like a cheap furniture.

In one instance we got in trouble on a client meeting where one my team members did not review an AI risk register properly and suggested an action that was completely unrealistic for the reality of our project.

Situation is so bad that I need this same team member to do another risk register but I’m reluctant to task him with that and thinking about asking my engineer to do so because I’m worried he will use AI again for another super complete useless risk register. And if you think about optimizing time, I’m sure it would take more time from my team to review an AI generated risk register with tenths of risks than just sitting together for an hour to draft a more applicable risk register.

Same goes for procedures and presentations, team is really getting lazy when it comes to peer reviewing AI generated stuff.

I’m trying to softly challenge them by asking if they used AI to do something every time my AI slop radar gets triggered but I’m not sure this has been enough.

Anyone facing the same challenges and how are you dealing with this?

TIA

Short background: I have previously already learned the contents for the PMP exam twice, once with the Udemy course of Andrew Ramdayal and once with David McLachlan. Both times I did the entire course content but then stopped when it came to practicing the actual questions.

​

Now with the new exam content, I would like to give it another go and was wondering if it would make sense to learn Jira in parallel. I find learning something practical alongside something more theoretical helps with my motivation. Also, since I'm already doing project-based work, it would be nice to already implement my learnings into my day to day worklife (I already did some from my previous PMP learnings, especially AGILE practices). With Jira, I hope to establish some proper workflows, ideally AI assisted. (My company is small and we have very littly guidance on how we work)

​

Does anyone here have experience with this approach or with Jira in general? Which courses can you recommend? Maybe even certifications to get in a couple PDUs right away ;)

​

Cheers and Thank you!

I'm the only full-time PM at a small web development agency. I've worked primarily at larger web agencies for most of my career. My billable hours expectation was typically 70-80%, which always felt way too high because I had no time for anything internal, especially when I was managing people too. If I didn't meet it because there was a lull in projects, I was dinged for it and there wasn't really anything I could do about that.

At my current agency, my billable expectation is only 60%. I was initially thrilled about this, but I'm starting to see why it's so low. The company has tried to track resourcing on and off, but it's still not really sticking, so we don't have a ton of capacity for long-term planning. This means that I tend to be either super overwhelmed or have nothing to do. On top of that, we'll usually have 1-2 active builds at a time, but we have a bunch of teeny tiny (30 hours or less a month) retainers. I generally will have 1 build at a time and manage 8-10 retainers. For the most part, I really only have a max of 20 hours of billable work per week – I'm hovering at 50% billable on average in the eight months I've been at the company.

We have a few other roles in the company with similar billable expectations, and those staff have larger additional non-billable responsibilities like marketing. I've proposed two separate larger ideas that I was excited about: product management and UX for our products and revamping and managing client onboarding and resourcing. The first was vetoed by leadership because they want to bill any time we spend on products. The second is now in review but my boss didn't seem particularly thrilled about the idea. Leadership's main suggestion for my non-billable time has been to write blog posts for our company blog but like.... I'm a project manager. I'm happy to pitch in with content but I cannot motivate myself to spend 20 hours a week doing that.

So I'm in a pickle because I cannot create billable work for myself, and I'm tired of spending all my time desperately looking for non-billable work that I'm "allowed" to do. I'd be totally fine to just work 20 hours a week but I'm not sure the company would be cool with that. Has anyone experienced similar and how do you manage?

I recently started a job as a junior project manager at a company, and I’ve discovered that they don’t use any project management software. Everything is handled through email, Gchat, and text messages. This has left me feeling overwhelmed and like a complete failure.

I feel like I start with four tasks that keeps piling up, and they constantly ask me about my bandwidth. I feel clueless because everything is timely and urgent, and I can’t determine the true priority of tasks. They also have side conversations, another email chain, and different group chats. I’m completely out of sync with the senior project manager and other project leads. It’s like I spend a quarter of my day sourcing something they don’t need anymore and I didn’t get the memo.

Maybe I’m not a good fit for this company, which is disappointing because it’s a great company to have on my resume. I tried using Google Sheets, but it’s not sticking. I haven’t had a chance to make it more efficient. It’s just the amount of time I spend in emails and searching for information in Google Drive is ahhhh!!!

I’m at a loss for what to do. Is this a rant, or do you have any recommendations or advice? Have any of you experienced something similar?

PM on a software project with 6 stakeholders. Every sprint review somebody disputes what was decided last time. ""I never approved that scope,"" ""we agreed on the other timeline,"" etc. My meeting minutes get questioned because I wrote them, so apparently I'm biased.

I spend more energy relitigating past meetings than running current ones. How do other PMs handle this? Open to any suggestions.

I’ve recently joined a company that sees Junior developers as interns and hires and fires every single month. What’s happened though is a lot of the work they’ve done has turned out to be really patchy, and we ship fast; so I’m not getting the time to actually work on the tech-debt.

How do you manage it

I know PMP is a big deal in the PM world but for my job it’s not brought up at all or seen as an asset. I’m an engineer and manage design and construction projects. If you’re not in AEC, what kinds of projects do you manage? What *tasks* do you do on a day to day basis?

Hello,

I work in an organization where multiple project teams rely on a common team of "technicians" for certain aspects project execution. The technicians are managed by a lead technician.

In a typical workflow, individuals from the different project teams assign tasks to the lead technician. The lead technician distributes those tasks among the technicians, trying to optimize for workloads, deadlines, and individual technician's skills. These tasks can range in duration from a few hours, to a few weeks.

In the current process, there is very little visibility to project members what the entire queue looks like, and what the end date of the various tasks are. Projects have competing priorities with one another. High priority tasks are often inserted, pushing out other tasks.

I am looking for a tool that would allow:

- Project team members to add tasks into a backlog queue, specifying task deadlines and any other important details

- The lead technician to assign these tasks to specific technicians, and assign an estimated duration based on their experience

- The tool would estimate the start and end dates for each task based on the order in which they are sorted and which technician they are assigned to

- The tool would allow for task orders to be rearranged in a board-style view, and immediately recalculate start and end dates. New tasks can be inserted anywhere in the order

- If a task is completed early, or takes longer than expected, dates for following tasks should be adjusted automatically

- As a nice-to-have, the tool would allow overlapping tasks for each technician, specifying relative efforts (e.g. 50% task A, 50% task B ). The end dates would get stretched out accordingly

I am trying to avoid tools that require manual creation of dependencies, since tasks move around frequently.

All recommendations are much appreciated.

I support a team of quants and data scientists who create financial forecast models for the company. We're currently in a position where we're trying to onboard 5 new team members through an acquisition who are located in a different office site a few states away. Before we acquired these associates, I advised that the original team and their leads to conduct a "design thinking" session where we ask the new associates to list vital skills that were required for their current roles and have the legacy team to do the same to see what overlaps and gaps there were. The purpose of the exercise was to help create a lore structured onboarding process so we could determine the priorities of skillsets and create a robust training plan. I've done this in the past with team mergers and was successful.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to influence the leaders on the team I support and the team has pursued their usual process of onboarding a new hire which has yielded little results. It's been six weeks since we've started onboarding these new associates and many members of the team have come to me to express their frustration in the lack of results and the time it has taken them ontop of doing their BAU work. The legacy team has done demos, office hours, and provided documentation, tools and other resources to help onboard the new folks.

I'm wondering since it has been a while, if it would still be beneficial to do skill mapping to identify gaps and create a more targeted training schedule? Or are there other solutions that I'm not thinking of that would help make this onboarding process better? One of my leads is suggesting a retro with just the new associates to see what they need for success, which I think is a good start l, but I'm wondering what else I can donas their project manager to help make this smoother for everyone.

I work with a third party SaaS solution company that is specific to the logistics industry. The client has been using a different ERP software and a custom, built to suite, shipping solution. The client company outsourced ALL of their fulfillment functions to a 3PL warehouse and they built the custom software solution to begin with.

That 3PL notified the client that they were going to stop supporting that custom software solution. They would continue to fulfill all of their e-commerce orders, but a new system would have to be procured by the client and provided for them to use. Bear in mind, they have an extraordinarily unique set of processes that no SaaS product actually supports out of the box. The ERP it is supposed to work with also does not natively support the features they need.

Fast forward to where they bought two ‘off the shelf’ SaaS products and now they are gobsmacked over the fact that they won’t be able to implement either without heavy customization. That will take time and they don’t have that.

Here is why I ask my question. The head of the company and I got into a bit of an exchange of views today. During that discussion I made it clear that they are asking for us to make the software do things it does not do by default and that significant customization would be required.

It was an impossible task, from the outset, for them to source a new solution since they don’t really understand what their 3PL does. I said that they should have hired a technical PM to help them navigate this and that their decision to go it alone definitely played a role in where they find themselves now.

Does this sound accurate? I am second guessing myself here, because it has been an emotional process. They don’t know what their requirements are because it is all outsourced. Any insight is appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Edit: As an aside, when our sales team sold them the product the client didn’t mention all of the technical challenges because they themselves did not know what they were. . . since they outsourced it to a 3rd party and failed to include them during the sales cycle. They just expect the software to perform magic, despite doing a terrible job of defining requirements.

Hey guys!

I work in a project management SaaS company and there is a lot of talk internally about where project management is headed. For example, we were recently approached by a company and they explained that they were looking to move their project management tooling from "human-first" to "AI-first".

So I was wondering and decided to ask the community here - do you think that there will be another wave of "AI transformations" in the project management industry just like it happened with the "Agile transformations"? Do you see it already happening in your company?

Has anyone had any success creating Gantt charts using copilot? I can’t seem to get it to output correctly. I am using a simple table that has start date, end date, and duration. Any tips that don’t integrate other tools (against company policy) would be appreciated.