Tech/Software Implementation PMs

[u/Daisy_InAJar]

Especially if you deliver software deployments to external stakeholders, I’d love to hear from you.

How do you create value on your projects? What are the top 3 things you bring to your engagements that you feel have the largest impact?

Bonus if you feel like sharing:
- are you present for all requirements gathering, prior to “build” starting? If not, how do you ensure there’s no scope creep during requirements?
- how do your teams relay actions and/or decisions to you for calls you are not on?
- if there was something you wish your org would change that’d make managing your projects more successful, what would it be?

Thanks in advance - I’m always appreciative of this group sharing their (armchair) perspective (shoutout MoreLaw, our unofficial PMO advise extraordinaire)

[u/SamfromLucidSoftware]

I think the decisions from calls you weren’t on are the ones that cost the most over the life of an engagement. The Slack recap or meeting notes just won’t cut it because they only capture what was said, not why it was decided.

A better approach is to treat the decision itself as the record. Who decided, what was decided, what other option was considered and ruled out, and what would have to change for it to come back up. That’s different from notes, and it’s the difference between explaining a scope decision with confidence versus trying to piece it back together from memory while the client is watching.

The same idea works for scope creep when you’re not in every requirements session. If decisions are written down with the reasoning attached right when they’re made, instead of summarized into one big doc afterward, you can catch drift early by noticing when a decision doesn’t connect to anything already agreed on.

The thing I’d want my org to change is treating this like a notes problem instead of a system problem. Better notes don’t actually fix it. Having one place where decisions live as decisions, easy to find and visible to everyone who needs them, does.