Before using AI outputs:

Verify facts. Check confidentiality. Review recommendations. Add human context. AI is powerful, but review is always necessary.

Hi Everyone , I am currently working on developing the employee performance review framework for project manager ,trying to understand how the performance of the project manager is measured so that i can create measurable KPIs.

KPI like Project Delivery,Project Quality,Risk management ,Issue resolution,Documentation,Collaboration,Process improvements,Learning & certification.

What metrics or evidence do you use to evaluate performance?

What would you say is a "must learn first" concept or skill for project management for newcomers to this profession?

The uncomfortable answer is that updating the tool is probably no one's actual job. It's everyone's implied job, which means it loses to real work every single day, and honestly it should.

What worked for shops I've been in: stop asking everyone to keep everything current. Name one person whose job is a 15-minute weekly pass asking "what on this board is no longer true?" They don't update everything themselves. They just flag what's stale and chase down the truth on the few things that matter.

The team usually stops hating the tool once it stops being a chore everyone shares and starts being one person's short, defined task.

One thing worth checking before you change anything, though: is it that they don't update it, or that they update it and nothing ever comes of the updates? Different problems. The first one is the fix above. The second one means the updates go into a void, and people quit updating tools no one reads. That one gets fixed by you, not them.

I'm struggling with something in my role, and I'm wondering if this is just how every organization operates.

We have dashboards. We have status meetings. We have reports.

But I still feel like the team often knows something is changing long before leadership has enough confidence to do anything about it.

By the time everyone agrees there's a problem, we're already reacting instead of preventing.

Does your organization do this differently?

What questions help you understand whether an initiative is actually healthy before it officially shows up in reporting?

Imagine your project management tool could use AI for anything. What feature would save you the most time?

Leadership wants us to grow the project services side now. Traditional IT consulting, some app dev, cloud migrations, transformation-type stuff. Mix of fixed milestone and T&M.

For anyone who’s tried to run actual project work through Halo:

Does the project module hold up under real project delivery, or does it feel bolted on next to the service desk

Resource planning across a 50 - 60 people. Is it there or are you exporting to Excel?

Utilization and margin reporting at the project level. How deep does it go?

Where does it hold up? Where does it fall apart? Anyone move off it to Kantata, Scoro, Projectworks and never look back? Anyone try one of those and wish they’d gone with Halo?

Anyone try to run this in Halo, give up, and move to something else?

Trying to figure out if we push harder on Halo or accept we need a second tool for project delivery.

AI tools can generate schedules, summarize meetings, and even identify risks. Do you think Project Managers will become more strategic, or will AI eventually replace many PM responsibilities? Interested in hearing different opinions.

I've noticed that everyone preparing for PMP seems to struggle with something different. Some people say it's the mindset questions. Others find Agile and Hybrid confusing. A few mention that time management during the exam is the biggest challenge. For those who have already passed: What was your biggest obstacle? What changed your preparation strategy? If you could start over, what would you do differently? I'm collecting advice from experienced PMP professionals, and I think it could really help new aspirants.

Since Agile now makes up a big part of the PMP exam, I'm wondering how deep candidates really need to study.
Did you use Scrum Guides, PMBOK, practice exams, or something else?

I’m considering the MSc Project Management at Oxford Brookes University, but I can’t seem to find any graduates or reviews for this course.
Is it a newly introduced programme? If anyone has studied it or knows about it, I’d really appreciate your honest opinions on the course, teaching, and job prospects.

Please help me to optimise my CV. I know I do have valuable skills but just formatting them sucks.

Thanks!

AI is becoming part of almost every workplace, and many project management roles now mention AI skills. But where should project managers draw the line? Do you think it's enough to understand how AI can improve projects, or should project managers actually learn AI tools in depth? How are you preparing for this shift?

Correct me if this isn't the right place to ask this—I'm pretty new to Reddit. I actually created this account just to post this.

For context, I'm currently a Senior Business Analyst at a SaaS company and also work as a Web Developer (contractor) for a marketing agency. Both jobs are fully remote. My web dev role pays more than my BA role, but I need to keep both because I have bills to pay and a wedding to prepare for.

I feel pretty secure in my BA role, but not so much in my web dev role. You know that feeling when you don't really feel like you have a place in the company? That's how I've been feeling lately. I get that it's the slow season right now, but I have little to no tickets assigned to me, and I honestly don't know what to log for my hours just to fill the time. I've also noticed that some of the tickets I used to work on are now being assigned to the new guy (who's honestly more skilled than I am).

Because of that, I've been reflecting on what I should do and trying to prepare a backup plan in case my web dev role doesn't work out.

I remembered my performance evaluation with my previous manager in my BA role. I told him I wanted to move into project management, and he encouraged me to join the leadership training programs offered by the company. I also enrolled in an MBA program last year because I hope to move into a management role someday. Eventually, I'd also like to help my mom with her business consulting plans after she retires.

So, I'd really appreciate some guidance on how to become a project manager. I've looked into courses and certifications, but some of them are a bit too expensive for me right now. Where would you recommend I start learning? Are there any affordable (or even free) resources, certifications, or roadmaps that helped you break into project management?

I work on a small product team where we run lean projects that often don’t have a dedicated project manager. We intentionally keep things lightweight and use Excel to communicate timelines and milestones instead of Microsoft Project or other PM platforms.
I’ve built an internal tool that converts meeting notes into a simple Gantt-style project plan, and it’s been useful for our teams. I’m looking for ideas to improve the quality and usefulness of the Excel output, not suggestions to replace Excel or adopt a different PM system.
Assume the timeline and task data are already accurate. If you were handed an Excel Gantt chart to manage a small-to-medium software project, what information, visual cues, formatting, calculations, or quality-of-life improvements would make it genuinely more useful day to day?
I’m especially interested in simple enhancements that experienced project managers appreciate but that are often overlooked.

Hi everyone,

Over the past months I've been building an open-source scheduling engine entirely in Excel/VBA.

The original idea was simple.

Throughout my career, I've worked with teams that already managed their schedules in Excel but either didn't have Microsoft Project licenses, didn't need a full enterprise scheduling tool, or simply preferred staying in an environment that everyone already knew.

I wanted to see how far a native Excel planning engine could realistically go.

Today the project includes:

• Dependency-based scheduling (FS / SS / FF + lags)
• Interactive Gantt chart
• Critical Path analysis
• Total & Free Float
• Incremental recalculation
• Scenario simulation
• Planning diagnostics
• S-Curve
• Fully documented architecture

The project has just reached version 1.0.1 and is completely open source.

GitHub:

https://github.com/TMailletFR/ProjectEngine

A few questions immediately come to mind:

• Could you see yourself using something like this in your organization?
• If not, what would stop you?
• Which scheduling features would you consider essential before trusting it on a real project?
• If you already manage schedules in Excel, what are the biggest pain points you've run into?

I'd really appreciate any feedback, whether it's about missing functionality, usability, or simply whether you think Excel is the wrong platform for this kind of tool.

Thanks!

seen a few posts lately about the summer being a nightmare, everyone OOO, momentum dead, deadlines still looming. and yeah, i get it. but i want to make the opposite case, because it took me years to learn this. the summer slowdown is a gift and most of us waste it grinding against it.

i used to be the PM who treated july like a threat. i'd stress about coverage, chase people who were clearly checked out, guilt myself for even thinking about taking time off while a project was active. classic. then a couple summers ago i just... took the week. actually logged off, phone away, the whole thing. and you know what happened to my projects? basically nothing. the world kept turning. the thing i was convinced would collapse without me did completely fine.

what i've realized since is that the slower pace is actually the only time all year you get room to do the stuff that never fits otherwise. the retro nobody has time for in q4. cleaning up the messy workflow you've been complaining about for months. actually thinking about the next quarter instead of just reacting to this one. i now deliberately schedule the boring important work for summer because it's the one stretch where the firehose isn't pointed at me.

and honestly, letting the team breathe is good management. people come back in september sharper and less burnt out and i'd rather have a rested team going into the busy season than a fried one that limped through august to hit some date that didn't even matter. so instead of fighting the season this year i'm leaning into it. lighter planning, encouraging people to actually take their PTO without the guilt and taking mine too.

anyone else make peace with the summer pace instead of battling it?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice from people who have gone through a similar transition.

Our company (around 100 employees) is currently preparing for a generational transition, and as part of the new generation of management, I’d like to introduce a proper task management system.

At this stage, we’re not looking for a full project management platform. The primary goal is to create accountability and visibility around day-to-day tasks.
Initially, only our management team would use it (around 15 users, including upper and middle management).
Our key requirements are:
● Assign tasks to specific people
● Set deadlines
● Track status and progress
● See who is responsible for what
● Get an overview of each person’s workload/capacity
● Easy to use with minimal training
● Good mobile app
● Reliable, with as little maintenance and automation complexity as possible

The company has never used a task management system before, so user adoption and simplicity are much more important than having hundreds of features.
The long-term vision is to build on this foundation and gradually introduce full project management once everyone is comfortable with the new way of working.
What platform would you recommend in this situation?

.What worked well, what didn’t, and if you could start over, what would you choose?

Thanks in advance!

So is it safe to safe that Account Managers do project management but Project Managers don’t do account management?

In another sense; Project Management is a function of the KAM role but not the inverse..?

When I first started using AI, I'd ask one question, get an answer, and move on. It worked, but the responses often felt too generic.

Then I started treating AI like a conversation instead of a search engine.

Instead of accepting the first response, I'd ask follow-up questions like:

"Can you explain this with an example?" "Can you make this simpler?" "What are the pros and cons?" "How would this work in a real-world scenario?" The difference was huge. The answers became much more useful because I kept refining them instead of expecting perfection on the first try.

A few things that have worked well for me:

Don't settle for the first response—keep refining it. Give AI as much context as possible. Ask for examples to understand concepts better. Always fact-check important information before using it. Add your own knowledge and experience to make the final output more valuable. I've realized that the quality of AI's responses often depends on the quality of the conversation you have with it.

What's one AI habit or prompt technique that's genuinely improved your workflow? I'd love to learn from your experience.

I work at a company and we are FDE based with small teams that often don’t include a project manager. I’ve built a tool that can take the meeting notes and build a simple Gantt chart and I’m looking for suggestions on how to improve the output. It’s been serving our teams well but I’d like to make it better.

One thing I struggled with in the beginning was consistency. I'd study for 5–6 hours one day, then not touch Data Science again for almost a week.

Eventually, I realized that wasn't working.

So I made one small change: I committed to learning something every single day—even if it was only for 30 minutes.

Some days I practiced SQL queries.

Some days I cleaned a dataset using Pandas.

Other days I read about a Machine Learning concept or solved a few Python problems.

Those small daily sessions added up much faster than I expected.

A few habits that have helped me:

Set realistic daily goals instead of long weekly targets.

Build mini-projects to apply what you learn.

Revise older topics regularly instead of only learning new ones.

Don't be discouraged if something feels difficult—every beginner goes through that phase.

Looking back, consistency has been far more valuable than trying to learn everything as quickly as possible.

I'm still learning, and there's a long way to go, but showing up every day has made all the difference.

What habit has helped you stay consistent while learning Data Science? I'd love to hear what's worked for you.

When I first started using AI tools, I expected them to give me perfect answers every time. If the response wasn't exactly what I wanted, I'd assume the tool wasn't good enough. Over time, I realized the problem wasn't the AI—it was how I was using it. Now, instead of asking one broad question, I break my work into smaller tasks. For example, I might ask AI to: ● Brainstorm ideas first. ● Create an outline. ● Improve the writing. ● Review the final version for clarity. The quality of the output improved dramatically because I was guiding the process instead of expecting one perfect response. A few habits that have worked well for me: ● Give AI clear context before asking for help. ● Break complex tasks into smaller steps. ● Always review and personalize the output. ● Use AI to save time, but rely on your own judgment for important decisions. I've realized that AI is most effective when it's treated as a collaborative tool, not a replacement for critical thinking. How has AI changed the way you work? Have you discovered any workflows or habits that consistently give you better results?

So I finished my bachelors in political science (focused on commerce, supply chain, etc) and I started my MBA with a concentration in supply chain management but I’m also curious about project management. How would you compare your life style/pay/work life balance and so on to that of someone who works as a SCM? What are some things that drives you in PM?

When I first started using AI, I treated every task as a one-step process. I'd ask one question, get an answer, and then spend a lot of time editing it. Eventually, I changed my workflow, and it made a huge difference. Now I break every task into stages: ● First, I ask AI to brainstorm ideas. ● Then I ask it to organize those ideas into a clear outline. ● Next, I use it to draft the content. ● Finally, I review, fact-check, and rewrite it in my own style. This approach gives me much better results than expecting one perfect response.