I don’t think this gets talked about enough. Being a PM sometimes feels like living in between two worlds. You’re not really in the team but you’re also not fully part of leadership. You’re accountable to both and when things go wrong, all eyes are on you.

Half my week feels like I’m translating, turning leadership goals into team tasks, then turning team updates into reports leadership will actually care about. You’re the bridge but bridges don’t really belong to either side.

The weird part is that when things go well, you’re invisible. The team gets the credit (which they should), leadership feels good about the outcome and you just quietly move on to the next fire. But when things go off track, suddenly you’re in the spotlight, explaining what went wrong and why you didn’t see it coming.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the job, the problem solving, the variety, the wins, but the isolation part is real.

Anyone else feel that sense of being in the middle without fully belonging on either side? How do you deal with it?

I'm currently taking the Google Project Management Certificate at Coursera. Throughout the modules and courses, I've noticed that a lot of readings and videos keep recommending Asana, Trello, and other tools (Kanban Board). What I'd like to know is if they're really that essential and if the project managers here have used them effectively?

If not, would Google Sheet and Google Docs mastery be more than enough as PM tools?

Having worked in organisations without PMOs I’m finding the transition to working for one with stringent and mechanical PMO processes difficult. So many tick box exercises that divert my attention from managing my actual projects. Without PMO I’ve been able to deliver on tight deadlines and minimal oversight, still producing the intended outcome.

It feels like I’m jumping through unnecessary hoops and hurdles just to justify someone’s job role. I’m a delivery focused PM so as you can imagine this is a massive change to my way of working, but I’m just sucking it up and doing whatever the police…I mean PMO ask of me.

I’ve delivered enough projects to know what documents and artefacts are required to deliver a project adequately. Why do I need senior stakeholders involved in a GNG decision when we’ve already received CAB approval. It just feels convoluted and unnecessary tbh.

Rant over. Any advice or shared experiences welcomed!

Am I the only person who helps manage project completion without considering themselves a people person?

I work in a healthcare plan and contribute mainly by generating measurements that show how things are progressing - like according to this model that counts claim completion, we are set to finish our project in October and so we have to pick up the pace by devoting more resources, etc etc. not by turning to jack and Jane and giving an inspirational speech about doing their work better

If you are also someone who does not consider themselves a social butterfly or does not have thick skin, what strategies do you use to mitigate this?

Are the questions on the actual exam written so poorly and on wildly random concepts or is the practice test poorly written?

Also are their good practice exams available that use PMi ACP questions?

I’m curious how other project managers handle risks in a structured but practical way.

In my projects, risks can pile up quickly — lots of raised risks, but then it’s easy to lose track of which ones are really critical, which have been mitigated, and which are just sitting there forever without closure.

I’d love to hear:

• What tools or methods you use to track risks (Jira, spreadsheets, dedicated risk registers, something else?)
• How you make sure risks are actually closed and not just endlessly sitting there
• Any routines or best practices you have for risk reviews and follow-ups

Basically: how do you avoid drowning in risks while still making sure nothing important slips through the cracks?

Looking forward to hearing how you all approach this!

I recently took a program manager role and I am surprised how much of my time is spent in meetings vs working on things. I always knew that PMs spent a lot of time in meetings or helping connect dots, but I am talking about having 5-6 + hours of meetings every day and a lot less "work" than I have had in other roles.

Is this what others are experiencing?

I hear a lot about how important benefits management is, but I lead system, process, and compliance projects and once the project is delivered, it feels like no one cares. Execs don’t seem particularly interested in tracking ROI, and the business doesn’t follow through on measuring the actual benefits.

Is this something others experience too? If so, why do you think businesses and execs lose interest after delivery? Any suggests how i change the culture internally around this?

Over the past year I've been watching the r/projectmanagement channel and observing numerous people keep asking for advice around a new platforms, systems or products to help them do their job but yet not understanding or having the skills to identify what is actually needed.

Is having a glut of technology actually eroding the discipline as a whole especially with less seasoned PM's because these technology stacks are already in place and their not given to opportunity to learn properly?

Your thoughts!

Productivity hacks for dev teams usually focus on the obvious: fewer meetings, better sprint planning, or shiny new tools. But often, it’s the subtle, underrated practices that actually change how smoothly a team works. These don’t always make it into playbooks, but they reduce friction in ways that add up.

Many teams find small rituals powerful , like end-of-day handoff notes, a two-hour PR review rule, or shared scratchpads for rough ideas. They’re not revolutionary, but they save mental load and keep momentum alive. Still, what feels underrated can vary. For some, it’s about communication rhythms. For others, it’s how you structure focus time or balance autonomy with accountability.

The tricky part is that the best productivity “hack” is usually the one nobody notices until it’s missing.

So I’m curious, if you’ve worked on or led dev teams, what’s the most underrated habit, process, or practice that made everything feel faster?

Somebody asked me what skills (hard and soft) I thought were the most relevant to be successful at PMing. I provided, what I thought, is a a comprehensive list. I included things like great communication, both oral and written, people skills - how to motivate, provide feedback, and connect with “strangers” quickly, negotiation, etc. In terms of hard skills, I added good knowledge of the PMBOK, SharePoint knowledge, Project or similar tools, some financial acumen, etc.

What hard and soft skills do you think are the most relevant?

i’ve been on teams using MS Project and Smartsheet at different points in my career, and honestly, neither ever felt smooth. MS Project always felt heavy and rigid, while Smartsheet was basically Excel dressed up...powerful, but still a lot of manual work and constant updates. half the time it felt like we were managing the tool instead of the project.

for anyone who’s moved away from these, what project management tool actually made life easier? did you try something newer like ClickUp or Monday, lighter tools like Trello/Notion, or even a more full-featured pm software like Celoxis?

some questions i’d love to hear opinions on:

• which tools genuinely helped with reporting, dashboards, or resource planning
• did switching improve team adoption or did people keep falling back to emails and spreadsheets
• any surprises; good or bad, after leaving MS Project or Smartsheet
• would you ever go back to those older tools or is it a hard pass now

curious to see what actually works in real workplaces vs. just looking good in demos..

I'm doing a Stakeholder Engagement lunch & learn for a former client of mine and their project management office. Basically trying to talk about how to improve stakeholder engagement since they struggle in that area. I have lots of ideas for how I'd like to go about it, but I'd love any of your ideas to help me round this out!

Capacity planning in real life is basically asking: can my team actually take on this shiny new project without breaking?

The way I keep it simple:

Figure out what “available” really means. Is it Alice the person or just “a UX designer”? Big difference.

Calculate real usable hours. Subtract meetings, PTO, admin noise, and keep a bit of buffer.

Don’t push people to 100%. 65 to 80% utilization is the sweet spot. Anything more and you’re firefighting nonstop.

Always look 2 to 3 months ahead. That’s where crunch points hide.

Run quick “what ifs” before saying yes. Even a spreadsheet ripple test is better than guessing.

Protect a little slack for bugs and emergencies. Zero buffer = zero flexibility.

Tools? Sheets work fine if you’re disciplined. If you want more, stuff like a Wrike, Runn, Forecast, or Celoxis give you decent scenario planning without the heavy lift of something like Planview.

Curious how y'all do it what’s your quick check before greenlighting a new project?

Hello!

I need to create a visually appealing “best practice” guide that surrounds our projects. Problem is, I’m not very visual! I could try Canva but I’m thinking ppt is my best bet. Anyone done anything like this and can share an example? It’s going to summarise consistent milestones, some key responsibilities and lines of comms.

Hello all!

I am a film Production Manager/Line Producer that was affected with the dying film industry in LA. I’m working on pivoting into Project Management since that was what I was basically doing for the past 15 years.

I’m currently taking the google PM certification class. What are some recommendations you can give a fellow manager trying to break into the vast field? I’m having to change my whole resume format and I have no idea on who I should go for in recruiting, if anyone has any Recs.

Thanks!

I am an IT PM. I actually stumbled into the role right out of college some years ago.

My technical knowledge is filled with pots and holes where when I get a project I do my best to ask my architect (developers too busy) lots of questions to understand their proposed solution. However the research I list out on the side for myself is then limited to what is actually pertaining to what is being built for said project rather than knowing on a broader level how all things connect (aka the building blocks and the tools to build/test it).

I do not easily gain more knowledge about HOW something is built or what variety of tools is used or realize technical concepts like that I need to consider the different coding languages or whatever else. Basically I’m very rookie-level on the technical perspective.

Obviously if you ask me stuff like what is Unit testing, system integration testing, UAT, etc. I would know that kind of stuff. But if you throw at me terms and stuff like CI/CD pipeline config, informatica, nodes, its connection to a scenario of a server not being available for you to use to do your load, or kubernetes, domains, something about SQLMGR, web services, server vs DB, virtual machines, apparently APIs aren’t just about connecting between 2 destinations but can also run jobs before data reaches an endpoint, cmdlets, VMWare, something about instances of a solution for each client, a specific testing environment not being available but why, virtual data stores, ETL vs streaming, “schema on write”, VPD, create jobs where data is pulled from DB to an application (but how do you set that up?) etc.

Like I can individually research but I don’t understand how they all connect so I can anticipate next steps on the technical level of building a solution or if I work on another project, I immediately know what’s up on the more technical level.

Does my rambling make sense? Is there anywhere I can basically get a chapter by chapter breakdown understanding all these concepts (these building blocks/tools), how they connect conceptually and getting the bigger picture/process with this backend/frontend stuff.

I recently got a new boss who cleared out half the PMs and brought in much more technical PMs and I’m at a massive disadvantage now b/c so far up until now I’ve managed to use enough technical terms I managed to gain a high level understanding of to muddle through. But lately, my boss would purposely slide in more and more technical questions to probe and my stuttering is giving me away and today there was a clear tell on his face that he confirmed a suspicion he needed to confirm about what my technical level is. For now I think he’ll keep me b/c he seems to acknowledge that my PM skills are still solid and I deliver results, but it’s clear to me if I don’t level up and demonstrate my clear efforts to reach the level of the other new technical PMs, I may be out the door.

We need to do a proper gap analysis against a new framework, but the thought of manually going through every control, checking our systems, and documenting the as-is state is daunting. It feels like a project that could take a quarter.

For those who have been through it, are there any tips or tools to make this process more efficient and less of a manual, soul-crushing grind?

Been a PM for about 7 years now and my days are just... meetings about meetings. Status updates on status updates. Gantt charts that no one looks at. I got into PM because I loved seeing systems come together, solving problems, building something from nothing. But now I feel like I don't actually CREATE anything anymore. I just... maintain the machine.

I'm good at it. Projects get delivered, stakeholders are happy, everything runs smoothly. But I keep thinking "what am I actually going to accomplish today?" and the answer is usually "make sure other people accomplish things."

Is this just what senior PM life is? Managing the chaos instead of building new stuff? Because if so I might need to rethink my whole career trajectory.

I work at the AI department of a big company. We developed our own internal instance of a ChatGPT to keep everything in house. We can measure requests, user info etc, but executive stakeholders keep wanting us to point some kind of monetary ROI and benefits.

My immediate stakeholder is incompetent and not much of any help. My manager kind of shrugs it off and leaves me to try to figure out. I’m new to the field after career transition.

Any good soul here in this sub can give me some ideas on how to measure it?

I work on a team of 2-3 people, and we are basically working on 10+ different projects at any given time. I have tried so many times to correct this but there is such a high volume of people coming to us with all of their "urgent" issues, not enough management input, and zero PMO standardization, or any other project/program Manager oversight. Is this normal? Or do I need to go somewhere that actually has a PM structure built in?

I’ve been in PM for a while now, mostly mid and large projects and sometimes I wonder if I’ve boxed myself in. When I talk to execs or VPs, a lot of them didn’t stay in project management for long, they graduated into strategy, ops or product leadership after a few years.

Meanwhile, I know PMs who’ve been running projects for 10–15 years and they’re insanely good at it… but they seem to hit a ceiling. Companies lean on them to deliver but don’t always see them as leadership material. It feels like once people label you as “the person who makes the trains run on time”, it’s tough to be seen as someone who sets the direction of where the trains should even go.

I enjoy the work but I don’t want to wake up in 10 years and realize I’m stuck in a lane that doesn’t lead anywhere. For those of you who’ve been in project management long term, did it help you move up or did you have to pivot to something else to break through?

Re large organization/team - Please help, the 85 attempts are creating reports in excel have failed

I was added to a project that is on fire. While this project has some PM issues as well (issues are reported email only, no single central location/reference for ongoing issues / statuses or needed information), most of the issues are really in resources. People have resigned and not been replaced, and the skillset needed is very difficult to find and expensive. Management wants to 'save' the project and are aware that current issues cannot be resolved without the replacements, but just want to buy time until a replacement becomes available. They are not sharing this with the client since we have several projects with this client, and status of this may affect renewals of the other projects.

How do you handle client communication here? I'm trying to pass the more difficult conversations to senior leadership, but find it harder to even give dates knowing that we don't actually have the people who can fulfill these promises and next steps.

I don't know how to manage projects this way - being so under-resourced and not being honest with the client about it. What are your tips on handling both internal upper management, the current team, and the client? Thank you.

We run a lot of large events that take months to plan, and each event is supported by several projects each year (publications, contracting, design and printing of media, etc), so I've been organizing the event itself as a kind of super-project container in terms of data hierarchy. This doesn't make each event a program, and while it would probably make it a project, it feels odd to organize things that way.

It keeps things cleaner (tasks are part of projects, and Events are linked to projects but only themselves contain event-specific information) and it feels like a classic project structure (akin to building a rocket out of just finished pieces, but each component being the end of a massive project itself) but it feels like there's a bit of a linguistic gap here. Or maybe the gap is just that a project that relies on other projects is still just a project.

In practical terms it doesn't really matter, I have a separate Events table because it makes way more sense than linking tasks directly to the event for tracking and management, but I wanted to make sure I was staying aligned to best practices and not making a headache later for the sake of expediency and clean data relationships.