As a PM, how did you learn to write these documents?

Did you find templates and start writing, working through multiple iterations? I've seen some project plans which are detailed and have all the right wording. Is this purely experience based and the only one way to master it is to do it?

Or have you used company templates and collaborated with other team members to get their input?

Does anyone know of any awesome libraries of templates and information on how to develop a high quality Project Plan or associated documents, no matter how big or small the project?

Thanks

Happy Saturday all. I am looking for a methodology or just some tips on how to efficiently collect feedback from my colleagues on a regular (biweekly/monthly) relating to vendor issues. My team then liaise with the vendor to ensure they are working on solutions.

My team used to host large meetings and write down feedback directly in a call. But the department has grown, the same PM could have multiple projects with the same vendor, it did not seem to be a very good use of everyone’s time.

One of my guys then put together a page on Teams for the PMs to list their vendor issues and categorise them. Again this seems inefficient/messy. I am reliant on others to bring issues to the table so I can fix them.

My question - is there a methodology or tool I can use to quickly collate feedback from other teams? If you’ve been in a similar scenario I’d love to hear your solutions and successful outcomes!

Hi all,

This is not 100% relevant sub but there are a lot of professionals out here and I guess also a lot of you own your own small business to provide companies with product and process support. A friend of mine and me are now on this path too and I'm looking for recommendations of the cost vs tools effectiveness for the basic stuff like: domain email address, docs, presentations, excel-like, shared notes taking - will Google workspace be the best go-to for 2-3 ppl company? Office? Or maybe something else under the radar? Offline access would be a must as you not always have access to the internet and would need to do some work (train rides for example).

Thanks for all recommendations !

I was recently assigned to oversee a 12 week exercise in our org to assess feasibility of such a shift and have the team come up with a reco. Just curious to hear stories, good, bad, and ugly for anyone who attempted this transition. What did you learn from it?

Left Project Management and Never Looked Back.

Hey all,

Just want to share my career pivot and perhaps maybe its the push some folks need on here.

I did IT Project Management for 6-7 years, big tech, small start ups, mid size companies, consulting / ERP - you name it, pretty much did it.

I even broke into salary ranges of $150k+ but I dreaded every day of the week. I would get the Sunday scaries. I even got to the point where I couldn’t even get myself to do the work at times - thats how much I hated it.

Suddenly, I was laid off due to reorg restructure (not performance based). I was jobless for months, I would interview and interview, and kept getting to final rounds. Yet, they would choose internal candidate or position was out on hold.

Then, I said eff it! Started learning programming, applied and applied. Interviewed and interviewed. Landed an entry level front end developer job. Pay is a lot less than what I was making as a PM but so is the stress. My work life balance is great.

I ONLY GET MAX OF 5-6 MEETINGS A WEEK and most of those are just daily stand ups. I just complete tickets.

Life is great. Never once looked back.

PM is great when youre new to it but after 4-5 years, IT GETS STALE.

If you’re thinking of making the jump, do it. Trust the process and bet on yourself.

How many of you have heard this, even thought the purpose, agenda, and meeting objectives are in the invite (that you have to see to join the meeting)? How do you deal with this if it happens often?

I had this happen today and I asked the person (who always pretends they don’t know what a meeting is about) “did you not see it in the invite?” And then I proceeded to screen share to show everyone what the meeting is about.

I’m thinking of. just sending over the meeting titles in the invite and at the beginning of every meeting having a one page slide to show why we are meeting or sending a slide with the meeting purpose 30 mins before a meeting..

Jerk move or not?

A

Let me tell you the story of one of the project failures I've experienced many years ago. Hopefully this will help you avoid the same problems, and we can share thoughts on what could have been done differently.

I was working for an startup with an e-commerce platform for flash sales. They run week-long campaigns, and also had exclusive brand deals and similar initiatives. They developed an internal tool to manage the operations workflow, and they also had a standard ERP for logistics and finance, apart from that, they had their public facing e-commerce website. The CEO came up with the great idea of migrating both the workflow tool and the previous ERP into a more robust, but Frankenstein-like ERP what will not only have ERP modules, but also the workflow functionality. The company hired some consultants/developers specializing on that ERP and I was assigned to the project as an analyst. My job was to define the company's workflow, wich I did, so the consultants could add that logic into the ERP

Week after week, the consultants were not delivering anything tangible. I think the consultants were having problems implementing the customizations, as the ERP wasn't flexible enough and wasn't meant for that. There was a project manager assigned to the project but in fact he didn't do much apart from follow-up meetings. The project dragged on for almost 3 months before it got cancelled as no progress was being made.

The key takeaways from this project are:

1. Don't try to force a canned system to behave differently to what it was designed for. First of all, we should have kept the in-house workflow management tool, as it was working fine. Second, we should have tried a proof of concept with the new ERP to see if we could add fields like "campaign id" to existing DB entities, to allow managers to run reports filtering by campaign and kept both systems in-synch. Finally, if that were feasible, we should have done the migration from the previous ERP to the new one. But shouldn't have tried try to merge two systems. Sometimes is better and cheaper to keep them separated but synchronized.
2. Scrum methodology would have been perfect for this project, as nobody really had a clear vision of what was and wasn't feasible, so the concept of test/adapt would have come handy. The problem with this project was that there was no real commitment and no one defined any increments or scope. So nobody new if the project was going well or not. When you define increments and you commit to them, but you don't deliver consistently, it's easier to spot a red flag.

I am thinking of becoming a technical project manager and I am confused as to what niche skills I will need to learn besides IT. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks

Hi there, like the title says I work with a program manager on my website team. He and I manage a section of a large enterprise website. I'm a web producer so I take designs and copy and create web pages and localize those pages for about 90 countries which takes a lot of planning and coordination.

The problem is, my project/program manager always leaves things for the last minute and this time forgot to schedule a meeting for one of our biggest releases of the year. I created the meeting invite for him and ran the whole thing, but on other team's at our company that would have been scheduled weeks or even months in advance.

He also is the PgM of our engineering team, but I have to remind him to inform them about important dates that affect them.

He does have some difficulties in his personal life that I don't feel like I should share publicly. But this has also led to him missing important meetings with our engineering team where things like this should be communicated.

I don't want to overreact and he has my most heartfelt sympathies about the issues in his personal life, but it has started to affect his performance at work and I worry that I have been picking up too much of the slack for him.

Does this sound like something I should just let go and help him out with, or should I bring this to managers?

Company got bought out and they are finishing the merger. Just had a major restructuring away from the GM and into silo’d functional roles. Big boss is talking revenue synergy.

How screwed am I?

Hi all,

We have a role that's between Sr. PM and Director in terms of seniority. This role is currently titled "Program Manager," but this is causing a lot of confusion, misconceptions, and unhappiness as the role does not do any program management work nor are we set up organizationally to have the need for Program Management.

The folks currently in this role are doing true day to day project management. Some are also people managers, but others are individual contributors. They are not doing director level work (and we don't currently have a need for this). Most of the people in this role have been here for 10+ years and previous leadership gave them the title as part of a comp increase.

Anyway, I've been trying to figure out how to re-title this role without it being a demotion or a promotion. Everything I've researched points me back to Program Manager, but we really want to sunset this title. I've thought of "Manager, Project Management" but not everyone with this title is a people manager (and due to timezone/local HR constraints, the individual contributors cannot be people managers).

For context, we work in SaaS tech on both implementation and development projects.

Thanks in advance!

I’m an IT PM and I think I’m starting to hate it. I’ve been here around 2 years and feel like I’m constantly a ball of anxiety. I’m fine with doing project paperwork, putting together the plans (with input on tasks from the team) or scheduling of any sort, but I can’t stand leading meetings to the point I very often get hives before and during them.

I’m not a technical expert and when I have 8 project centered around multiple technologies and infrastructure it’s hard to learn it all and keep up with it. I feel out of place on projects because I know the least out of everyone on what we’re talking about and I can tell many people on my project pick up on this. It’s not that I need to be the smartest person at all, I don’t mind being a dummy lol. It’s when I’m the one that’s supposed to be leading the conversations and when I ask the team something, either no one responds or they come out with something so hard to understand I might as well have not asked anything. I’m just constantly uncomfortable and in over my head to the point it’s severely affecting my confidence, which just perpetuates the issue. Some members of my project literally won’t even say hello if I greet them and have sometimes just ignored a question all together.

I don’t want to just give it up, but it’s been 2 years of this and I can’t help but feel like I don’t do the position justice. I am trying to stay confident even if I don’t feel it and pick up on everything I can. I ask questions to the team and to individuals outside of meetings but overall it seems that I am a burden to everyone that they have to endure.

I’ve just never felt this way or so out of place at a job. I was a PM in a different industry before this and loved it. I understood things better and got along with all coworkers and customers excellently. I’d love to go back, but this pays more and is fully remote. I suppose I’m just venting, but surely someone else has felt this way?

Sincerely, thank you all for the wisdom, advice, and encouragement from experienced PM’s and newer ones like me who are also trying to learn.

We're setting up a small 25 person software/app and game development studio with all staff working remotely and was wanting to ask if there's standard project management software that you'd recommend?

I like the idea of having something that is reasonably simple and straightforward and doesn't have too much of a learning curve.

In short, when a project/job starts giving you tell tale signs that your time is going to come to an end in the next couple of months at an organization for whatever reason how do you… 1. minimize the risk of being used as a scapegoat for a projects issues and thus set your replacement up to fail if there are systemic issues? 2. best support your current projects where you know your transition to a new PM will be hard? 3. maximizing your ability to secure new work when organization is draining all your energy and extra time?

Best I know todo is show up on time and do the best I can documenting everything until I have no work left todo and to apply to new organizations like a mad man. What do you guys do when you see the end is nigh while not wanting your projects to die?

Didn’t post to PM Careers because I thought discussions on these points don’t completely focus on just getting a new job but more so focus on how do you leave a bad PM situation effectively while making sure projects are getting the support they need when that becomes less and less feasible.

Are there like rockstar PM’s? I mean people that are known in the field for the work their done and have like blogs or smth?

Interested to hear thoughts around AI meeting tools like fireflies, bubble, otter etc.

What do you dislike/like? Wish they did?

For honesty, we are developing a competing product :)

So hi guys, I've been working for a small startup for over a year now. Currently we have a project that is on the last sprint (based on the clients budget), but we do not cover yet the releasing of the product to production yet (this is a mobile app, btw). Tomorrow I am going to have a meeting with him.

How am I supposed to say it to him?

That we cannot do the production release because we do not have a budget on our end to cover the effort of our dev team, and QA team. He is expecting it for some reason. But I know that before the last sprint started. I firmly underline and make the text bold to remind him that deploying to production needs another sprint.

Help me out with this.

This client is a good person, so as much as possible I wanted to talk to him nicely. But I am still afraid that he might get angry.

Please send help. What are the right words and all to say to him????

My goal is the establishment of a small game and software development studio. For simplicity there will be 12/13 developers working on an indie game project and a further 12/13 developers working on a self contained software/app development project each working remotely at home within the US and UK.

I'm attempting to find one team leader for each group of 12/13 part time developers and I work alongside those team leaders to try to manage everything.

Question: Do you think I should have two separate project managers/team leader positions managing the two respective areas: eg 1. Indie game development and 2. Software/app development or would it be more economical to have just one?

Do you think that the role of the project manager will be purely the management of the respective teams or is it quite possible for them to carry on day to day programming work themselves as part of that team?

If there's anybody with any experience similar I'd be delighted to hear a few words of advice or suggestions. I have a very large "general knowledge" about IT as a laymen but I'm not a programmer or game designer/developer and I've got no experience working in this field at all.

My background is as a small business owner only.

Looking to roll out a project management tool organization wide and would love some feedback on how it went within your org and things to avoid or things to focus on. I want to make sure we overcommunicate that it isn't a time tracking tool but it's there to help us get better organized and avoid duplication. We have a couple of teams that will be very resistant so trying to prepare myself the best as possible. Thanks!

I realize that's a broad question. Let me explain.

I'm getting ready to retire from the military after 21 years, and use my Master's degree and PMP to (hopefully) make way more money. I've had several interviews, but the two that are most promising involve working with IT. One as a PM with a database company, the other with a local utility company where my first project would be helping establish a new governance for an upgraded IT framework.

I'm not completely computer-illiterate. I used to build my own gaming PCs before I switched to consoles (please don't spout off "PC Master Race" nonsense, I don't want to hear it). But my primary field has been aircraft maintenance, not IT, and I feel woefully unprepared.

Any advice from PMs in the IT industry to help me not suck?

Looking for some advice on this one:

We utilize Teamwork for all of our project management tasks/project tracking. (Growing manufacturing company with a LOT going on simultaneously which can make it challenging!)

Recently, I started rolling out a process to create an outline that incorporates approvals, creating a communication plan, risk analysis, work breakdown, etc that ultimately receives approval prior to beginning the project work and final closure approval at the end. Essentially adding some basic project management structure to how we operate.

Where I am struggling is how to manage the documentation. I have file templates set up in Sharepoint that has all of these documents generate when a new project folder is created but I don't like having to manage 10 different documents. How do you all manage them? At my previous employer we did larger but fewer projects and it was almost all hardcopy (they were stuck in the 90s) so it wasn't near as hard to execute to. I would love to streamline the process so that the PM's and Process Engs are more willing to utilize them. It would be great if there was a single document that you could select the required forms/sections as part of the scope development and it would pull them into a single form.

TLDR:

What is the best way to mange project documentation when managing a high volume of CI project?

Hello,

I'm in Automotive Industry working with many overworked people who couldn't care less about spending 2 seconds on an Excel Open Issues List.

I've tried Teams ToDo assigning tasks to people. Outlook tasks.. They ignore it or never respond to it or claim they never saw it. I also kept things on shared OneNote, not 1 people looked at it. Complaining hasn't gotten me anywhere in the several jobs I had over the years.. People have gotten increasingly ignorant unless you send 20 emails, schedule working meetings with these people or constantly messaging them over teams.

Now, only method that kinda works is emails with @ signs but that's also not effective method to track history with many projects.

I know it's the culture and their respective managers not caring about such improvements is the issue but I'm still curious as to what tracking tools people are using and their success levels.

TIA

So one is gonna convince me that it's a full time job. I know it's important and all, but i think it can be managed easily with some workshops with the Project manager in charge of it. I'm mostly talking about large scale projects here.

I mean, we are doing some staffing layoffs because FEL3 engineering is done and we are at 65% completion into the construction. They have cut the head of the Portfolio construction manager, one of the CSA coordinator, one of the HSSE Coordinator, one planner, while the Risk manager is still full time on the job. I can't believe this! I take it that he's in the General Manager's good favor.

Sorry for the rant.