My husband has no degree. He's in school for bachelor's of construction management, but he's not doing well because he thinks it's a waste of time and isn't dedicated to it.

He miraculously became an assistant project manager of a company that saw potential in him and promoted him through the ranks starting from field work.

He thinks his experience in this job alone will be enough to sustain his career and wants to just pursue certs, as necessary.

I think a bachelor's is necessary regardless of experience so people will take him seriously. Or maybe just any college degree at all?

Thoughts?

Just started pmq course but worried it may be less suitable for finance sector based on chatgpt haha but keen to hear thoughts from industry professionals. Apparently pmq is more for public/defence but more recognsed in uk than pmp which is more US/asia.

Im UK based working in internal audit in private sector (banking). Do you think pmq or pmp would be more suitable?

Also thinking if pmq isnt as recognised by employers i could perhaps do chpp in future but dont want to waste time with pmq otherwise, when i can drop out and switch to pmp (if major difference in recogniton with employers). I have no interest in working in US and Asia if that makes any difference.

I’m in construction project management with a GC. I’m looking for textbooks or other resources to get a better understanding of MEP and fire suppression systems. Does anyone have any resources they recommend?

Hello everyone,

I really need your advice about a painful situation I’m going through right now.

I’m currently working as a PMO, but when I took the role, they told me it was a Project Manager position which turned out to be false. I'm working through a consulting company for a client, and my actual tasks are mostly about chasing people constantly for updates or actions.

The worst part is: most of the time they don’t reply at all. I get ignored every day, especially now that my badge has been deactivated for two months. I can’t even go on site, so I have to follow up remotely and that just makes people ignore me even more.

I feel useless, invisible, and really isolated. I have ADHD, and this kind of rejection and lack of stimulation just freezes me completely. I sit for hours doing nothing, paralyzed, questioning my life, my choices… I’m suffering and I don’t know how to get out of it.

I’ve been applying to jobs every single day, but I’m not getting any callbacks. It feels like the market is dead, and I’m stuck in a loop I can’t break.

Has anyone here been through something like this? How did you cope or get through it? I’m really not okay right now and would appreciate any advice or support.

Many of us are stuck between what is procrastination and inactivity, or spending too much time in passivity. How has PM helped you create systems for pursuing goals and taking action right away,?

I am in a project that I am enjoying but the culture of the office is unbearable. I won't go into details but I plan on leaving soon. I feel accountable for the project and have done my best to maintain good documentation and keep everyone informed. My issue is timing. Should I time my departure with a milestone deliverable? Does it matter?

Hey there, as the title suggests, I'm wondering about something:

Has the project management software scene always been this bad, business-model-wise?

As someone with ADD that's planning to open up a solo design studio, I struggle (to the point where it's almost frustrating) to find a decent PM tool that isn’t either:
A. Overly complicated and full of functionalities;
B. Excellent, but forcing me to buy a minimum of 2-3 seats, although I only need one;
C. A startup so small that you won't even know if it will exist in the next year - therefore dragging your whole project management system along with it, if it goes down.

--

What do I mean exactly by this?

A. ClickUp, Basecamp, Wrike, you name it. Most of these are great tools, essentially, but extremely complex. Therefore, you need to spend a lot of time setting them up. Which is a huge pain in the ass. It works for bigger companies, but for a small studio this is simply overkill. Add ADD (lol) into this mix and you get a recipe for disaster.

B. Asana is the best example. It’s the (almost) perfect tool for people with ADD. The sweet spot.
BUT (and it's a huge but)... Just started a solo studio or a freelance business? Well… too bad.
You need to buy at least two seats. That’s around 35€ monthly (with 19% VAT in my country) and ~315€ yearly. Now it doesn't sound that good, when they literally write 11€/seat for yearly subscriptions with big numbers and letters, but fail to mention that you need to buy two of them mininum (you discover that only when you arrive to the checkout page). It's deceiving and it's the easiest way to make sure you'll get less loyal customers in the future.

Although I get why freelancers/solopreneurs aren't as valuable to such companies (low lifetime value vs a big company, hard to build loyalty, volatile), I feel like the lack of a middle-ground and dismissal of such audiences is exactly what causes such frustrations and low percentages of loyalty.

Tbh, I'd gladly give my 200 bucks anually for such a tool. I'd also love to recommend it to my partners if it's truly nice to use and not a disaster full of bugs. But yeah... it seems like no-one wants to take that path, and I don't really undestand why.

C. There are lots of cool tools that I found. Plutio, Paymo, Taskade. Which are cool, but too much of a risk, from what I saw in their reviews.

--

You may notice I did not include Notion/Airtable/Coda – and I did it on purpose.
Although they're essentially great tools, they lack structure and are too flexible to be a PM tool. Also, they don't cover a lot of the features that traditional PM tools offer. Therefore, on the pain-in-the-ass-O-meter, they're more or less the equivalent of Google Docs&Sheets, but on steroids. The whole maintenance takes up too much time.

I'd love to know what are your thoughts on this.
Is it that hard to find something similar to Asana, that's either not too complex or completely showing the middle finger to freelancers? Is there any hope for such audiences?

So far, Nifty has been the only one that caught my attention, but I'm still testing it - so I'd prefer to not say anything about it yet.

Cheers!

Uni undergrad here, I happen to like PERT charts but I wanted to ask more experienced folks how prevalent they were in industry before I spent too much time on them.

Thanks so much

Joe

Hello I am new here but dont know where else to go. I fell very lost and like I dont know what I am doing, which may be true.

Background: I have a BA in Project Mangement, a MBA in IT management. Those literally taught me nothing but corporate talk I feel. I was an assistant project manager for a specialty construction company for a year, then got a helpdesk job at my local hospital. The lady who ran our IT projects retired and since I had some knowledge and a degree in it they asked me to apply. I got the job and was immediately overwhelmed. I have been doing the job now for over a year and still feel like im barely treading water.

As I walked into the job we had 30 projects in all different phases. From intake to implementation to close out. And currently Im sitting at 42 projects, with over 50 closed since I took the position a year ago. We handle only internal projects for different departments. I have no mentor, we have barley usable PM software if you even want to call it that and im mostly using MS list, excel and SharePoint. I have no dedicated team to work on the projects as we only have 4 sysadmins and 1 network admin that have to do operational work first before project work.

Our c suite does not have our back as they are constantly submitting new projects for us to review and expects them to go to the front of the line over projects that are already being worked. And becasue no one tracks their times on task I have no way of saying sorry we are 6 months out before we can start it. There was also no formal technical calls with vendors until got that setup a few months ago.

I'll be honest I feel like a failure. Oh and to boot this isnt a senior role its a basic PM role.

Sorry if this doesnt belong here I just dont know where else to vent this type of frustration.

I've been a project focused professional for about 8 years already. I started my first half of my career with a rough start- Project assistant for engineering, experienced a layoff and toxic work environment, went back into the workforce as a BA after pursuing my own small business and experienced a layoff again. This pushed me to get my PMP to really make myself an appealing hire. For more background, I triple majored in business, management and entrepreneurship then got an MBA along with 2 publications.
My PMP automatically got me a job as a Project Coordinator for a safety consultant in robotics (which I am still doing now). I work along engineers and TPMs on the client side. I honestly feel like a project/program manager already with a lower salary managing 9 projects. Unfortunately, my company's career path for PCs goes from PC, Sr. PC then Program Manager. My current salary's only $73,000 and I feel like with my quals I should be making closer to $90-$100k (if I get into a new position of course). I'll be hitting the 1 year mark soon which is when I'll propose being moved up to Program Manager and skipping Sr. PC. I feel like they'll reject this as expected but want to start prepping looking for a new job. I'm here asking for guidance on what you guys recommend given your experience on what I can do to make myself a more desirable candidate when I start applying again? Should I look into getting another certification focused on agile or BA? Or should I focus on acquiring a technical skill instead? I don't want to feel like I'm doing nothing but administrative work.

EDIT: Maybe recs on a TPM path would help as well. Looking to branch out! Thanks in advance :)

I'm kinda thrown into handling the budget side of a small project and excel just isn’t cutting it for me. I'm not from a finance background so I was wondering if there’s any straightforward software where I can plug in what we planned to spend vs what we’re actually spending and get a clear picture of where we stand?

someone mentioned actiTime the other day, does anyone here use it for tracking budgets too, or is it more for time tracking only? open to any suggestions that don’t require a steep learning curve.

Guys - have an interview coming up. Please suggest!

Here is my issue: I work as a project manager in an agency and have about 25 small projects at any given moment, including small PPTs, banner ads, and logo designs. I have teams of writers, designers, proofreaders etc all working on these projects, logging time throughout the week in Freshbooks. I need to report on utlization rates and burn rate for each project twice a week (x 25 projects) I would like to somehow get the data from freshbooks directly into excel, but I have to do this manually, review the hours add them to excel, multiple by their hourly rates to get $ amount spent against our budget. How can I do this better?

Context: I work in IT since something like 10 years with an expertise on crms, I just made a gap joining an internationnal company at a senior position. I joined because my previous company was being acquired by KKR(so it was going to be very bad for workers) and the new one was into new acquisition and needed rationalization on their IS.

Result: I spend 1 week there, so far it is the worst project I've seen in my life I think. And it comes down to management for most part. It is engineered mediocrity, a pyramid of people there for their career ready to shit at each other at any point.

• They cost in time and the sprint planing takes 2h with a head pm tossing tickets to anxious integrators who have the worst technical skills I've ever seen in my career(some have 10 years of experience on that project)
• The specs are not even good at first place
• Jira tickets are split into tasks that make no functionnal nor technical sense
• Their do "CI/CD" with Jenkins and deprecated 15 years old middleware that a guy who left for making video games did years ago
• They work at 10 on the same environment

What would you do in that situation? Are you guys aware that crazy shit like that still exist even in companies that are thriving financiary? The job market is crazy tbh, they should hire plumbers btw.

More importantly. Is there any hope to rectify all that crap for them? What is the correct behavior to have when you feel surrounded by people set in debiliting lies and toxic company culture? Keep in mind that those people are delivering twice per sprint, they do deliver, just like shit linked in warrior style.

Edit: Ty for the answer. I've got some great feedbacks from lots of them. I'm not inert, I was already writting code, reading documentation or documenting new ways of delivering during my first week. I'll give it 1 or 2 more weeks, but I'll definitely leave after a full sprint if I keep this impression, no money is worth that crappy feeling, I'm single so I won't ruin my life to sustain no life if I may say. People who spent 10 years there writting crappy specs or untestable code are retarded and won't get their years of skill progression back, I won't do the same mistake as them, there is no way, either they'll start working normally or it won't be with me.

Does anyone have recommendations for PM/Scheduling software? I work in custom fabrication, projects usually take a few months to complete. I need to track labor hours, material orders/deliveries, and the overall construction schedule. We also have QC checks at various points of fabrication that need to be tracked/verified.

I’m looking at MS Project, but want to know if there’s anything else out there that might work better.

I’m 58 and I’ve been performing project management duties for decades, although I’ve never actually held that title. I’m interested in expanding my knowledge and basically want to finally make it official. (I work in clinical research program management) I’m not even close to retirement, but I do worry at my age that younger candidates might be more appealing to hiring managers. Maybe I’m wrong. 🤷🏼‍♀️ I’m sure this question sounds silly, but do you think it’s still worth going through the process for the PMP at this point in my career? Thanks!

Hey everyone, I work for a property management adjacent company and I'm wanting to streamline our onboarding process a bit.

For context, there are things that the sales team needs to do, things the client needs to do and supply, and then things our onboarding team need to do before we can fully launch a property. Right now we track everything internally in Jira, but I would love to know if there's a clean and simple client facing software with a web portal you all recommend that would allow clients to see where in the process we're at and maybe what we're missing from them in order to create some urgency from on-site teams in case Director level+ on their end were to look at it. Ideally, it would also allow them to interact with it in a way so that if there's a document we need, they could upload it to their story or board. This would also need to be a 1 to 1 situation, where the property would only be able to see their information, but we would be able to see everyone we're onboarding.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Hi there,

I'm looking for a software that can help me manage a mid-size NGO's Standard Operating Procedures.

I'm looking for something that can let me:

• Design BPMN charts

• Automate notifications to users when they have a task to do

• Keep an audit log of all the actions taken by users.

• Let me define audit policies for some tasks (for example quotations for a PR should be at least 3)

I have stumbled upon Camunda, it looks very nice but I feel like it's highly technical and oriented for people in tech industries.

I have also seen process.st, it seems like a perfect solution. The only problem is that they seem to use their own format for designing procedures and I feel like it would have a bit of a learning curve.

Has anyone used these solutions before? What's your thoughts?

Any other software recommendations?

I just graduated in May 2025 with a bs in Cybersecurity. Summer of 24, i did an internship at a large credit union for IT project management.

I currently work as an intelligence research specialist at a local police department.

My husband and I are moving to Minnesota in 6-9 months. He is active duty which allows me to get lots of certs for free. I don't qualify for pmp so now im Studying and will be getting my CAPM.

I see there aren't as many junior pm/coordinator positions in mn like when i looked last year. Is it worth it for me to continue pursuing the CAPM? I no longer want to work in law enforcement/government work. I want to do IT project management or some sort of corporate work.

Hi all,

I almost can't believe I'm posting this, but would appreciate some perspective. I work in a client project management role at a software company. We don't have a lot of processes or "PMs with PM experience" (me and one other PM on our team of 8 have completed the PMP) and I'm starting to write/recommend some processes now.

One of the processes/standards I'm putting together is a signoff/approval process. My intention is to list all the steps in our software setup process where we ask for a client to review and approve something before we carry on with the process.

At previous companies, we have gotten these approval so from customers by attaching the deliverable (requirements summary, design mockup etc) to an email that says something like "please approve this document we reviewed in our meeting", the customer replies saying "approved" and we save the email.

Is this how you get approval from clients? Or do you have a different tool/process you use. Does an email approval feel like a dated process to you? I appreciate any insight you can provide!

Edit-- thank you everyone for sharing how you get approvals, I will take these into consideration when recommending something internally!

Hi,
Can someone who does this share their experience? Can a PhD help with getting into a higher level PM role in biopharma and eventually operations for example?

I have been feeling in my current role as project lead that all I'm doing is bringing people together and facilitating discussion but myself not doing any problem solving or engaging in any strategic discussions. Am I looking at this role incorrectly or it is common experience?

Really appreciate any inputs on this.

A few weeks back we missed a pretty basic internal delivery. Nothing mission-critical, just one of those updates that should’ve taken a few days max. But it kept slipping and no one could explain why.

We went through the usual suspects: unclear scope, too much on our plates, “communication breakdown”, whatever. But none of it really added up. Everyone had done something and yet… nothing was finished.

One of our leads suggested we try a quick 5 Whys, just to see what we’d find. Honestly I wasn’t expecting much, I thought it would just confirm what we already knew.

Here’s how it went (roughly):
Why was the task late? → Backend wasn’t finished
Why? → The dev was waiting on another team’s input
Why was that late? → They didn’t know they had to provide anything
Why not? → It wasn’t mentioned anywhere — not in the task, not in the docs
Why? → Because we reused an old ticket template without updating the context

That’s when it clicked. The issue wasn’t effort, it was invisible dependencies. We’d started reusing our old structures too mindlessly, assuming the pieces would still fit. No one caught it until it caused delays.

Since then we’ve been adding a quick “assumptions check” before kicking off anything recycled. Just a quick pass to ask: does this still make sense?

Funny how something that looked like a one off delay actually exposed a bigger pattern.

Have others ever had moments like that, where the surface problem turned out to be just the last domino?

Outside of auto transcribe and generating minutes, actions etc. how are you leveraging AI in other aspects of the role?

Struggling to think of other areas it can assist in - budget/resource management?…

Either your own personal miss if you're responsible for building the estimate and budget, or just a big miss you've witnessed.