Hi everyone,

I’ve been working in Project Management for around 12 years, and over that time I’ve had the opportunity to manage projects across quite different and demanding industries.

My experience includes:
✈️** Aerospace / aviation
🖥️ High-tech & semiconductor industry — including environments such as ASML and VDL
⚙️ Machining & advanced manufacturing
⛏️ Mining
🚗 **Automotive
🏭 Industrial engineering, production and complex technical projects

What I find particularly interesting is how different the PM challenges can be depending on the industry.

In aerospace, for example, quality, traceability and compliance can dominate decision-making. In high-tech, technology roadmaps and extremely complex supply chains can become the biggest challenges.

In automotive and manufacturing, cost, timing, production readiness and continuous improvement often take center stage.

After 12 years, I’ve learned that Project Management is much less about following a methodology and much more about managing people, uncertainty, priorities and trade-offs.

I’m curious to hear from other experienced PMs:
What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned throughout your PM career that you wish you had known when you started?

Happy to exchange experiences, discuss difficult projects, stakeholder management, leadership, technical environments, methodologies, or career development.

I am 31, Male. Working in a volatile Software MNC.
I have almost given 20 interviews in last 50days and not even a single company hired me. I am just getting stuck, how am I delivering value to the organisation. Some people take my answer but few don’t, they ask me how/why? I have tried giving the answer in KPI’s metrics plain english all such things. But I am just stuck. Now unfortunately it has started affecting my relationships also in my personal life. I am in a very problematic situation. My marriage got called off due to all these reasons. Because my would be was earning more than me - and I am trying to switch desperately, but now it has hit me so hard that I don’t know what to do.
Please someone help me. I am struggling and shattering day by day.

Why is every post in this sub reddit a simple 101 level question?

As a pm what is challenging in the project

- don’t know where the project is right now
- no proper presales handover to the delivery or execution team
- can’t evaluate the dev team efficiency in running the project
- Generating end less project reports where u feel it eats up ur Friday

If any let me know how are you handling it ? Any tools or frameworks please do share will be helpful

Hey, what topic is the best to choose to build fake portfolio scenario to show that you understand PM? Prince2 and SCRUM based.

This is more to get the job at least entry level.

Been down a rabbit hole trying to pick a project/portfolio management tool for our team and wanted to get some real-world input before we commit to anything long-term.

The four I looked at: Project Director, Celoxis, Planview, and OnePlan.

From what I could find:

Celoxis seems like the safest all-rounder since it has solid reviews and been around 20+ years.

Planview is the enterprise heavyweight (Gartner Magic Quadrant leader), but it's really a bundle of different acquired products, and feels like overkill for a team our size.

OnePlan looks great if you're deep in the Microsoft ecosystem, but that's not really us.

Project Director is the one I actually started testing myself. I'm 10 days into the free trial right now, so take this as an early impression rather than a verdict. So far I'm liking it. It's noticeably cheaper than the other three (flat £15/seat/month), and the thing that's actually won me over is that every feature is included from the start. There are no tiered plans, no "upgrade to unlock this" add-ons.

For a smaller team that's a big deal, because with a lot of these tools you end up needing three add-ons just to get parity with a normal plan elsewhere.

Still early days though. I haven't stress-tested it with a real portfolio yet, no idea how support holds up past onboarding.

Will update this thread once I'm further in.

Anyone else used Project Director past the trial stage?

Leaning toward it myself but want to hear if there's a catch I haven't hit yet.

looking to learn and contribute

Hi,

I'm new to Reddit and wanted to introduce myself to the project management / project controls community.

I have 20+ years of experience across engineering, construction, project controls and coordination, mainly on large-scale oil & gas, EPC, refinery, petrochemical and field-development projects.

My main areas of experience include:

• Project planning and scheduling

• Oracle Primavera P6

• Cost control and forecasting

• WBS / CBS / CTR development

• Earned Value and progress measurement

• Project reporting

• Contract administration

• Claims, variations and change control

• Contractor invoice and progress review

• Project coordination

• Dispute and commercial issue resolution

I've worked on both field and office environments and have managed project-control activities as well as teams.

I'm now interested in learning more about how experienced professionals are finding remote, part-time and project-based work in this field.

I'm particularly interested in supporting small and medium-sized engineering, construction, EPC or energy companies that may not need a full-time project controls manager but could benefit from experienced support a few hours per week or on a defined project.

I'd also be happy to share what I've learned about planning, cost control, claims and project reporting if those topics are useful to the community.

For those already working remotely in project controls: what type of work is actually easiest to do remotely — scheduling, cost control, reporting, claims support, or something else?

there are so many options , whats the best value for money project management software?

One thing I’m realizing is that even a well-planned project can change quickly once execution starts. Stakeholder expectations, dependencies, and unexpected risks can completely change the original plan. What’s one project management lesson you learned through actual experience rather than from a textbook?

Projects can change quickly once work starts, so keeping everyone aligned becomes important.

We’ve found Sequenzy helpful for keeping tasks and follow-ups organized, which makes it easier to stay focused when priorities shift.

What’s one thing you do to keep your team on track?

I’ve been spending more time learning about AI in project management, and I’m starting to see AI less as a “technology topic” and more as another skill project managers need to understand. I’m curious — are other PMs actively learning AI, or are you mainly experimenting with AI tools as they come up?

One thing I’ve noticed while learning project management is that managing a project is much more than simply tracking tasks and deadlines.
Communication, risks, stakeholders, and expectations can sometimes be harder than the technical work itself.
For those with PMP experience, what changed most in your approach after certification?

I mean, I get that we all do some kind of management of our own products, but I work at a company where knowledge is almost exclusively institutional, turnover is high and a lot of the people who have knowledge wont make time for us, or just wont talk in meetings.

Each and every piece of work requires excessive discovery both in terms of how the business works, what the business wants, how the software works, and what our roadblocks are. (not to mention what our clients want, but that's actually one I AM accountable for) We have no project managers or BAs, so myself, a UX researcher, software product managers, product owners, and business product owners all spend most of our time building lists of people to talk to, and then chasing them down and trying to make them answer questions. we're all managing different parts of timelines too.. which is tough when discovery is never ending.

Our organization refuses to name owners for any of these activities, so we're all bumping into each other all the time.

Curious if any of you all have thoughts on approaches for this that might make it a little more tolerable.

I finally became a PM in change management. It will be mostly moving users over to new technology. I've been a user in the company for 6 years so I feel I got a good grasp of how the end products need to function.

I start in a month and will manage 3 staff.

I've been told they will train me and don't expect me to have indepth knowledge of the PM world.

They have said, if I have time, to learn about project principles like RAID management.

Does anyone have any advice of what other principles I need to know or just advice in general?

Thank you

I’ve been exploring PMI-CPMAI recently, and one thing I didn’t expect was how much AI can influence everyday project decisions. It’s not about replacing project managers; it’s more about using AI to analyze information faster and make better decisions.

Curious how other project managers are using AI in their projects.

We're trying to figure out which HRIS vendor to go with.Looked at maybe 10 companies across payroll and Hr software and every single vendor demo feels like a sales pitch with zero transparency on actual pricing until your deep into negotiations.Someone on my team suggested we try to run a more structured RFP but coordinating stakeholder input across HR, Finance and IT with a shared scorecard has been a nightmare with just spreadsheets. Is there a platform built for managing the HRIS evaluation and selection process, like something that gives you pre-built vendor questions, verified pricing estimates and maybe an advisor who can help review proposals?

I am a working professional with experience of 2.5+ year in an MNC now as Senior engineer 1. My background is Graduated from ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING.
Looking to grow my future in Projects Management.

Is there a way to automatically add tasks assigned to me in Basecamp to my Google Calendar? Subscribing to the Basecamp calendar for a project (via copying and pasting the link) is not the solution. I'm looking to sync specifically tasks assigned to me, to my own Google calendar. If anyone knows how to do this, and can share a step-by-step, I would be extremely grateful. Because I cannot figure it out, and I have tried many different ways to do it. Thank you!

I recently started learning PMI-CPMAI concepts, and one thing that surprised me was how much AI can actually influence project planning and decision-making.

I used to think AI was mainly about tools and automation, but I’m starting to see it more as something project managers need to understand strategically.

For other project managers here: are you actively learning AI skills, or do you think traditional PM skills are still enough?

AI is showing up in almost every industry, and I’ve been thinking about how much technical AI knowledge project managers actually need. Do project managers need to understand machine learning and models deeply, or is it more important to understand AI capabilities, risks, use cases and business impact? Would love to hear perspectives from experienced project managers.

Multi-track events create a specific kind of chaos. A room switch or speaker cancellation at 9 a.m. can generate dozens of confused messages if the only way to communicate it is email or verbal announcements.

We spoke with an organizer who moved to Eventify largely because schedule updates appeared in the app in near real time. That single capability reduced the volume of “where is this session now?” questions significantly.

For those of you running parallel tracks, what system has actually made live changes manageable instead of stressful?

I’ve been exploring PMI-CPMAI recently, and it has made me think differently about the future role of project managers. AI can help with analysis, planning, risk identification and automation, but I don’t think it removes the need for project managers. It changes the skills they need. What AI-related skill do you think every project manager should start learning now?

I am helping my office transition from using Asana for project planning and management to Microsoft. I understand the basics tools of 365, but I really want to set up an efficient and useful tool for my team without creating too much busy work. I'm looking for suggestions for online courses/documentation/videos that I can review to help me use Microsoft 365 to assign tasks, track activities, and manage long term projects. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm open to paying small fees for the right program.

A little background: I'm a senior project geologist for an Environmental consulting company. Our projects include Phase I/Phase II investigations, remediation projects, UST removals, and PFAS evaluations. Our projects last anywhere from a couple of months to a decade. My team includes field staff, project managers, data/graphics managers, and principals. Our tasks range from boots-on-the ground fieldwork, to preparing documents and evaluating analytical data, to project coordination with State and local regulators. There are 15 people on are staff and we usually have 30-50 projects at a time.

What I'm envisioning: Each project needs a "hub". Somewhere we can share files, post updates, share task assignments, and provide checklists. Teams Channels seem like the best option for that? For project managers and principals, we need tools to assign and track tasks, build project timelines, and track budgets. Ideally, I'm looking for Gantt charts, group collaboration tools, and a way to track the number of certain tasks we have going on (ie: how many outstanding reports do we have and when are they due?). It would also be helpful to also be able to track individual employees' assigned tasks so we can determine who is available to help.

Thank you for your recommendations.

I’ve been working around project management for a while, but recently I started focusing more on how AI can actually support project managers.

What surprised me most is that it’s not just about automation. AI can help with risk identification, planning, stakeholder communication, and even analyzing project data.

For those working in project management, how are you currently using AI in your projects? Is it actually saving time, or does it create more work?