Hey! There’s always Monday.com! Why have a human Project Manager when there’s AI?
I’ve used a similar tool, Asana. When you constrained it enough to keep it’s dirty data center hands off the actual plan, it’s not horrible.
Great for personal use, shit for anything larger than a small team.
i work for a company that outsources us as phone CSRs to other companies.
recently we had a ‘town hall meeting’ where we were told our current client is not going to renew their contract. first complaint: they are keeping the stupid/problem causing company. one that had trouble building good or complete cases, dispatching any escalations to the proper team, and was the cause of many of our supervisor requests (as callers were given wrong information, wasn’t escalated when warranted or escalated incorrectly.
Secondly, they announced a new client, but they have a can’t miss any work for 90 days and I have up to 5 days (depending on work schedule) that I can’t and won’t miss. (and yes i did offer to try and minimize that) but because of any expected absence they did not place me. so, i’ve been furloughed.
They are paying for my insurance, and hopefully i can make some progress cleaning.
Or no project manager at all! It seems like a useless profession to me.
Maybe “useless” isn’t the right word. More like…it doesn’t seem to be a job that companies give two shits about. And I say this as someone who has worked as some flavor of PMP / Agile certified project / program / engagement / change manager for 15 years.
A good project manager is invaluable when coordinating large, mutli-team projects. I don’t really need one for projects that stay within the confines of my little corner, I’ve found them useful on projects with a broader scope.
And there are a lot of jobs where one of the hats you wear says “Project Manager” (yes, I am thinking of a '40s fedora with a press card stuck in the band).
I agree. I’m just constantly surprised how terrible so many large companies seem at actually managing projects of any kind and how little they seem to care about getting better at it.
Yeah, I have worked at DSTV, the largest satellite TV company in the world, and with a huge staff.
I spent over a year working on a product everyone on the team expected to flop. And… it did. We did have a phenomenal project manager, though, so we met all our targets. It was just a disastrous idea that would never have succeded.
The company wallows in mediocrity and hubris; with that management style the good people leave, elevating the mediocre well beyond their Dunning Kruger level.
And yet, they succeed. I don’t know how, which is why I am not in senior management.
If you think of the PMO as the entity which exists to insulate the suits from responsibility for their bad decisions it makes a lot more sense.
If the project succeeds, the suits take all the credit. If it fails, the PMO takes all the blame. And meanwhile the droids in the trenches just follow their orders, sorta, to accomplish their tasks. Which tasks, sorta, advance the project towards the goal, kinda.
But that’s not really how it works in my experience. If anything, senior leadership seems completely decoupled from the activities of the PMO and their portfolio of projects.
Half the time it seems like my job is collecting high level status updates from people I’ve never met on projects I’ve never worked on to consolidate them into some PowerPoint deck some executive can pass to an even more senior executive.
I don’t know if they ever read this shit.
Most of them I don’t know if they even understand what they are reading.
Most project management and PMOs simply exist to “insist upon themselves”. As if you applied their perfect structure and methodology all your projects would turn out perfect results on time and on budget. The secret is most of them never do because at the end of the day you are doing something you’ve never done before and you actually have no idea how long it will take to figure out how to do it. At least Agile methodologies recognize that but then replace it will some bullshit abstractions that management doesn’t care about (like “story points”)
And senior leadership does get “blamed” all the time. Maybe they yell at their PMOs and project managers or the Accenture consultants they hired but if a project doesn’t produce desired results the executive’s leadership and rivals are going to call them out on it.
Part of my current job requires creating files, moving them around, collecting signatures, collating pages, much of which requires copying and pasting into various folders on a shared drive.
I’m one of many people who is doing the same thing with my own sub-set of files, but we are often storing these files all together, so we are often looking for files in lists of anywhere from 10-100 files at a time, depending on how backed up things get.
There are two meaningful data elements in the file name- a date and a name. The mandated naming convention is currently mm-dd-yyyy-lastname.
Most of our work is based on the name. We each are responsible for documents related to a particular person. If I need to see if there are any files for me in a list, I cannot sort by name- I have to scan all file names for my files.
Chronology is also important- each unique name has one file per month (approx), so being able to quickly check to see if specific months are accounted for in the list is a frequent need. Or we may need to find a specific month.
However, our year runs August-July. So the chronology begins with 08-12 and then loops back to 01-07. Definitely some extra effort in mental processing and room for error when we can’t sort files chronologically. In places, we even have folders pre-pended with the numbers 1-12 so that they show up in the correct order (so: parent folder/26-27/1. 08-01-2026/ , for example).
I made a well-stated and friendly suggestion to our boss that we consider changing the structure to something like:
lastname-yyyy-mm-dd
… which would allow easy sorting by name so we could all find the files we need most easily. Make fewer errors. Get work done in less time. Understand the status of things at a glance.
Or, even if we didn’t do that, maybe just lead with yyyy-mm-dd so we wouldn’t have to look at the middle of the file name to know if we’re even on the right year or not.
Answer: “No, I like it the way it is.”
… so we remain stuck with an obvious-on-the-face bad system that causes constant frustration, for which there is a zero-cost zero-effort solution, because someone just likes it as-is.
I got an invite for a 1.5 hour meeting later this afternoon, with the subject “Please read the invite”. It’s actually three half-hour meetings - group A in the first half hour, group B in the second half hour, and group C (mine) the third half hour. WTF? Why not just send an invite to each group for their half-hour meeting? And I just know the first two sessions will run late… Argh.
Well, if management has been reading a Douglas Adams book, the A group is the visionaries and the C group is the hard workers, both of which are needed.
And the B group is everyone in the middle, who contribute neither.
Congrats on being a C! Do let us know if the B group is deemed dispensible.
What made this even weirder is that for all three “sessions” more than one project was involved. So when we dialed in for our session, we had to wait in a “room” for our project until it was our turn. And the folks running the meeting would just hop from room to room.
That sounds wildly inefficient and labor intensive on their part.
It sounds like the person who set up the meeting tried to split it into 3 separate meetings, but couldn’t figure out how to change the invites. Was the meeting organizer’s admin on vacation this week?
Yeah. It’s one big meeting from the POV of the organizers. So they made one big meeting for them, and expected all the attendees to adapt to whichever few minutes happened to be relevant to them.
Thats still better than having to sit through parts of a meeting that have nothing to do with your department.
A functional workaround would be a PowerShell script that reads all the filenames, reformats them to lastname-yyyy-mm-dd and displays them in a gridview without affecting the files in the directory at all. Assuming you’re not in an environment where PowerShell is blocked. And that you’ve got someone available with PS skills. If not, ChatGPT can hook you up with something that simple.
Our IT department migrated everyone’s personal storage folders from the network server to OneDrive over the weekend. The only notice given was a single email sent out last week, which I missed because I was out of the office (and didn’t have access to email - see below). I now have dozens of links and shortcuts that no longer work. And as an added bonus, when you’re opening a document there’s a slight delay while it’s downloaded, since storage isn’t local anymore.
And they’re also forcing us to install Microsoft Intune on our personal mobile devices if we want to use them to check work email. Yet browser access from a computer is still fine! So the IT department has no problem with me potentially accessing work email from an unsecured computer, but using my phone that is thoroughly secured because of the amount of personal info I keep on it is a no-go. 
Got it.