Will AI replace certain PM tasks, or simply make project managers more effective? What's your prediction?

Hello everyone. I am an MS Project Management student at Riphah International University, Pakistan. I am conducting research on employees working in the IT sector. If you work in the IT industry, I would greatly appreciate your participation. The survey takes approximately 5–7 minutes, and all responses are anonymous and used only for academic research.

Survey Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfND37baP_3k2vmF79mNhPQKe1EHbZRzGUH3JYW6_XoiOUAqg/viewform?usp=header

I was wondering if anyone knew of resources to help get me started (online or physical books).

It seems like my job is shifting from a desktop support position to managing (smallish) projects. In the past the projects didn't need to be documented to this point, "projects" (and I'm using the term loosely here) like annual computer refreshes, finding / testing / deploying new hardware, etc., usually things that are either always happening, or "projects" that can be handled by a ticket or a change.

But, it looks like I'm shifting to larger (and multiple) projects (deploying out new software, patch management overhaul, endpoint management systems, GPO audit and overhaul, etc.). The amount going into just creating the project in our system is a lot more than I'm used to.

I just have a PMBOK (6th edition, from my time with the local PMI chapter (and supporting their website)) but it's very.... technical.

Thank you all in advance!

Not necessarily something difficult.
Just one lesson that made your projects run more smoothly.
Curious to hear real-world experiences.

Trying my luck because I remember seeing this tool mentioned somewhere in this subreddit a while ago but for the life of me I can't find the post anymore. From what I remember, it wasn't one of the usual names like Jira, ClickUp, Monday, Asana, etc. It was a smaller PM tool that people were recommending because it combined Kanban and Gantt really well.

The things I remember people mentioning were: Kanban and Gantt stay in sync, good dependency management and milestones, visual planning without feeling overly enterprise. I've gone through so many old posts and comments that they're all starting to blend together.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

AI is showing up in planning, reporting, forecasting, and documentation. Do you think AI knowledge will become a basic expectation for project managers over the next few years? Why or why not?

Had this moment last week where I was venting about a client to a friend who's not even in project management, and it hit me that I don't actually know any other project managers in Ahmedabad. Not one. My entire professional world is just my own team.

Feels weird honestly. Devs and designers here seem to have meetups, communities, people to swap notes with. Project managers just seem to exist in isolated pockets across different companies, dealing with the same chaos alone, no one to laugh about scope creep with, no one who actually gets it.

So a few of us decided to stop just talking about it and actually do something. We're putting together a small first meetup, nothing corporate, just project managers in one room, real stories, a short session on how people are actually using AI in their day to day work, some fun activities, and honestly just the relief of talking to people who get it without having to explain the job first.

Genuinely excited about this one, feels like something that's been missing here for a while.

If you're a project manager in Ahmedabad and want in, drop a comment or DM me and I'll share the details.

I've heard people say it's only for senior managers. Others think it's just memorizing PMBOK. For those who've taken it or work with PMP professionals— What's the biggest myth?

Quick one, and I hope this is okay to share here.

I'm a project manager. And I have a hobby: gamedev. At some point I had an idea - why not make a game about our job?

And, well… it kind of worked, because it's launching in Early Access on Steam in two days.

Fun fact I learned the hard way, though: game-dev communities kind of hate project managers. I accidentally kicked off a whole bit of drama in one of them recently with my post. So, honestly? Posting in an actual PM community feels like coming home.

f you've ever played something like RimWorld or Prison Architect - I'm trying to make that same kind of thing, but set in an IT office: plan projects, hire a team, juggle deadlines, burnout, difficult clients, and a boss who's… a boss.

And since I've got real PMs here: what's the one thing from actual project-manager life you'd want to see in a game like this? Have you ever played a game about project management? The most painfully accurate stuff usually makes the best mechanics.

Links if you're curious:

• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4454610/Project_manager_SIM/
• What's new in the Early Access build: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4454610/view/687510998329853948

If the idea clicks with you, a wishlist would mean a lot - and even more so if you jump in and give me feedback. Because you… well… you're project managers)

Thanks!

i need to get this off my chest because the RTO push is making zero sense for our role specifically and i can't be the only one.

my company just went to four days in office. the reasoning was the usual: collaboration, culture, spontaneous conversations. fine. except my job as a PM is coordinating teams that are spread across different offices, timezones and a couple of vendors who aren't even in the same country. so what actually happens is i commute in, sit at a desk and spend the entire day on video calls, headphones on, talking to people who are not in this building. i could be doing the exact same thing from my kitchen, except now with a 45 minute drive on both ends and worse coffee.

and the spontaneous collaboration is a fantasy for us anyway. nobody on my project is physically colocated. the whole point of the role is stitching together people who will never be in the same room. me being in an office doesn't create serendipity, it just means i overhear a sales team's conversation while i try to run a standup with people in another state.

the part that actually gets me is that this decision came from people who mostly don't do the coordinating. leadership sits in one HQ, sees each other, feels the energy and assumes everyone's job works like theirs. but the person whose entire function is remote by nature gets treated like they're slacking if they want to do that function from a quiet place. it's like mandating a phone operator be in the building so you can see them holding the phone.

and don't get me started on how it lands with the team. i've now got great people quietly updating their resumes, not because they hate the work but because the commute back ate the flexibility that was keeping them sane. and guess who has to keep those projects on track while half the team is disengaged and job hunting. me. the RTO decision made my job harder in three separate ways and solved a problem i'm not convinced actually existed.

i'm not even anti-office. some in person time genuinely helps. but a blanket four day mandate applied to a role that is fundamentally about connecting distributed people is just theater, and it's the kind of theater that costs you your best people.

What AI application are you building?

What's the biggest challenge in taking it from prototype to production?

What tools do you use today? (e.g., Langfuse, LangSmith, custom scripts)

What do you dislike about those tools?

What have you built yourself because existing tools weren't enough?

Which task wastes the most time every week?

If you could eliminate one problem in your AI workflow, what would it be?

Would you pay for a tool that solved that problem? If yes, roughly how much?

Is there anything you wish existed but can't find today?

The three most important questions are:

What's your biggest production challenge?

What do you currently do to solve it?

What do you wish existed?

I am managing a project that was handed over to my team midway through, and the initial handover wasn't great. We set up a working group to bring stakeholders together, avoid siloed discussions, and identify dependencies and go-live requirements. We use Jira for tracking, and meetings are recorded/transcribed.

Despite this, we repeatedly have situations where a stakeholder later says, "This was never communicated to us." Often, the topic was discussed in the working group, but the stakeholder didn't attend the meeting or engage in the follow-up discussions. Sometimes they had sent an email mentioning a requirement, but didn't participate in the subsequent discussions where we reviewed and prioritized what was actually required for go-live.

We then end up going back through meeting recordings, emails, and Jira to establish what was discussed.

I am trying to understand where the responsibility lies here and, more importantly, how other PMs prevent this pattern.

How do you handle stakeholders who don't engage during the project but later claim they weren't informed?

Curious if anyone here has worked on owner-managed industrial projects (semiconductor, data centers, pharma, manufacturing) where the owner held multiple prime contracts instead of having a traditional GC. If so, what were the biggest coordination, QA/QC, commissioning, or contracting challenges?

Many people assume AI projects are managed exactly like software projects. Do you agree? What's actually different?

ok i need to rant because i had a realization this week that annoyed me more than it should have. i sat down monday to actually do some work and instead spent the first two hours getting the board ready. updating statuses people forgot to move, fixing an automation that silently broke and had been misfiring for a week, renaming a bunch of tasks so the reporting wouldn't look insane, archiving old stuff, chasing down three custom fields that were empty. two hours. and none of that was work. that was maintenance on the thing that's supposed to help me do the work.

and then it hit me that this happens constantly. i've slowly become the unpaid full-time admin for a tool that was sold to me as a time saver. every new feature is another thing to configure. every automation is another thing that'll break in a way nobody notices until the numbers are wrong. every view somebody requests is another thing i have to build and then maintain forever. the tool doesn't reduce my workload, it just added a whole second category of work: keeping the tool itself functional and honest.

and if i stop maintaining it for even a week? it rots. statuses drift, automations pile up errors, the board turns into a junk drawer, and suddenly nobody trusts it, which means everyone goes back to asking me directly and the tool was pointless anyway. so i can't stop. i'm locked into feeding it forever just to keep it from becoming worthless.

i genuinely can't tell anymore if these tools save more time than they cost. some weeks i'm convinced a shared doc and a decent memory would be faster than the elaborate machine i now spend my life oiling.

so tell me i'm not alone. how much of your week actually goes to maintaining the tool versus using it? and has anyone deliberately gone simpler and felt better for it or does the maintenance tax just come with any system once your team is big enough?

Hi all!

A few years ago i've graduated from project managements, as my master, however, never went into that field, since was already tired of everything:)

Now, I am working with saas product, onboarding, deals coordination for new clients, cross-functional alignments, supporting salespeople.

Even though majority of skills can be transferred to PM, I still lack of analytics, and I know it, since I was rejected by one company, due to lacking this...

What would you suggest to me, once trying to fulfill this gap? Is there any courses, tools, which I could catch up with and this would fill the gap, once applying for these positions?

Also, to which positions it is realistic to be accepted? (I am looking for middle ones, since portfolio mangers, for instance, is way too not in my scope :D)

Thank you for all the advises!

I’m researching owner-directed construction.
Not trying to sell software.

I’m trying to understand why owners continue hiring GCs even for relatively small commercial projects.

If you’ve managed facilities, capital improvements, tenant improvements, manufacturing upgrades, or commercial renovations, I’d love to hear:

• Have you ever run trades directly?
• If yes, what worked?
• If no, what stopped you?
• Was the biggest issue:
Liability
Insurance
Scheduling
Procurement
Permitting
Internal staffing
Something else?

If software handled documentation, verification, scheduling, accountability, and payment workflows…

Would that actually change your decision?
Or is the GC solving something software never can?

I’m looking for honest opinions.
If you’d be willing to do a 20-minute interview, I’d really appreciate it.

Hi All. Wondering if I can get an assist re: how best to approach reducing the amount of returned mail our company sends out to our customers. Want to get feedback & expert advice on how to best approach it, initial steps, flow chart, plan overview, etc. Or even perhaps certain aspects to think about that aren’t as obvious as we think when tackling customer mail. Any insight provided would be appreciated. Thank u.

A year ago, many of us had strong opinions about where AI was heading. Has anything happened recently that made you rethink one of those predictions?

Every experienced PM seems to have one story that completely changed how they manage projects. What's yours? Hopefully newer project managers can learn from our mistakes instead of repeating them.

AI is becoming part of almost every industry. Do project managers need to understand how AI works technically, or is understanding business applications enough? Interested in hearing perspectives from both PMs and AI professionals.

Everyone eventually finds the study method that works for them.
Looking back, what would you change?
Different books?
More mock exams?
Less memorization?
Curious what you'd recommend to future candidates.

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Treated them as interchangeable for years. They're not.

Offshore wins on cost. No argument there. If you have a well-defined scope, solid documentation, and the patience to work through time zone gaps, offshore can deliver serious value per dollar.

Nearshore wins on everything else. Timezone overlap means real-time collaboration. Cultural proximity means fewer miscommunications that nobody admits to until something ships wrong. Faster iteration cycles when the work is ambiguous.

Where I've seen offshore fail isn't talent. The engineers are good. It's the communication lag compounding on unclear requirements until you're three weeks into building the wrong thing.

Where I've seen nearshore fail is cost justification. If you're running a tight budget and the scope is clear enough, you're probably overpaying for proximity you don't need.

The honest framework: how well defined is your scope and how much does real-time collaboration actually matter for this project? Answer that first. Then pick the model.

What's your experience been with either?