Why is project management just doing admin and updating trackers?

“A lot of companies still onboard vendors through email chains, PDFs, spreadsheets, and endless follow-ups.”source ↗

“Anyone else fighting this battle? Or am I just yelling into the void?”source ↗

“Instead of one obvious failure everyone can point to, you get slower turnaround, people quietly skipping steps when the deadline's breathing down their neck, or a doc nobody's actually opened since the day it was written, sitting there giving everyone false comfort”source ↗

“A bad PMO will create excessive, unneccesary metric that turn PMs into "spreadsheet jockeys".”source ↗

“If as a PM you have to choose getting your report in on time over moving the project forward, that’s likely the breaking point between a good PMO and a bad PMO.”source ↗

“Sr Product Manager here and I absolutely abhor the process overhead that has creeped up over time.”source ↗

“as an example, I spend 2/5 of my work week just doing reporting busywork. Not creating anything of value, not talking to customers, not unblocking my team, not designing and running experiments and validations. Just reporting.”source ↗

“I moved to a new company and went from previously running my own projects end-to-end to be an admin and builds templates.”source ↗

“I used to own programs. I was respected as a leader and a manager. My teams generally did their work, and I existed to bridge gaps, manage risk, align dependencies, and stand between the working team and leadership. At my new job, I get questions, and then connect two different people on Slack. I know where the documents are, like, 30% of the time, which is a lot more than most people, so I become a walking link directory. I collect what happens in 50 Slack channels into a single meeting agenda. I'm not a program manager anymore. I'm not even a project manager. I'm a fucking task manager.”source ↗

“Instead of having conversations they want to solve every problem with a tracker. I suggest one 30 minute meeting a month to make sure things are on track and I get “why don’t we build a tracker”. I can’t keep track of all the things that need to be updated. Can’t I just spend my time tracking the actual project?”source ↗

“where the PMO governance model added 3 months to the delivery of a program of work because of the mandatory reporting requirements”source ↗

“Some introducing our PMO, the amount of reporting we have to do has increased substantially. Earlier this year before we complained and made them simplify it, I was reporting to like 10 different places every month.”source ↗

“Introducing the PMO around a year ago just introduced a pile of extra gateways and paperwork that nobody understands the purpose of due to complexity, without any support or quality assurance for our actual work.”source ↗

“Having run sales teams and marketing as a founder, you do need a CRM but the tedious part is to fill everything manually and hoping teams will do it too.”source ↗

“I've had a standup argument with one PMO manager who tried to impose a process which turned out to be a PMO's functional responsibility”source ↗

“As I’ve progressed and now lead enterprise level programs/projects - half my time for sure is just doing updates and PowerPoints.”source ↗

“I spend an hours a week just updating all my projects in service now so management can manage demand and workloads. I complete 2 status reports that aren’t used or read.”source ↗

“The amount of "work about work" we do is outrageous. At my company I'd say conservatively we spend 60% of our time just tracking and reporting.”source ↗

“Your delivery PMO is likely just as frustrated by excessive project controls as you are”source ↗

“spent two hours this week on an invoice formatting issue. two hours. on formatting.”source ↗

“A sales man keep saying "i don't have the time ,it's too much". And I keep wonder ,is it bad to ask them telling us where are they going and why?”source ↗

“If a required field doesn’t help move the deal forward, it becomes 'call – went well.'”source ↗

“Instead of resolving the problem at hand, they created a new one - a huge and unnecessary bottle neck that everyone hated and no one respected.”source ↗

“I’m on a project and there is absolutely no need for a PMO. They have no domain knowledge that is relevant so they have no capacity to provide process that is relevant. If i could change something i would eliminate the PMO.”source ↗

“I don’t know my experience a PMO and a PM has been kind of a useless position. It would be better served to have more staff to do the work than someone to report on the Work getting done.”source ↗