Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Study Project Managers are Stressed and Overworked

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Study Project Managers are Stressed and Overworked According toWorkfront’s new Project Management Survey, conducted in late2014with 384 North American PMs, project managers are being inundated with too much work, lack of visibility into the work being done, and the use of disconnected tools to do the work. As a result, they are left without insights into the work they are doing and are stretched too thin. Fifty-five percent of the surveyed PMs said that in 2014, their workload increased significantly, causing 38 percent of project managers to say no to new projects, work overtime, and outsource at least 6-10 hours of work per week. Disparate new tools don’t ease admin pains Surprisingly, nearly a third of the PM workweek is spentupdating project status instead of working on projects. Of the survey respondents, 27 percent listed “project information scattered across too many disconnected tools” as their biggest problem at work. Thirty-three percent arestill using spreadsheets and email to manage their projects, and 18 percent are spending loads of time entering the same data into different systems. While 58 percent of the respondents are using Agile methodologies including Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming, 62 percent stated that more than half of projects are completed using traditional project management methods that may or may not be effective. Sixty-six percent of PMs don’t have a formalrequest management system, so projects come in from all over and are difficult to prioritize and track. All in all, many PMs are so “all over the place” that they aren’t in a position to derive crucial information and take action on it. Lest we chalk these issues up to inexperience, Workfront actually polled animpressive group of PMs. More than half had over 10 years of experience in project management, and 84 percent had completed formal PM training or earnedPM certifications. A majority have been in this field a long time, and their jobs aren’t getting any easier. For the rest of the post, head over to Intuits Fast Track blog.