u/Ilovefitness72

I've spent well over 8 years as a scrum master, coach and agile delivery lead. I loved it. It was high energy and I was able to solve problems and lead teams to deliver real business value. I took a new role 5 years ago at my current job as a project manager because my boss was terrible and I had to get away from her. I moved to a pm role because I have a PMP and thought it may be a better opportunity. I absolutely hate it. I feel like a secretary who just takes meeing notes and tracks a project plan with made up estimates from one person. When I worked as a scrum master, I actually had the ability to coach teams and keep them focused on meeting deadlines better than using a project plan in MS project. We use jira and all of our work is captured there, along with milestones. Yet my boss expects me to track a project plan that looks great on paper, but doesn't paint an accurate picture of the project. My entire team is agile, they run sprints on a 3 week cadence. A week ago, I caught wind the project was behind schedule I went into jira and analyzied data related to work planned vs completed, burn down charts, and scope creep. It showed we are at least 2 months behind. I told this to my leadership and they were upset that I'm not using a project plan in MS project, and they didn't like me putting on my scrum master hat, Had I kept using waterfall approaches, and not put on my agile hat, I would have never been able to discover this. But my leadership expects us to run the project using waterfall methods for planning, estimates and tracking instead of a more hybrid process. They are not skilled in this area and neither are the other PMs. All of our projects struggle. I want to move back to an agile delivery role, I feel tradtional project management is outdated, inefficient and fails to deliver, especially in today's cutthroat business environment where business direction changes daily.

I was assigned a project with a set start and end date. The project duration was for one year. At the onset of the project, after it was approved by governance, I was not provided resources to begin development work or to even provide estimates. The resources , who were all contractors , were finally on boarded 5.5 months later. Placing the project at risk, as it began almost 6 months late and without management taking this into consideration and extending the delivery date. In addition, there was a critical dependency on an external vendor, who was 3 months late delivering a backend solution that would be integrated into the front end. We lost 2 key resources along the way who quit. Those resources were never replaced. Yet, despite all of these setbacks, I successfully delivered the project on the last date of project. We ended up meeting all milestones. One month after final delivery, I was placed on a PIP. The PIP called out how the project missed deadlines, the project plan lacked detail, meeting notes, and risks were not communicated. All of these accusations are false. I had a clear, detailed project plan that was reviewed on a weekly basis. Meeting notes, action items, and escalations were communicated. I raised risks and qualified several high risks and placed the project in red status. Afterwards, I was told by my manager to lower risks because they didn't want to bring attention to the project sponsor. My thought is I'm being thrown under the bus for managements failures to escalate risks, issues, and to solve problems. At the end, again, the project was delivered in time due to my leadership. Yet my reward was being placed on a performance improvement plan. Am I being used as a scapegoat? Is this how all projects are managed by senior leadership? It this a common thing in the project management field? Right now I am so discouraged and have lost any interest in being a PM. I'm seriously questioning this career field.

I'm thinking about becoming an independent contractor and finding opportunities to bill my work at an hourly rate for opportunities with various clients. I'm tired of the corporate games and politics and have built a website to offer my services to companies needing a consultant.

For anyone who has done this, how difficult is it to reach out to various organizations for independent consulting opportunities? Is working through Upwork, Toptal, and other gig sites a good way? Other than having to pay for healthcare, is becoming independent a good idea and are you happy with it versus internal corporate jail :) ?

I'm just looking for advice. Working internally as an FTE certainly has much more benefits, but in most cases there's no growth potential and the corporate games are painful.

Thanks in advance.

I'm thinking about becoming an independent contractor and finding opportunities to bill my work at an hourly rate for opportunities with various clients. I'm tired of the corporate games and politics and have built a website to offer my services to companies needing a consultant.

For anyone who has done this, how difficult is it to reach out to various organizations for independent consulting opportunities? Is working through Upwork, Toptal, and other gig sites a good way? Other than having to pay for healthcare, is becoming independent a good idea and are you happy with it versus internal corporate jail :) ?

I'm just looking for advice. Working internally as an FTE certainly has much more benefits, but in most cases there's no growth potential and the corporate games are painful.

Thanks in advance.

I recently bought a 2023 RDX A-Spec. I live near Cleveland Ohio, but the car was been in Arizona the entire time and brought up to Ohio when I bought it 2 months ago. The weather here in Cleveland sucks bad and winter lasts like 6 months. My RDX has never seen snow or salt, so I am thinking on getting it undercoated before winter. Does anyone have recommendations? is it worth it? What kind of undercoating is recommended?

I keep reading on reddit and Facebook groups how bad the Acura brand is, how it has no identity and the vehicles are lower quality compared to Lexus and Toyotas. A lot of folks are saying Honda is going to just abandon the brand. Others complain they are just over priced Hondas and not worth the money. I personally love my RDX, I know the technology is a bit behind, but I actually like not having a huge TV screen in the dashboard. Its the best car I ever owned. Just trying to understand the hate.