When tools don’t talk, PMs improvise. Mario Romero shares his day-to-day fixes for juggling multiple platforms and keeping projects on track.
Picture this: You've just switched from addressing a critical vendor issue in your email to updating task statuses in your project management tool, when a Teams notification pops up asking for information that's stored in yet another system entirely. Before you can respond, three more alerts demand your attention from different platforms.
For Mario Romero, who leads the Project Management Office at Allied Properties, this digital juggling act is a challenge he faces every day, demanding both creative solutions and a strategic approach to navigate successfully. The insights and approaches he shares here reflect his personal experience and perspective, and not necessarily those of Allied Properties.
"Sometimes I get to my day and I'm like, 'Oh my God, so much stuff.' I have an email here, I have a message there, somebody's contacting me through this other platform, and I have questions all over the place," Romero explains. "Sometimes the tools don't talk to each other, so I find myself forwarding an email here so I can tackle it there."
Like many PMOs, Romero's team relies on multiple specialized tools that don't always communicate well with each other. This fragmentation creates what he calls a "broken workflow" – where project managers spend valuable time manually transferring information between systems.
"Ideally I want to keep the 'flow' part. I don't want to keep the 'work' part," Romero shares. "Let's say I'm working on an email with some important information. Ideally I don't want to leave that email there – I want to have a backup because good project management says documentation is key down the road."
This leads to inefficient workarounds: "I have to take that email and store it in the content management system where I have all the project information. But I want to track those tasks too, so let me send an email there or use the add-in that connects the two tools. And then when you realize you're like: that's silly. I should just have done it once and everything should be in the right place."
Quick Win: Audit your most common workflows and identify where you're duplicating effort across tools. Creating even basic automation between systems can save hours each week.
When Romero first joined Allied Properties, he was the first and only project manager – which gave him a unique opportunity to build the PMO practice from scratch.
"I established the methodology from intake to delivering projects, from the processes, all the gates that we were going to have to ingest projects, and what was going to be our process to deliver projects," he explains.
While this standardization met initial resistance ("Are you the minute taker? I'm not the minute taker. I can write minutes, yes, but I'm not the minute taker"), it gradually gained acceptance as stakeholders recognized its value.
"Slowly, people started learning. They'd say, 'Let's go to these guys, they know what they're doing.' And then we started helping them with understanding what their needs were, the processes, how to build a business case, how to make sure we were working on the right solutions."
Quick Win: Begin with standardizing just one process – like project intake or status reporting – and demonstrate its value before expanding to additional workflows.
As AI tools become more prevalent, Romero sees opportunity – but with important limitations. His team has been exploring AI since ChatGPT's release, but maintains a pragmatic approach to its implementation.
"We use a lot of tools to help us on a day-to-day basis. Whatever we can leverage for administrative tasks like agendas, minutes, charters, risk analysis, mitigation plans – we try to use AI to assist us with that, understanding that it's not quite there yet."
The goal is to augment human capabilities, not replace them: "If our job was just tool-based and mechanical, then leave it to AI to replace us. But we do so much more. There's the human aspect, the emotional intelligence, the strategic thinking, the negotiation aspect. There's being able to remove roadblocks from people and projects."
Technology, in Romero's view, should free up time for higher-value activities: "If I can free myself up so I don't have to spend 16 hours building a business case or project charter, but can spend just a couple and most of my time reviewing the data, making sense of it, understanding where I'm behind – that would be more valuable."
Quick Win: Identify repetitive, documentation-heavy tasks in your workflow that could benefit from AI assistance, while preserving human oversight for strategic and relationship-focused elements.
When asked about his dream scenario for project management tools, Romero focuses on streamlining actions across platforms.
"For me, the killer feature is if I have two or three actions to take, that I could just trigger them from one place. For example: these are the terms of conditions for this particular agreement. I need to talk to legal, I need to talk to my manager to see what he thinks about this, and I need to create a task because this is going to take a few weeks for us to deal with."
The ideal solution? "If I could just select 'send to this, send to this, send to this,' and I know it goes to the right places, it would be great. That might be a dream, but that would be ideal."
Quick Win: Map out your most common multi-step workflows and explore existing integration platforms (like Zapier or Microsoft Power Automate) that might help connect your critical systems.
With nearly 40 projects running annually at Allied Properties, Romero's team can't directly manage everything. Their solution? Empowering others with project management skills.
"The reality is everybody runs projects, and in our capacity, we don't have the ability to run all their projects. Sometimes it's not even necessary," Romero notes. "So let's empower them. Let's train people on how to run their own projects."
This approach is built on the principles of open collaboration: "Instead of being afraid that people are going to steal your ideas, maybe you give your ideas and between all of us, we grow together."
Romero's team is preparing to launch training initiatives that will create a consistent project management approach across the organization: "This is how you run a project. You have a project? This is what you should do. These are the ABCs. Go do it. And whenever you have a question, here we are – the people that can help you."
Quick Win: Create a simple "PM Starter Kit" with basic templates and guidelines that anyone in your organization can use for smaller projects, reducing the burden on your formal PMO resources.
For internal project teams, demonstrating value can be challenging when there's no direct revenue impact. Romero's approach combines strategic alignment with practical improvements.
"For every initiative we take on, we try to align it with a strategic initiative of the organization," he explains. "When we have a steering committee meeting or a presentation to executives, it's a matter of saying, 'You set out to do this for your tenants. This is how this particular solution improved the tenant experience.'"
Process improvements offer another angle: "Sometimes we focus on process improvements: 'These people were doing ABCD. Maybe two of those were not important tasks to the organization – just time consuming. But now they do EF, and those two new ones are very important to the organization, more strategic, because now we've freed up time.'"
Nevertheless, Romero acknowledges the challenge: "It's tough to measure ROI for internal projects. A lot of it comes down to executive support. Projects that don't have executive support, you're kind of doomed."
Quick Win: Create a simple before/after comparison for each project that quantifies time saved, errors reduced, or other tangible metrics beyond just dollars saved.
Despite the challenges and frustrations of working across multiple platforms, Romero's enthusiasm for project management remains strong – stemming from his earliest career experiences.
"I came with an engineering background but ended up doing business. When I went to school, there was one class I loved: project management. I said, 'Man, it would be so great to do project management one day,'" he recalls.
When a manager later asked if he planned to stay in his business analyst role, Romero's response was immediate: "I want your job. You're a project manager."
This passion extends beyond office hours: "Once I finish my work, I don't stop being a project manager or a technologist. I go and start playing with tools, I investigate, I do research, I participate in projects just so I learn how others work. Your job is where you put your practice or knowledge into action, but I acquire a lot of my knowledge outside work through experimentation and research."
For project managers like Romero, the future isn't about finding one perfect tool, but rather creating seamless connections between specialized solutions.
"We live in a world with a bunch of APIs. There's an API for this, an API for that," he notes. "In my mind, when we look at the world of notifications, what matters are the actions that get triggered with those notifications."
Until the perfect solution emerges, he'll continue experimenting, adapting, and building processes that bring order to the multi-platform chaos – one forwarded email at a time.
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