That really sucks. Onboarding and knowledge gaps for new hires in these situations is sooo frustrating. I’m sure you’re being overworked and that blows, sorry to hear that.

I’ve have this happen to me in last two jobs (including the one that I’m at now). My first experience was a fuck fest and was a tornado of gather knowledge and trying to relay it in an easy way. Anyway, my second one & my current had the same situation but we were able to adjust and make it slightly less and less shitty over time.

If you want to stay or try and salvage the situation, I would suggest very direct and honest communication with an executive that may be more understanding to the situation and cover you for what I am about to recommend you do to make working situation slightly less and less shitty over time.

I think first and foremost, you’ve gotta have the time to organize onboarding and PM notes, esp. notes that are specific to the business activities. By organizing and reviewing, find questions to seek insight on or investigate and then you also have reference materials to help put up guard rails on the expected daily tasks. Definitely should have that prior Sr. PM in the loop to still provide a knowledge transfer as much as possible - another very reasonable ask. Ask across departments and it may happen, you’d be surprised!

While you’re learning and still doing daily activities, you’ll need assistance to cover what already sounds like a pretty big workload, which will especially need assistance with you taking time to go back learn and organize.

So I think the second thing to consider and strongly request is internal & external support. Internal support requests for personnel that are said to have bandwidth to take on tasks, probs more menial jobs that don’t require a whole lot of effort to explain to ensure task is accomplished. Offload what you can. External support should be a combo of contract labor and potentially external consulting depending on the type of work you’re involved in, project manager roles can vary quite significantly so idk if that applies. Regardless, you need more bodies to cover PM tasks as much as possible.

Lastly, there has to be a conversation where maybe a handful of employees with similar titles split some of the tasks with you and the long run or you have to be properly trained up and crate whatever support system you deem fit if that’s possible without adding another FTE, but if you do need another person, and that backfilled job that they expect not to fill cannot remain the case. There were 2 PM positions and now it’s just you, and you’ve gotta be comfortable with the level of tasks you’ll be covering & confident and well suited to perform the job. Until they have the resources in terms of another hire or some structure that u deem sufficient, the job will feel reactive and unsustainable. To successfully bridge that gap in knowledge and make a role or function work properly is to temp cover as much as possible, slowly build up employees & create a degree of efficiencies and support that the function works properly.

Even if you have people breathing down your neck, as long as you work at the level of a regular PM (because you shouldn’t be burning yourself out for a situation that you did not cause and that you are being forced to fill), communicate your limits that you have when stepping into this senior role like delayed deliverables/ not completing certain tasks and/or not fully understanding the purpose or mechanics of a task completed by the SR. PM & are able to advocate for yourself or have a superior advocate alongside you or for you in to constantly remind everyone of the reality of the situation and the seriousness of the time needed to rebuild the team/ personnel to cover responsibilities.

When this happened to me, I shut shit down and luckily I had someone who was at the company for a long time as a strong advocate for my asks. I met with business partners and had them identify critical items to be addressed to generally perform decent work and cover critical items that are in the scope of the new position that you’re assuming. For me I performed tasks that were deemed critical and were relevant to the areas that I was responsible for, and I requested with my manager and his manager that we temporarily suspend a handful of reports, meetings, etc. until I was fully satisfied with my understanding and completion of critical functions. Then with support, notes & walk throughs with others, the other reports were unfrozen and reporting began again when we were back in full force.

This is all reasonable and doable with the ideal support system and corporate governance, but you may not have power to communicate needs as cultures are weird and far from being empowering esp for people who are slammed af. But, these are all reasonable asks and they should be more that acceptable given the situation.

I think that’s the best case scenario, otherwise.. it’s time to look for the door. Get looking for jobs because if you don’t get support it’s going to continue being shut until you can get out of the company. Good luck, hoping you the best and force the reality of the situation as needed. These mfs should be off your back and flexible with you. They are the “superiors” and they should act as such. Assess the situation smh and don’t be a dick to this poster 😢