Donna Fitzgerald

I’ve been doing my imitation of a headless chicken recently so it was only this morning that I had a chance to sit down and go through my god-son’s pictures from his summer program in Japan.   Let me begin by saying that I’ve never been to Japan.   6 years ago when we supposed to go, work just got too crazy and flight availability was iffy to say the least.

 Looking at Daniel’s pictures I was struck by how many things had changed.  Going to Japan just seemed like a big deal to me in 2006.  Today it’s just one more long airplane flight.  In 2006 I knew lots of people who had been to Japan but seeing their pictures would have been a process of going to their house, waiting for them to find them and then flipping through the hard copies.  Today tweetdeck offers me a personal slideshow, delivered to my family room 24 hours a day, and Daniel isn’t even back from Japan yet. As far as its come, technology isn’t completely ubiquitous yet.  We loaded Skype to Daniel’s computer the day before he left only to find out that there isn’t any Wi-Fi available in his dorm room.  Our assumption that it would be there is almost laughable but it reflects how we all see the world today.

So what does all this have to do with PPM?  Two things; the first is our potential project staff really is global and we need to begin understanding how to work effectively with a geographically dispersed team (especially those of us in the United States).  If this sounds like old news, I’m not sure it is.  We all went international years ago but I think we did it with our eyes closed.  We just treated everyone the same and tried to adjust for time differences )or at least that’s how I handled it).   Now I think we owe our team members a little more personal touch (which means a little more travel on somebody’s part no matter how grueling).  The second point is back to my refrain that PMs are luddities.  We need to not just embrace communication and social networking technology.  We need to lead because we’re the ones on the front line.

I know we’re all busy, but our professional lives are not completely defined and bounded by the PMBOK.  To be perceived as leaders in our organizations we should be looking for areas where we can establish leadership naturally and I think collaborative technologies and the fine art of managing in a global world is a golden opportunity that is being handed to us on a platter.

Thoughts?  Opposing opinions?

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Category: PMO Technology     Tags: Collaboration, Geographically disbursed teams, Leadership

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