Donna Fitzgerald

While in the process of finishing up a note about ensuring organizations have competent project managers, I ran across an article that contended that project managers were so focused on the metrics of “on-time and on-budget” that they had become incapable of actually remembering that the goal of their project was to deliver strategic business [...]

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“IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.”
Found this quote in a ComputerWorld article a friend sent me (http://tinyurl.com/lm9yb7).  While the entire article is well worth reading this one sentence seemed to pertain to the [...]

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I’ve never bought into the myth that obtaining an MBA has anything to do with superior leadership or management ability.  So it was humbling to find that my blog post  was chosen as an example to help young MBA applicants write their leadership essay.  My post said leadership was simple: Vision, Courage and Responsibility, and that [...]

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I was just reviewing a presentation for a client and the light bulb just went on.  The presentation discussed the common problem with having too many projects that don’t actually further the strategy and the presentation seemed to imply that this was a process compliance issue.  I can understand their perspective.  Layout the steps and [...]

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Mumble, mumble, mumble.  Life has been busy in Gartner Land and that means that somethings (like cross posting to my personal blog) have had to slide.  Not sure why I decided to take 10 minutes and post something yesterday but I’m glad I did.  Turned out I’d been hacked.  Yeh, I was stupid (I hadn’t [...]

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I found this on Glen Alleman’s Herding Cats blog and it was simply too good to not reprint in its entirety
People, Processes, and Technology
People, Process, and Technology is a common management consultant set of “pitches.”
I’m here to say it’s in that order. And the order steps down in logarithmic. Meaning Processes is e (2.71821) less [...]

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“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.”
                                                                             Peter Drucker
If I had to indentify 2 areas that I believe PPM Leaders will need to increase their focus on in 2010, it would be communications and change management. 
I have adopted [...]

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I promised that I’d pass along some thoughts about the PPM Summit so here goes:
1) We had a terrifically engaged audience.  I’ve been speaking at one conference or another for just a few weeks shy of 13 years and hands down I felt that the attendees where there because they really cared about running a [...]

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I just read an interesting quote that said centralized PMOs experienced a higher degree of PPM maturity than decentralized PMOs.  Yep, that’s absolutely true and NOPE it doesn’t mean that if you centralize your PMO you will instantly become more mature.  It means that at least up until 2009, centralization itself was linked to maturity.  [...]

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What makes for a good user experience?  I recently had the oppotunity to stay in two different hotels that each cost the same BUT with very different experiences.  In the first hotel there was someone at the desk to check me in when I arrived.  At the second there was no one which seemed a [...]

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