Donna Fitzgerald » Uncategorized

Worthy Causes and Doing What We Can to Help

Donna Fitzgerald — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:23:39 +0000

After almost a week away in Orlando at the PPM Summit I decided to take a few minutes and catch up on my email. As it always does with me — one click lead to another and before I knew it I found myself at the ESI site checking out their Stand Out Scholarship designed to help unemployeed individuals brush up their PPM skills so that they hopefully can get a job. Call me naive but I was delighted by existence the program. It is my deepest believe that all any of us are called on to do to help others is just what we personally have the resources to do (be it skills, time or money). Clearly ESI is in a position to offer professional training and they’ve chosen to make available some scholarships to those who need the help. Whether or not that training gets someone a job can never be guarranteed but just knowing that someone thinks you’re worthy of investing in can be a big ego boost and for some that might be all it takes to get their career back on track.

I’ll be writing more about the conference tomorrow but for today I just wanted to give a “hat’s off” to ESI.

Update on our Summit

Donna Fitzgerald — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:41:43 +0000

The panel on the future of PPM seemed to go over well. No real surprises that about 75 percent of the audience hope the status quo will hold as the most likely future. We all want change only when it furthers our own desires. Other than that we have better things to worry about. General agreement across all four scenarios that program management and change management will be important.

Twitter Outage and the Shape of Things to Come

Donna Fitzgerald — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:26:03 +0000

Just a few minutes ago I posted an entry about using Twitter at the PPM Summit in September. When I was checking that my links worked I realized that Twitter was down. Being an analyst by inclination and by job title I immediately went out to the web to find out where this was a recurring problem or just a one time glitch. It appears that there have been a number of DOS issues recently. Tracking this back got me to a site called Downrightnow which tracks the status on the more popular social networking sites. I then followed the appropriate links on reporting an outage only to find that they generally rely on Twitter to help them monitor user reported outages.

So here we have a completely free service (Twitter) that is rapidly becoming the backbone of applications and workstreams. I hate to say it but I’m thinking that at some time in the future we’re going to have a situation where the firms funding Twitter will want some financial renumeration for their investment and then we’ll all find out about TANSTAAFL really means.

Announcing the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit Linkedin Group

Donna Fitzgerald — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:06:57 +0000

Have you ever been to a Gartner symposium? Are you planning to join us for our first PPM and IT Governance Summit in September in sunny Orlando? Would you like to attend a summit or a symposium once the moratorium on corporate travel gets lifted at your company? If your answer to any of these is yes then please consider joining our new linkedin group Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit. We have lots of exciting plans for this group and are looking forward to having a way to keep in touch with everyone we meet at conferences. Over the next couple of weeks different Gartner analysts will be playing host at the site and there will be opportunities to start discussions and get the answers you need from us and from your peers. Check it out.

Envisioning this blog

Donna Fitzgerald — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:18:40 +0000

Let me begin by offering my vision of what I hope to accomplish by writing this blog. For background let me say that for the past 12 years I’ve moderated a worldwide discussion group focused on project management. It’s been a wonderful experience but it’s taken up what little spare time I’ve had, leaving me short on the creative juices necessary for writing my own blog. Since coming to Gartner I’ve turned the reins to NewGrange over to other capable hands and have found myself missing the opportunity to reflect of what’s going on around me. I hope this site will be give me a forum to offer my somewhat quirky perspectives on what works and what doesn’t and how we can focus our energy in a manner that creates results.

I’m passionate about PPM. I was hired to manage my first large project in May of 1979 (I was of course only 12 years old) and I still find myself reflecting on what went right and what went wrong with that project even today. In concept this is called double loop learning and is the best way for any of us to continue to grow and develop. One interesting fact I’ve noticed from revisiting the past occasionally is the changes in my own perceptions. Five years after my first project completed I would have told you the things I did wrong were A, B, and C. Ten years later I would have told you that I should have done D, E, F but the truth was at the time I wasn’t experienced enough to even know what D, E and F meant. Some of what I hope to do here is to point out the bridges that I should have seen between A and D and B and E, so that it might be easier for others to move faster than I did. I also hope to tell stories here since it is only through a story that tacit knowledge can really be transmitted since it is the story that carries the context.

I would be doing a disservice to those of you who are considering reading this blog if I didn’t also acknowledge that I have a tendency to state things in the declarative case. All my opinions are very strongly expressed and yet the truth is that I have no trouble changing my mind about anything as I learn more, generally through dialogue with others. And it is that dialogue that I hope will be a hallmark of this blog. What I’m hoping for is that I will say something in my usual forceful way and that all of you reading will let me know what you’ve experienced that might be different from what I’ve experienced which would allow us to come to a joint conclusion somewhere in the middle.