by Donna Fitzgerald | August 31, 2011 | Comments Off
“Appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.” MACHIAVELLI I found this quote from Machiavelli in something I was reading this morning. I generally like [...]
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Category: PMO Program Management Project Management Tags: Difficult People, Leadership, Lessons Learned, Politics
by Donna Fitzgerald | August 5, 2011 | 1 Comment
I’m a big believer that no matter what job we’re in we need to spend some time looking at the big picture. It keeps us honest and it keeps us from making silly mistakes. The problem is when we are surrounded by trees it’s hard to see anything that isn’t right in front of us. [...]
Category: PMO Program Management Project Management Tags: Leadership
by Donna Fitzgerald | October 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
There are concepts and connections I kick around in my mind for years before I get to the core of the issue. One reoccurring point of interest has been the relationship between leadership and courage. Somehow the concepts have always been connected for me but I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m wrong and overly romanticizing [...]
Category: Agile IT Governance Organizational Development PMO Tags: Leadership, Risk
by Donna Fitzgerald | September 3, 2010 | 4 Comments
As part of the “new normal” everyone is redefining how things get done in order to reduce the number of people it takes to do the work. Normally I’d say that’s a good thing because I’ve always believe Robert Heinlein had it right: “Progress doesn’t come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men [...]
Category: New Normal Organizational Development Tags: Leadership, Productivity, Stress Management
by Donna Fitzgerald | August 24, 2010 | Comments Off
I had a call last week that helped me connect the dots on a situation I’d occasionally found frustrating, but hadn’t really known why. Every once in a while a client will call and ask for information they can hand to their boss. For support personnel that is a completely valid request but if the person on [...]
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Category: Organizational Development PMO Tags: Leadership
by Donna Fitzgerald | August 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
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, [...]
Category: PMO Technology Tags: Collaboration, Geographically disbursed teams, Leadership
by Donna Fitzgerald | February 13, 2010 | 6 Comments
I woke up this morning thinking about the fact that when I talk to CIOs many (if not most) tell me they know they don’t have the best project managers currently on staff. My own experience would absolutely confirm this as true so the question is why don’t we fix it? Part of the answer [...]
Category: Organizational Development PMO Tags: Competencies, Leadership, Project Management
by Donna Fitzgerald | October 13, 2009 | 6 Comments
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 [...]
Category: PMO Tags: Career Development, Leadership
by Donna Fitzgerald | October 2, 2009 | Comments Off
I was writing a review at Amazon this morning and I noticed that a book review I had written a couple of months ago had been listed as unhelpful. The book is good, I said it was good and yet someone didn’t like what I said. Ok, I can live with that. Since I have [...]
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Category: Book Reviews Program Management Tags: Difficult People, Leadership, Power
by Donna Fitzgerald | September 30, 2009 | 2 Comments
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 [...]
Category: PMO Program Management Tags: Leadership, Shared Vision
