by Donna Fitzgerald | April 25, 2010 | 3 Comments
In my last post When is a Project Too Large for Agile Project Management? I made the case that we NEVER can be sure of what will happen on our project or programs because Murphy will always get his “pound of flesh”. In Mosaicproject’s Blog entry “If it can go wrong they recount the story of a terrorist pigeon [...]
Category: PMO Project Management Tags: CAS, Project Management, Risk Management
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 | November 9, 2009 | 7 Comments
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 [...]
Category: PMO Tags: Project Management, Value
by Donna Fitzgerald | September 28, 2009 | Comments Off
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 [...]
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Category: PMO Program Management Tags: People, PMO, Program Management, Project Management
by Donna Fitzgerald | June 11, 2009 | 3 Comments
My blog entry All Project Portfolio Management Prioritization is Subjective has generated some interesting comments. There was one underlying thread in the discussion that I thought needed to be brought to the top. Steve Romero (with CA) was concerned that my challenge to the “objectiveness” (where objective is defined as fact based) of most portfolio analytics would [...]
Category: PMO Tags: Project Culture, Project Management, Project Portfolio Management
by Donna Fitzgerald | May 18, 2009 | 1 Comment
In my last post I discussed two perspectives that will lead to better project results. In this posting I’ll be discussing the third perspective. 3) Projects results will improve as long as the project team is equipped to handle anything that might block their progress toward completion. Not sure I’ve got the statement above worded [...]
Category: PMO Tags: Agile, area of order, Project Management
by Donna Fitzgerald | April 25, 2009 | 1 Comment
I’m not sure why I woke up this morning thinking about lessons I learned on an old project. I have a tendency to reflect back on projects that didn’t go like clock work, and since people only hired me for difficult projects, I have a vast mental store of examples I can reflect on. This [...]
Category: PMO Tags: Politics, Project Management, Social capital
by Donna Fitzgerald | March 18, 2009 | 2 Comments
Leadership is not based on formal authority. Especially since, at the early levels of maturity, project management might still be approached on a somewhat informal basis. What this will generally mean to a PM is that the ability to form a team. focus the teams actions toward the agreed upon goal and deliver the project [...]
Category: Program Management Tags: Leadership, Program Management, Project Management
by Donna Fitzgerald | March 15, 2009 | 2 Comments
Doug DeCarlo (the author of Extreme Project Management) has an interesting concept he calls project imperatives. A project imperative is the thing or things that will cause the PM’s head to be loped off if he or she fails to deliver. Since good PMs are hard to come by I like the idea of making [...]
Category: PMO Tags: critical success factors, Project Management
