Ed Gaeta

In my last blog I mentioned that I recently received a job offer at a new company.  This started me thinking about what is my plan for getting started at the new job, so today I figured I’d share my thoughts and maybe it will help you or maybe you’ll have some feedback for me.

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Recently, like all too many people these days, I found myself in the position of needing to find a new job.  Now before you give up on this blog I promise not to rant on about how bad things are; rather I’ll talk about a topic that came to mind while I was preparing for [...]

When is an Agile development effort not so agile?  When you haven’t clearly defined the ultimate objective.  I freely admit that I am not an expert in Agile development so my expectations may not be appropriate but come on now how can one expect to be successful if they don’t know what the ultimate goal [...]

Every program manager has run into the same situation at some point in their career. You put together your program plan with lots of spreadsheets, Gantt charts, requirements documents, resource requirements, risk management plan, etc. You present the plan to management and everything goes reasonably well until you start to talk about risks and how [...]

I have worked in a true Project Organization, a Strong Matrix and a Weak Matrix.  From a corporate perspective, there are pros and cons to each and the company must select the format that works best for them.  However, from a Program Management perspective, the role changes significantly and what makes you successful in one [...]

Ok, we have performed a number of interviews and town hall meetings at all levels of the company, evaluated the company culture, and elected to develop a PLC.   Now we need to define our implementation and get the job done.
Implementation:  Based on the feedback

Technorati Tags: Program-Management, project-management, Project-Portfolio-Management, project-sponsorship

The last two companies I have worked at were both experiencing significant challenges with bring products to market in a timely and predictable fashion and something had to be done or the companies would not survive.  There are many similarities between the companies and in the end the corrective action selected was to Develop and [...]

I’m old enough to remember life before “Smart” Phones, Cell Phones, PDAs, and Email.  Heck, I still remember the smell of the mimeograph machine when I was in elementary school.  Today I have a “Smart” phone; you know part mobile phone, part PDA, part computer, and it contains everything about your day-to-day life; including pictures [...]

Recently I looked at my calendar and caught myself saying “Sweeeet only 4 hours of meetings today”.  That’s when I realized “I’m in meeting hell”. I had always suspected this, so

Technorati Tags: meetings, Program-Management, project-management, Time management

A mentor of mine once attributed this quote to General George Patton. I don’t know for sure if Patton said this first, but I do know that these are words for every Program/Project Manager to live by. I’m not saying that running a program is equivalent to waging war, although it may seem that way [...]

Yesterday I said that “as the Program Manager it is your responsibility to make sure your team has what they need to succeed” (see Resource Poaching 101).  The reality is that this is the responsibility of

Have you ever been the program manager on a job where you planned everything down to the smallest detail; you collected the requirements, got your experts together, reviewed what it would take to perform the development, and finally presented your plan to upper management.  They were so impressed with your presentation that

Technorati Tags: portfolio-management, [...]