It’s hard to remember when to use its and when to use it’s. One means it is or it has and the other make it possessive. But which one is which?

It’s should be used to refer to it is or it has. It’s a contraction.
Its should be used as a possessive form of it. Its lack of apostrophe is important.

How can you remember this? It can be tricky. Here’s how I do it:
It’s (it is or it has) uses an apostrophe. In contractions like don’t and can’t use the apostrophe to replace a letter. The same is true for it’s. …read more

I read the summer reading guide for IT pros on CIO Insight. It reminded me of the days I worked for AT&T Solutions, an “insightful” consulting firm within AT&T that picked “futurizing” as it’s mantra. We couldn’t get out of the starting blocks because of all the “ideating” that was going on. We read ALL the books but they were about as bad, in terms of practical action, as the organization I was a part of.
One book CIO Insight missed, which has completely changed my thinking about the highest impact actions a company can take, is Advanced Project Portfolio Management …read more

I have some great, reliable, commentors. One of them is Alan Wilensky. Commenting on my June 7th post ““Fewer, More Successful Projects”: The New HP” he gave one of his great personal examples of an IT organization run amuck. Here is his comment (edited by me) and my response:
Alan W: A while ago, I was a bidder on fair sized contract with a specialized mfr. They had a BIG IT plan, SAP, SCN, you name it. They were hostage to their IT man, he had them seduced and bought in to the tune of 30 projects (none fully implemented) and …read more

My post on comparing HR and IT as service parts of the organization once again brought out the best in my readers. Miki at Leadership Turn gave her usual, and appreciated, “words-that-we-would-like-to-say-but-don’t” in regard to a McKinsey Quarterly’s quote “only HR can translate a business strategy into a detailed talent strategy…”:
“That has to be the stupidest statement that ever came out of McKinsey! I spent 25 years as a recruiter and another decade teaching line managers better hiring skills and in most instances HR has neither the knowledge nor the business acumen to detail staffing needs for any project, tech …read more

The “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” article in The McKinsey Quarterly referred to applying customer segmentation principles to designing different talent management approaches for segments of the workforce. This starts with recognizing that it’s more than just “top talent” that needs this kind of attention:
“The impact of top talent on corporate performance hasn’t diminished, but what’s much clearer today-not least, as a result of the expansion of knowledge work-is that organizations can’t afford to neglect the contributions of other employees….Experience suggests that an exclusive focus on top players can damage the morale of the rest of the organization and, as …read more

The McKinsey Quarterly article on “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” has spawned a lot of reaction on my part. One statement seemed to lay the talent management function firmly in the lap of HR:
“Only HR can translate a business strategy into a detailed talent strategy: for instance, how many people does the company need in order to execute its business strategy, where does it need them, and what skills should they have?”
This got me thinking about how IT interacts with the organization on it’s projects. I’m not a fan of expanding the role of a CIO to be CEO-like. The …read more

The McKinsey Quarterly article on “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” conducted a survey of 98 business/HR leaders that yielded obstacles to effective talent management; it’s amazing how well these “obstacles” correlate with obstacles to any organization wide effort like project management and PMO processes- the top three were:
1. Senior managers don’t spend enough high-quality time on talent management
2. Organization is “siloed” and does not encourage constructive collaboration, sharing of resources
3. Line managers are not sufficiently committed to development of people’s capabilities and careers.
Often HR is given the “talent management” task. However, the “obstacles” point to talent management being a function …read more

A McKinsey Quarterly article on “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” dealt with lack of talent management especially when more knowledge workers are required:
“Companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage. Yet the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating, and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.”
While reading this it dawned on me that talent strategies lead to talent tactics and talent projects just like any strategy-tactic-project link in the organization. They went on to describe how talent management is perceived by …read more

Continuing from yesterday’s post , another great point made in David Brumby’s Computerworld article “Risks Pay Off in Brand Building ” relates to how we evaluate projects. Clearly, he makes the point that financial criteria can hurt innovation; a better approach is to evaluate how a project contributes to strategies:
“Some of the most innovative ideas I have seen would never get off the page if they were decided solely on financial criteria like payback period. For example, we initiated a centralized program services office to manage how we did projects across the company. We knew we would need to demonstrate …read more

You may know by now that I am not a fan of increasing the CIOs role. Rather I see tremendous value in centralizing non-IT executive control of projects (IT and non-IT) supported by a PMO-like organization. Even so, I’m am NOT saying I’m against CIO role improvement; what I am saying is that other executives need to become more familiar with what IT is doing, and the projects they are working on, as they relate to company strategies FIRST.
Darin Brumby deals with the CIO role as a “brand” (i.e., “what do you think of first when you hear CIO”) …read more