Joanne Cullen
Joanne Cullen is a seasoned executive and former Senior Project Manager with more than 25 years of experience leading business and technology initiatives across both public and private sectors. She has built a distinguished career delivering complex, large-scale solutions that enhance customer service, drive economic value, and minimize operational risk. With deep expertise in pension systems and enterprise technology, she is recognized for her ability to align strategic objectives with high-performance execution in complex organizational environments.
Throughout her tenure with the Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds, Cullen held multiple leadership roles, including Budget Director and Chief Information Officer. As CIO, she led transformative initiatives supporting the Wisconsin Retirement System, including the successful implementation of a multi-million-dollar benefit payment system that significantly improved processing efficiency and service delivery. She also established governance frameworks, modernized IT infrastructure, and built a project management office that strengthened organizational alignment and execution across business and technology functions.
Cullen later brought her expertise to the private sector at Sagitec Solutions LLC, where she served as a Senior Project Manager and Account Executive for over a decade, leading large-scale pension administration system implementations and managing global, cross-functional teams. Following her retirement from full-time corporate leadership, she founded J and T Consulting LLC, where she now serves as owner and principal consultant. In this role, she partners with organizations to navigate complex project planning and implementation challenges, leveraging her strengths in Agile methodologies, vendor management, and organizational change to deliver practical, results-driven solutions.
• Certified as Agile Specialist 2012
• Women in Business Graduate
• La Follette Center
• Leadership Foundations (2019)
• Listening to Customers
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• UW - Madison La Follette School of Public Afffairs
What do you attribute your success to?
I really think it's listening to people and having a varied background with some in-depth, not only technical knowledge, but also business acumen that I've accumulated over the years. It's about asking the right questions, really listening to them, giving them some options to try to fit the best solution for whatever issue or direction that they want to go, and showing them the steps to gain that. You need to look at the business, you need to look at your people, you need to look at the training, you need to look at security to see where your organization's levels are at and where they need to be to achieve the vision that you're looking for. It's really leading them to, you know, leading their thought process so they can kind of work through it. You have to have some incentives, you have to have some milestones, you have to have some goals, you have to have some successes along the way. It can't be just one big bang at the end, or people become less than motivated.
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Be confident in your abilities. Seek out other people. I've had some really good mentors, and some people that I can rely on for good advice in fields that I may not be expert in, but knowing to talk to the right people and having access to them when I need them.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I say to the person that you need to be competent in your abilities. You're gonna be probably the only woman in the room, still, to this day, that's going to be leading the project. Most of the team is going to be male, and that's been true of almost all my projects. When I started at Sagitech, I was the only woman project manager. When I left, there was only two, and we're talking about a company that has over a thousand people. You're just gonna have to learn how to deal with people. Cultural differences are important to recognize, because you're going to be working in a global economy, no matter pretty much where you work, whether it's public or private sector. Listen to people, seek out a mentor that you're comfortable with, that you respect, ask questions, work hard, and I think those are kind of the keys to success. But you have to expect that you're not going to have a lot of peers that you're going to be able to look to, because there's not that many women that have been CIOs for 6 years or in positions of authority and account managers. So it's still a ceiling that has to be broken, but it's an exciting, challenging time to be in the industry. The work-life balance should be considered at a company that you're looking at, or whether it be private sector or public sector, because if you're really going to go in the project management field, there are times that that is going to be much more than a 40-hour-a-week job during an implementation.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think the biggest challenge is to find the decision makers and make that connection with them, so that your expertise can help them with their planning at the beginning of a project, or if the project is having some sort of challenges, to be able to find you and to reach out to your areas of expertise to help them mitigate that risk and make sure things go well. Or if they're not going well, how to get them back on track.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Honesty, integrity, accountability.