Chapter 12
The Future of the Project Support Office
The history of information technology (IT) offers us some insight into the probable future of the project support office (PSO). History is going to repeat itself with the PSO. It won't be in my lifetime but it will happen. In the late 1950s IT was the province of a select group of engineers. If a manager wanted a business application, they had to enter the domain of the engineer and hope they could describe what they wanted and actually get it. I remember how frustrating and often disappointing those early times were because I was one of those confused managers. In time my staff and I acquired the skills to use some of the emerging development tools and we took a more proactive role in our development needs. The fourth-generation languages of the 1970s gave us the kick-start we needed. Modeling tools like unified modeling language (UML) are the current offering. In some cases the manager's staff could do most of the high-level design work themselves and turn the actual code development over to the IT developers. Whether that was a good strategy isn't the issue here. It happened and it continues to happen. We are now seeing a trend in strategic systems where development is becoming the way businesses operate. Both the business analyst (BA) and business processes manager (BPM) have come on the scene and are often assigned into a business unit. They are the subject matter experts (SMEs) for new and improved systems for their business ...
