Acronym

This is very insightful and I think you are on to something here. I especially agree with you that IT staff have their fingers in a lot of different pies simply due to the nature of technology being just about everywhere in an association.

Great post. I think the association of the future will have a much more organic organizational structure where essential functions like IT, member relations and marketing will no longer be separate departments but will be represented in every department throughout an organization - and therefore project management will be s nurtured skill across the board too.

This post has a particular significance for me, because I actually am a technology project manager - as in, that's my title.

The structure of my department is that we have one director, one project manager (myself), and three programmer positions. I feel that this is a great structure for an association technology department because it allows for one person to be focusing on strategy while the other can drive the planning and tactics of the strategy to be implemented.

Additionally, I find it increasingly true that the project management tasks I undertake have applications across the entire organization. Every year, every day, everyone's jobs rely more and more on technology.. from membership and AMS systems, to finance, to conference calls with Skype in any department. These are all the people that I get to work with as a technology project manager, because what we do really does affect everybody.

To reply to a few questions posed.. I don't find that this promotes an "us vs. them" attitude any significant amount. I believe a technology department is, first and foremost, a service department (internal and external), and that almost intrinsically creates a bit of that feeling but no so much as to have any ill effects.

As for project management competency in other parts of staff, I don't think there is any area of an organization that couldn't benefit from efficient project management. Perhaps the size of a department dictates whether they need a dedicated PM, but it certainly couldn't hurt to have managers who are at least competent in the discipline and can apply basic PM methods.

Of course, I could admittedly be a little biased =)

I agree with Maddie, but with a twist. I don't necessarily think IT or marketing will no longer exist as departments. I think there is still a need for specialization in these disciplines. However, I think the specialists become tool providers and program managers take and use the tools. This differs from the current model where a program manager turns over the marketing or IT responsibility completely.

In my experience in IT management consulting and software development I've worked with many different types and sizes of organizations, from associations to manufacturers to insurance companies. In most of these instances the IT department has a much better grasp of project management practices, tools, and techniques than other parts of the organization.

I've concluded that the reason for this is that for many years IT's value to the organization was proven through projects that delivered useful business applications. Once this was done IT went on to develop new applications -- the fun stuff -- while another portion of IT was tasked with application and infrastructure support -- the less fun and less visible stuff.

The business users, on the other hand, wanted to have the applications that supported ongoing operations and processes that could be managed in a repetitive and repeatable fashion. This is different from a project with its temporary nature and start and stop features. Hence the IT department finding project management tools and techniques more often used than business users, even when business users were regularly involved as expert users or testers with actual application development.

This old distinction between IT and business in their need for project management expertise is breaking down. Many technology-dependent projects involve more business process change than technology change, and many of today's sophisticated applications require less development expertise from IT than IT's technology management expertise. Plus, a case can be made for business units taking the lead in procuring sophisticated remotely hosted applications (even though I think an organization would be nuts not to involve IT in selection, operation, and support decisions for any remotely hosted application).