Power

VIEWPOINT: Tech Project Management as a Service
For many bank chief information officers, there is a frightening prospect lurking beneath the good news about the rebound in bank technology spending.Celent forecasts a 3.7% increase over last year. For retail banking alone Ovum predicts a jump of nearly a quarter over the next five years. The worry? How to find and manage all the technologytalent it takes to make a success of all those billions invested.
For most banks, the IT spend represents a vast variety of projects - fast-track compliance implementations, core system changes,customer-facing innovations like mobile and online, platform consolidations, postmerger conversions. Every project requires specific expertise in that technology for the duration - and then it doesn't. Everyproject requires deeply capable project management - and then it doesn't. Just onboarding and training takes tremendous time and skill, and then it's time to offboard trained resources, or work theminto other projects, or whatever makes the most sense from a talent and investment standpoint.
It's impossible not to sympathize with bank executives who find themselves basically doing two full-timejobs - the one in their job description plus project manager to a deluge of tech projects.
Little wonder that some are finding parallels between how they have successfully offloaded otherresponsibilities to dedicated providers under the as-a-service model. Software-as-a-service relieved them of the burden of installing and maintaining software when the software vendors demonstrated that theycould meet banks' service levels. Data-as-a-service saved them the trouble of building their own vast data centers when data providers could manage the activity to their quality expectations.
So whynot people-as-a-service? Specifically project managers-as-a-service, to save bank executives precious management time and money at the same time.
It's not as though project management is easy to...