PROJECT SPONSORSHIP

For all of our good intention with regard to projects, it’s a fact that most organisations still aren’t very good at them and haven’t been for some time. Attempts to build new products or fix existing problems are continually met with expanded time frames and budgets, often leading to disappointed stakeholders and, in some instances, front-page horror stories.

And it’s not just ‘some’ projects that fail. Most research put failure rates at between 50 per cent and 75 per cent. The upshot of this appalling statistic, according to the Project Management Institute (PMI) in their Pulse of the Profession report in 2018, is that a million dollars is wasted every 20 seconds on projects around the world.

One of the main reasons projects fail is that senior managers are fully engaged only in those projects in which they have a vested interest. In my experience, these ‘pet projects’, as we call them, very rarely add any material value to the organisation, yet they consume countless hours of precious people time.

In fact, as I’ve noted, there are only two reasons for project failure: poor project management and poor project sponsorship. This part of the book addresses the second of these reasons to provide senior managers with a blueprint for continual success, just as the first part did for project managers. Every reason we can come up with for project failure (and reports and statistics frequently list between 14 and 16) comes back to these two reasons.

To put a much-needed positive spin on our challenges, The Standish Group identified the three key success factors for projects as:

1. executive sponsorship
2. emotional maturity
3. user involvement.

In my experience, these are all critical and are all within the control of the project sponsor and project manager.

Committed executive sponsorship is still (as it has been for a while) the biggest contributor to project success. Every project needs a senior manager to identify a problem that needs to be fixed, to stand by it through the justification and planning process, and to push the project manager to deliver. Without such a champion, the project simply won’t be given the priority it needs to be successful.

There is a common and misplaced assumption, however, that people in senior management positions will necessarily understand what it takes to sponsor projects to success. Project sponsorship is just another line on the job description, and few know how to do it competently and consistently. So organisations establish project management offices (or PMOs) to take the responsibility away and only put in the effort once a month at governance meetings or in reviewing reports.

A quick look at some of the major projects occurring around the world right now shows a clear lack of ownership. I see lots of grand, bold statements of what will be delivered and when, even before the planning has been completed, which immediately sets the project up for failure.

The fact is that projects, by their nature, continually change and evolve. Senior managers who understand sponsorship know this. They provide their energy, ideas and unequivocal support to ensure that the needs of the stakeholders are met and that those leading projects are doing their bit to drive for results. Too many have become apathetic when it comes to this last point, accepting mediocrity as the norm, crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

At least half of an organisation’s activities every year will be project-based. Organisations have for years been investing in the wrong things and wondering why nothing has improved and there’s no demonstrable return on investment.

Great project sponsorship and management can become a strategic competency for success only when organisations stop resorting to quick-fix certification programs as a mechanism for lifting its capability and start focusing on what’s important.

We need to invest in the capabilities to help organisations evolve

I run year-long capability development programs with a number of organisations to help build strong and successful cultures of project management, and they are achieving levels of success that others can only dream of. Long experience has shown me that what makes projects successful is the people who lead them and the environment we create for staff to do their very best work to deliver to stakeholder expectations.

It’s time for senior managers to put time, effort and real money into developing a capability that is both fit for purpose and capable of evolving as the organisation grows. One that understands that at the heart of great projects are sponsors and executives who do the right things, at the right time and in the right way.

Senior managers have to realise that investing in methods as a way of solving the project failure puzzle doesn’t work.

Agile is the current method being peddled as a silver bullet for improving project delivery. Organisations think that simply implementing a method such as Scrum will work. It won’t. Indeed Chief Information Officers in the UK estimated in late 2017 that 93 per cent of agile projects had already failed. The same report estimated that agile project failure alone would cost the UK economy £37 billion. Lack of senior sponsorship was identified as one of the key reasons for failure.

These methods, whether waterfall or agile, are only as good as the people who use them and the teams that are created to develop the products. In other words, the methods aren’t the problem; the mindset, competencies and behaviours of those who are leading them are.

The best projects are a result of the people who lead them and the environment they create. In short, leadership and culture. If you want to be successful in all of your projects, this is where you start. You then use the methods to support you in creating the right approach and capturing the information necessary to help you stay on track. Only in this way can a project sponsor and project manager jointly ensure that projects meet stakeholder expectations around time, cost and scope.

Make no mistake, though: successful delivery starts and ends with you as sponsor, however this role is defined. To implement something new, you have to lead from the front and show everyone how it’s done. Throwing it over the fence to the person who has responsibility for delivering the project just doesn’t work. Neither does skipping the planning stage and just getting on with it.

A 2015 survey by PMAlliance found that only 17 per cent of project sponsors and managers agreed on key criteria such as benefits, objectives, scope and deliverables. Don’t add to this problem. Get close to your project manager at the start, work together to build a culture for the team and a plan that everyone buys into, then remain visible and make decisions throughout.

More than just governance

There are many (and I do mean many) books in the project management marketplace on the subject of governance. I know because when writing a book you have to read everything else written on the subject. And to be fair, most of the advice they offer, if followed, could add real value to an organisation, particularly when it comes to clearly articulating what a project sponsor should do. Not so much if you want said people to understand how they should do it.

Now let’s get the jargon, or at least some of it, out of the way early. The project sponsor or project executive heads up the steering committee (or project board) and is the figurehead of the project.

The senior responsible owner, or program sponsor, is the person accountable for a program, not a project. A program is a collection of projects. Depending on the size and complexity of a program, each project contained within a program could have its own project sponsor (or project executive), who together would form a program steering committee (or program board) in support of the program sponsor.

This part of the book covers the roles and responsibilities of a project sponsor, not the program owner. That said, if you’re a budding program owner, you’ll find lots in here to help you.

The agile world (and I’m using Scrum as an example here) can be confusing, as some organisations try to shoehorn the roles into traditional ones we’re familiar with. However, when I’ve implemented agile, the sponsor was a key person for both the product owner and the Scrum master to defer to for decisions, and therefore generally fit neither of these two roles. The sponsor’s role is therefore almost unchanged in terms of accountability.

For consistency I’ll be using the term project sponsor here, although the information is equally applicable to project executives or anyone who is ultimately accountable for the delivery of a project or initiative.

I’m afraid this is rapidly turning into a Monty Python sketch, so it’s time to move on. The problem is people are very good at defining what a project sponsor should do, but very few project sponsors know how to actually do it. Reading through numerous reviews, reports, articles and transcripts, and drawing on my own experience of what I’ve seen, I’ve identified five broad reasons for this:

1. Project sponsors don’t fully understand what’s expected of them.
2. Those who are designated as project sponsors don’t have the time to...