What is the role of a project sponsor?

Some years ago, TOP surveyed senior executives across a wide range of industries and organisations, asking what they understood by their role as project sponsor.

Of those polled, 90% admitted that they did not know exactly what project sponsorship entailed, and were not confident that they were effective at it. What’s more, when the 10% who claimed they did know what they were doing were questioned further, most did not have a correct understanding of the role… and in many cases were making decisions that destroyed project value.

In fact, less than 1% of those surveyed actually had the correct understanding of the role and the skills and confidence to carry it out correctly.

Being a project sponsor is not the same as operational management, nor is it a role that is intuitively obvious, and most business executives struggle with it. When formal training is suggested, it often involves courses on project management, or on different types of technology, or systems development techniques. However, most projects already have competent project managers (indeed one of your roles as the sponsor to ensure this) and second guessing the project manager and the technical specialists is something you should avoid.

Essentially, the project sponsor’s role is very simple: to focus relentlessly on delivering value in return for the resources (such as time, money and people) committed to the project by the organisation.

Project sponsors undertake all the things required to define a valuable project and then protect that value through the project lifecycle. They provide leadership and direction, from the seed idea, through to the project's end; they initiate that idea, develop the business case, guide and lead the project through the lifecycle of project execution, and finally realise the benefits and value.

The role commonly occurs over a much longer timeframe than the annual cycle for business-as-usual. This means the project sponsor must guide the project and make decisions in response to both project events and also the changing business environment. Sometimes that can mean cancelling even a well-run project, simply because the business rationale is no longer there.

An effective project sponsor needs knowledge and skills, and needs to learn the principles and mental models to be able to look at a project and clearly understand what is really happening, in order to make good decisions.

A project sponsor needs to know:

• How to define a project’s Value Equation™ – the desired outcomes, benefits and value, and what change activities are required to deliver these. These define what the project is trying to achieve and what success looks like when everything is working ‘just right’.
• What the Path Dependency roadmap for your project looks like
• Why on-time and on-budget are measures of the inputs used, and why and how you should track the successful delivery of the valuable outputs as your primary measure of success
• What the start and end points for a project should be
• The difference between opportunity scope and solution scope, and why that matters
• How IT projects are different from other types of projects, and what additional management techniques should therefore be applied.

It’s then important to develop sponsorship skills. These cover more than just normal operational management.

A few of the essentials include:

1. How to distinguish a valuable project from a poor one
2. How to optimise value delivered against the cost of delivery to convert a low-value project to a high-value one
3. Knowing what to do, why, when and how, at each important phase of a project, to protect value
4. Managing project risks and problems
5. Knowing when to dig down into the detail level to check that it is congruent and coherent with the ‘big picture’
6. How to control the project
7. How to avoid being ‘snowed’ by the techies, vested interests and ‘experts’.

Most importantly, a project sponsor should be able to diagnose the early warning signs of failure and so take preventative action early enough to get the project back on track.