Project Management Screw-up #5: We Didn't Have the Right Sponsorship
- Feb 11, 2005
- Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall Professional
- Be Accessible, Not Open Door
- I'll Be Done Friday, Honest! Six Techniques To Ensure Solid Project Management Execution
- Execute...Or Be Executed: Avoiding the Project Management Guillotine
- Leadership Lesson: Shiny Objects And Other Distractions
- Babbling Is for Babies, Not Interviews
- Leadership Lesson: Activity Minus Focus Equals Randomness
- Doesn't Accountability Count Anymore?
- Drive a Tight Agenda, Don't Let It Drive You
- Great Communicators Can Be Made
- One Less Meeting Gets You Home in Time for Dinner
- Don't Let a Challenge Stall Your Business: 5 Tips for Staying on Track
- We Found a Rock Star! Hiring the Best of the Best
- When Are You Coming Home? Five Practical Tips to Realizing Work/Life Balance
- In Search of the "Good-Enough" Leader
- Thirteen Tips to Effective Upward Management
- The Truth About Getting Your Point Across: You and Your Recipient
- Project Management Screw-up #5: We Didn't Have the Right Sponsorship
- Project Management Screw-up #1: We Weren't Addressing the Right Problem
- Leading on the Edge Report - December 1, 2008
For those of you in the United States I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday and that you had plenty of time to spend enjoying your loved ones. We spent the week in Phoenix where we enjoyed time with terrific family and friends. I planned on doing my newsletter over the holiday but had too much fun doing little things with my wife and kids. Precious times indeed.
- Leading on the Edge Report - November 15, 2008
The United States and the rest of the world has been watching the Presidential election with a wide range of emotions including fear, excitement, uncertainty, angst, and wonder. History was made with the election of Barack Obama. Many were elated, many were disappointed. Regardless of political affiliation, my faith tells me to respect the authority of our leaders and to pray for them. President-elect Obama has many challenges facing him and he deserves our respect as leader and commander in chief.
- Leading on the Edge Report - November 1, 2008
- I hope that during these times you are keeping your head above water and keeping good balance in your work and personal life. It’s going to be a busy couple of months for me between writing, speaking engagements, and consulting aside from my important role as a husband, father and friend. I talk a lot about keeping work/life balance not only for you but also as a reminder for me. Heaven knows I need it!
- Getting Invited Back for a Second Interview
It's happened to many of us. We go through a first interview thinking we've nailed it but the phone doesn't ring for a second interview. Sometimes it's due to poor job fit, but at other times there's something we've done which leaves a bad taste in the prospective employer's mouth. Watch for these problem areas and increase the likelihood of a call-back...
- Leading on the Edge Report - October 15, 2008
So like many of you, I’ve watched my portfolio get absolutely hammered over the past months. Since my last report the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped over 2000 point despite the most significant financial bailout in history. These are very sobering times and cause many to reflect on what is truly important; faith, family, and friends. My thoughts and prayers go out to each of you.
- Managing Outsourced Relationships
More and more companies are outsourcing everything from IT to call centers to facilities management. Measuring the effectiveness of the outsourcer is crucial and can mitigate tons of downstream issues for both companies. Consider the following to help you better measure outsourcer effectiveness:
- Diffusing Conflict Between Co-Workers
So everything isn't always peachy keen when it comes to working together. At times co-workers are going to get in each others' face and have some conflict. As a bystander, there's some things you can do and not do to help put out the co-worker fire:
- Leading on the Edge Report - October 1, 2008
Wow, what times we live in now. As I write this the United States Legislature is about to embark upon the most significant financial bailout of Wall Street in world history. Companies thought to be bullet-proof are now no longer in existence. FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is prevalent amongst businesses large and small today.
- Leading on the Edge Report - September 15, 2008
This edition of the Leading on the Edge Report: Using Project Guides to Define Your Project in MS Project...The Top Ten Attributes of a Great Project Sponsor...Hail to the Chiefs: United States President Mischief, Morals, and Malarkey from George W. to George W.
- Putting Some Balance In The Work Life Balance Equation
-
With the vacation season coming to a close, many of us are going to get back to the grind of working too much, not getting enough sleep, eating poorly and not getting enough exercise. The concept of work life balance to most is just a bunch of theoretical baloney espoused by a bunch of talking-head motivational speakers and organizational leaders. There’s simply no way out of the imbalance, right?
- Are You A "Squeaky Wheel" Leader?
Several years back I managed a group of very high-energy, spirited, vocal managers. One of the managers was particularly vocal on just about every issue. This manager, who I'll call "Vox", frequently complained to me about other managers, about how Vox's organization wasn't being rewarded appropriately, and how Vox's organization needed more people than Vox's peers.
This chapter is from the book
Project Management Advisor, The: 18 Major Project Screw-ups, and How to Cut Them off at the Pass
Some years back I was appointed the lead program manager on an initiative which had as its objective to consolidate a number of disparate order management systems into a single system which supported all of the company's order management needs. There were about five program managers working with me who each dragged in their respective customers to participate in the project. The project was sponsored by the IT organization with no sponsorship from the business owner. The project lumbered along for about two months with the customers continually questioning why they were working on a project that wasn't on their manager's radar. The business owner finally had enough and called IT management and the lead program manager (me!) into a meeting. The meeting started off with the manager saying to IT, "Who told you to go do this project?" Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but it was pretty clear at that point that this was not to be one of my shining project management moments. While the meeting was very uncomfortable, I learned an extremely important lesson: absolutely, without a doubt, secure sponsorship on a project at the beginning, or suffer the consequences.
For any project, it's crucial to get an appropriate level of project sponsorship. The ideal project sponsor for your project would possess the following characteristics:
-
He/she directly experiences the pain of the status quo and would directly benefit as a result of doing the project
-
He/she actively helped craft the project mission statement
-
He/she has the decision making authority to secure or re-allocate resources to/from other projects as necessary to ensure that your project can be completed successfully
-
He/she is willing to go to bat for your project with peer managers if you need help in getting something from another organization
-
He/she is willing to meet with you on a regular basis to ensure that you're getting what you need to succeed
-
He/she is willing to make difficult decisions that may be unpopular but are in the best interests of the business
-
He/she has some "skin in the game" to ensure the project's success
Now, I recognize that as a project manager you only have so much control over your project sponsor. Nonetheless, it's important to diligently try to manage your project sponsor to ensure that you're getting what you need from him/her.
Depending on the scope of your project, it may be beneficial to have a steering committee in place in addition to the project sponsor. Your steering committee is typically comprised of key managers of your stakeholder organizations. The primary functions of a steering committee involve
-
Being a decision-making body on key issues that cannot be resolved by the project team
-
Eliminating any project barriers that the project team is running up against
-
Being a supporter of any resultant change that the project will bring about to their respective organizations
-
Providing counsel and guidance to the project team on key aspects of the design and implementation of the product
-
Assisting the project manager in securing required resources for the project
-
Providing recommendations to the project sponsor on major issues which are beyond the authority of the steering committee
You need to decide whether a steering committee is beneficial to the project. Some criteria that I have used on projects are as follows:
-
There are multiple stakeholders that are directly affected by the outcome of the project
-
There are internal or external subject matter experts that can provide functional, technical, or execution guidance to the project team
-
The project sponsor has limited time to spend on the project and delegates some of the project decision-making responsibility to the steering committee
I've successfully completed projects with and without a steering committee depending on the criteria mentioned, but every successful project always had an engaged project sponsor.
HOW IT HAPPENS
The project sponsor is either too high or too low in the organization
Just because you have someone who is willing to sponsor your project doesn't mean that they are the right sponsor for the project. Optimally, your project sponsor should have decision-making authority over the in-scope project areas while at the same time being close enough to the work that they understand the implications of the issues that are raised. If your sponsor is too low-level, they're unlikely to be able to make decisions that will stick and will have to be getting authorization from their management before committing to decisions. If your sponsor is too high-level, you're likely to get decisions made but you're probably not making best use of management because others at lower levels could be making the decisions you need made.
The project sponsor is being inundated with issues that could be resolved by a steering committee
In deciding whether or not you need a steering committee, consider what you're going to need from your project sponsor and whether or not decisions can be made by others at lower management levels. If you are continually bringing issues to your project sponsor that can be addressed by other managers, you run the risk of exasperating your sponsor and being labeled as crying wolf. This will put you in a very difficult situation for when you really need help because your credibility with your project sponsor may be eroded.
You make the project sponsor work too hard to try to understand your project
In the environments that I have worked, I never gave a project sponsor anything other than presentation-type slides when it came to project reviews and requests for help. Typically, your time with the project sponsor is limited and he or she has to understand where things are and what you need from him or her in an efficient manner. Be very conscious of what you share with the sponsor, how much detail you give him/her, and what you want him/her to do for you to help the project succeed.
You walk a fine line here of being credible with your sponsor and giving them the elevator pitch. If you've already established credibility with your project sponsor to the point where you're a trusted project manager, then you can possibly afford to be more high level in your communications because he or she is going to trust you with the details. If you're an unknown quantity or (gulp) have gone negative in the credibility column, you're going to need to be prepared for deep-dives on areas that the project sponsor will want to go. One technique I've seen and used is to have appendix slides which have supporting detail in areas where there's likely to be question. The appendix slides are only meant to be used in the event that a specific question arises to support your claims and would not even be seen if no question arises on the topic.
Being prepared to go through details is important, but there will be the occasional situation where you just don't know the answer or don't have supporting detail. Your best bet at that point is to simply say, "I don't know, and I'll get back to you on <put date here> with the answer." It's much easier to fess up quickly than guess at the answer and later be found wrong. Keep in mind as well that there are only so many "I don't knows" you can use before your credibility becomes an issue. More than a couple in a meeting can turn into a problem pretty quickly.
You don't tell the project sponsor what you need
Working with a project sponsor is a two-way commitment; you need to deliver what the sponsor considers to be important and they need to help you when you've run into an issue you can't resolve on your own. The issue could be with another organization, a need to change policy, a team member not participating as agreed, or a host of other reasons. It's super-important that you are very explicit with what you need the project sponsor to do for you. In your reviews with the project sponsor, it's helpful to have an "asks" slide that very explicitly lays out what you need the project sponsor to do and when you need it by. As I've discussed earlier, make sure that your requests are appropriate for your project sponsor to be addressing. If your requests are inappropriate, you run the risk of exasperating your project sponsor and losing credibility.
You meet either too much or not enough with your project sponsor
Depending on the criticality of the project, you may need to meet with the project sponsor either more or less frequently. I've been on projects where we've met with the project sponsor on a monthly basis for a one-hour update and have also been on projects where we've met weekly for an hour or more. You need to decide along with your project sponsor what the right frequency needs to be. I've found that meeting at least monthly is important to keeping the sponsor engaged and ensuring project success.
