The Quest for (True) Sponsors

The Quest for (True) Sponsors

“Who finds a Friend finds a Treasure”, says the old adage. The same applies for the wild “Project Kingdom”, where we can paraphrase and say the same thing, just only for Sponsors. Alas! It is just that true Sponsors are really an uncommon thing in the Project Management world: a rara avis within the modern business jungle. Now, a disclaimer is necessary upfront: it is not the case that sponsors are actually deliberately acting against PMs or more importantly, against the project and its goals. It actually doesn’t makes sense for a Sponsor to sabotage his/her own interests & organization. The project´s success is their success. So what is going on here? Answer: in the vast majority of the cases, sponsorship issues can be grouped in five general categories, as follows…

Sponsorship Problem Categories

• Work Overload: the Sponsor role demands someone with criteria, someone with experience, someone with enough ascendancy & power in the organization. These are individuals entrusted to make decisions. They manage budgets and resources. Sponsors are normally high-ranking persons within the org: C-suites, VPs, Directors. Thus, they are very busy and get pulled simultaneously from many directions. You see the in-built conflict here? The Sponsor role demands for high-profile staff who is already over-allocated. The result is that many sponsors – logically – privilege day-by-day work and “keeping the lights on” in detriment of their sponsor “additional hat”, all this to a negative effect on the projects.
• Organizational Immaturity: The Random House Dictionary defines maturity as “full development or perfected condition”. So this factor actually refers to lack of development in our entities. To put it simple, the organization (or its division) is not ready for a “projectized ecosystem”. Actually, the prior bullet point is a reflection of this, since the entity as a whole is not aware of the current workload distribution within its leads or simply lacks enough headcount to cover the sponsor roles. Another possibility is that the governance process and/or body managing the portfolio is weak. This is a common situation: the organization is immature and fills roles with names “just to fill the field”, to a total misunderstanding of the actual requirements, consequences and implications of this behavior. The governance process (Portfolio Management, “Approval Gates” system, Resource Allocation, etc.) is probably weak. Moreover, the Sponsor is not understood as the ultimate accountable person as of the project success. Au contraire, a mature organization with a solid governance process is nearly “vaccinated” against “sponsor-virus”, to put the topic in hands in our era´s terms.
• Lack of Knowledge: lets recall the actual definition of a Sponsor. According to PMI´s PMBOK 6th Edition, a Sponsor is “A person or group who provides resources and support for the project, program or portfolio and is accountable for enabling success.” I don´t know about you, but that short statement really raises my eyelash. There is a lot in there: “provides resources and support”. Also, “accountable”. And then, “enabling success”. What an explosive combo! And yet, Sponsor role training is really uncommon when compared to the Project Manager role (PMP vs ???), not to mention other technical and business areas abundance of training & education. Actually, my research found just a couple Sponsor certifications, such as PPS by APMG. This is quite interesting: if all projects should have both a PM and a Sponsor, how come this total disproportion? How come there is no specific Body of Knowledge for that role? A final disclaimer on this point: if the org runs under a PRINCE2 framework (back to the maturity point, I guess), then precisely the “Controlled Environment” part should tackle many of these issues away.
• Shared (fake) Accountability: I (Fernando) personally disagree with the PMI inclusion of a “group” as a possible entity to play the Sponsor role. In my personal opinion, “shared-accountability” is sort of an oxymoron. Accountability is personal or it isn´t. Therefore, more than one name listed as Sponsor is a contradiction in terms. I also think that there may be exceptions to this principle in the real world, especially in really mature places (CMMI L5, Prosci CM L5, PMI OPM3 L4 and similarly rated organizations) but exceptions are precisely that: rare, sparse, in a word – exceptional.
• Any possible combination of the above… which, in my experience, tends to be indeed the most common case.

How to solve this mess

What´s to be done with this situation? Let me quote Plato: “Ignorance is the root and stem of all evil”. What I mean is that education both to the individual and the organization should be the first step: we need to fully understand & digest that a Sponsor is not just a signature or a name in a PPT slide. Project Sponsorship implies active engagement, dedication, time & energy. A Sponsor should be a champion for the Project, acting sometimes as a lightning-rod in order to shield from external attacks to the endeavor, sometimes dealing with the complex organizational politics, sometimes serving as a guide to the PM. Sponsors promote, authorize, fund, approve, distribute and receive info, resources & outcomes for and to the project. They are also escalation paths, priority masters and scope definers.

Sponsors should be educated (certified), and the organization should acknowledge its maturity level and perhaps even more importantly, assign time & resources for the role. Building on this idea, and thinking outside of the box, perhaps for really busy, high-level individuals sponsoring many projects, a dedicated Sponsor Assistant may be an option. That would be a really savvy business individual, someone empowered to make decisions within pre-defined thresholds/limits/rules and with the responsibility to compile, filter and summarize key insight to the Executive he/she serves: sort of a smart funnel point for sponsorship affairs. That being said, accountability must reside in the official Sponsor and him/her only: it is a personal requirement, period.

Then for really large corporations, here´s an original idea: some organizations may require an “SMO”, the equivalent to a “PMO”, specifically, the Supportive type, but tweaked for the Sponsor role. I devise this entities as similar to their PMO equivalent, providing a purely consultative/assistant role to Sponsors by “supplying templates, best practices, training, access to information and lessons learned from other projects” (Giraudo, L. & Monaldi, E. (2015). PMO evolution: from the origin to the future. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2015—EMEA, London, England. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.). Moreover, SMOs could be “Delivery support functions/services – these focus on supporting the delivery of change and may be provided through a central flexible resource pool of delivery staff, with capacity planning, and HR management processes.” (Giraudo, L. & Monaldi, E. (2015). PMO evolution: from the origin to the future. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2015—EMEA, London, England. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.) So there you go: SMOs, an internal consultant agency for Sponsors, if you will, is born.

Conclusion

Sponsors are the top liaison, the ultimate bridge between the organization and the project. There is a reason why they are the ultimate accountable staff for the project success – their active commitment & engagement is proof of it. Furthermore, the mandatory time, processes, tools & resources required to execute the role must be provided by the organization, else, the organization is tricking itself.

I´d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Email me or preferably state them as a comment to this post.

Cheers,

Fernando