Helping new sponsor understand the Joys of Sponsorship

The truth be told, a new sponsor may need help understanding with their role. PMO’s often have onboarding processes for new project managers, they should also consider extending support to project sponsors. A sponsor may need to understand their roles and responsibilities as they add this extra helping to their already full plate.

Sponsors normally are either the directors or managers of an organization. These individuals have excelled in their area of expertise and been placed in management roles. The good news is that they are probably already displaying the responsibilities of sponsorship in managing their functional department. We just have to help them focus these skill sets in a different way.

The first two skills normally to begin with is the advocacy and vision sharing responsibilities. The manager has probably utilized advocacy is campaigning for a raise of start performers and vision sharing in relaying process flaws with the possible improvements to those flaws. However project advocacy and vision sharing are just a bit different. Here are some techniques which can help the project sponsor.

In today’s tight economic times, projects are being reviewed to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze. A sponsor’s advocacy for a project during execution is a key component. Often the sponsor is not aware that advocacy and vision sharing needs to be done in between meetings while talking about family and life informally. There are also opportunities for formal reviews. Most projects have a business benefits they are trying to achieve. Several others have organizational risks which are trying to be mitigated or avoided. It is key that the sponsor is well equipped to speak to the purpose of the project and how it is on target to achieve the benefits. The best way to facilitate this understanding is to have a project review with the steering committee lead by the project sponsor. Before the review, the sponsor should be set up for success. The pm and pmo can help provide presentation information and progress information. If the sponsor is nervous a dry run may be necessary. The PMO can also offer insights into what was successful with previous reviews and the points to focus upon. For the executive audience, they need to understand the benefits in what is in it for them terms.

For example, while engaged in a major risk avoidance project moving to a hosted solution for the main organizational system from a in-house legacy aix/oracle 8 platform. The organization needed to review the project listing for cost cutting opportunities. Due to the executives not understanding the risk of the system not only breaking but not being recoverable, because it was just some “IT” project, this initiative was cut. The sponsor did not clearly illustrate the need for the project to mitigate the risk at hand. Using the technique illustrated above, the executives would have been aware and sponsor would have been skilled at advocacy and vision sharing

If you enjoyed this post, perhaps you would also enjoy others on Anticlue:

• Engaging Sponsorship - Team up during project launch
• Engaging a sponsor before project launch
• 7 ways organizations can assure engagement with the project sponsor
• The project kill switch and project management