Foreword

There is an old saying that we can pick our friends but not our relatives. Similarly, a project manager can often pick his or her team but rarely, if ever, the executive sponsor. Yet, projects cannot succeed without an engaged and skillful executive sponsor or project owner.

Strategies for Project Sponsorship offers project managers, project sponsors, and executives insight into the key role of the sponsor. The authors have correctly identified that much has been done—and continues to be done—to develop the role of the project manager, but they have also identified that the role of the project sponsor has been sadly neglected to date—something the authors want to correct.

The Standish Group’s CHAOS research, an ongoing survey of software development projects and their resolutions initiated in 1994 that is very well known in the project management community, has shown improvement in project outcomes—improvement that arguably can be perceived as excruciatingly slow. The study has also shown that the role of the executive sponsor is a critical success factor.

The authors focus on the executive sponsor and the sponsor’s relationship with the project manager, because if the sponsor is critical to the successful outcome of any project, then so is the partnership of the sponsor and the project manager. In The Standish Group’s survey, chief information officers (CIOs) said that it was important that the project manager bond with the executive sponsor; 43 percent said it was very important. A good example of the importance of this bond is a project undertaken by one of The Standish Group’s clients, a large insurance company in the northwestern United States. The organization needed to replace its outdated general ledger application because it did not support the compliance requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley. In this case, the executive sponsor of the replacement project was the chief financial officer (CFO).

This CFO, like many of the CIOs we surveyed, thought it was important for the project manager and the executive sponsor to be on the same page in creating and maintaining the vision, objectives, and problem statements. She decided she wanted a project manager who understood the application package. The CFO directed the project management office (PMO) to find her a project manager with these skills. The PMO interviewed a number of external and internal project managers. They selected a couple of candidates and arranged a meeting with the CFO. The CFO met with the candidates and selected the one with whom she felt a bond, and with whom she felt she could establish a working relationship. Throughout the duration of the general ledger project, the executive sponsor and her handpicked project manager enjoyed a good working relationship that brought the project to completion early and under budget. This situation shows what is possible with a good bond between manager and sponsor. Therefore, if you work on your bond, you too can have this success.

Leadership and managing expectations of the executive sponsor are two of the most important skills that project managers need to master and continually improve. However, these skills are some of the most difficult to learn. The project manager will need to adopt a “servant leadership” style with the executive sponsor: to listen very carefully and reflectively, to empathize, to be aware of the sponsor’s skills, and to rise above the sponsor’s shortcomings.

The authors offer checklists for both the project manager and the executive sponsor to use in assessing themselves and each other, along with other diagnostic tools. The knowledge gained from these may go a long way toward helping the sponsor and the project manager work together to maximize each other’s strengths, support each other’s weaknesses, and build the trusting relationship that should be their goal.

Collaboration between the executive sponsor and the project manager is essential for the success of the project. However, creating the basis for this collaboration is not an easy task for the project manager, since the executive sponsor is usually at a much higher level within the organization. The project manager needs to take time and learn skills to create such a bond. Ninety-one percent of CIOs said that mastering the skill of bonding with the executive sponsor is difficult and reported that only 12 percent of their project managers are highly skilled at bonding with the executive sponsor. This book offers insights into the nature of building that relationship through the use of tools such as the power grid, influence mapping, and checklists, and it includes examples of dealing with specific types of challenging sponsors.

The authors bring good news in that executive sponsor bonding skills can be acquired and improved. Project managers can learn to communicate, negotiate, and build consensus with their executive sponsors, and they can learn to make sure that the project team, stakeholders, and other executives are on the same page as the executive sponsor. They can become skilled at working with the executive sponsor on general project optimization and financial controls. And they can discover how to work with the executive sponsor on presenting and dealing with bad news and difficult challenges.

Strategies for Project Sponsorship is a resource that project managers can use to master and hone their skills in bonding with the executive sponsor as well as a resource for would-be and current sponsors interested in assessing their strengths and weaknesses.

—Harry Stefanou, PhD
Retired Vice President, Global Alliances
Project Management Institute

—James Johnson
Chairman
The Standish Group

The longest word in the English language is the one that follows “And now a word from our sponsor …”