Project Sponsorship

Executive sponsors are the secret to project management success

Business & Management

By Mark A Langley, President and CEO, Project Management Institute Thursday, July 14th, 2016

We are delighted to see Mark publish these comments. We heartily agree that the state of executive sponsorship is dismal. The biggest complaint we hear from project managers world-wide is that upper managers do not understand and/or support the project management process. Alfonso Bucero and I address both sides of the story with books on Project Sponsorship and The Complete Project Manager. Project success is much higher when the environment, sponsors, and project teams all embrace an imperative to fully implement and create value from project-based work.  A worthwhile—and lucrative–goal is to achieve excellence in project sponsorship.

“Why is executive sponsorship so important? Isn’t a CEO committing to a strategy enough?
The executive sponsor is an individual in the organisation whose seniority allows them to influence stakeholders, remove roadblocks, and allocate project resources when necessary. Every programme needs this direct support. An effective sponsor uses his or her authority and experience to help the team understand the alignment of the project or programme to the organisation’s strategy. And the sponsor reports progress to the other members of the executive leadership team, including the CEO, to ensure the visibility mentioned earlier. Even though PMI research shows that having actively engaged executive sponsors is the top driver of success, less than two-thirds of key initiatives have executive sponsors assigned to them.

Simply naming an executive sponsor isn’t enough either – he or she has to be engaged. One in three unsuccessful projects fails to meet goals due to poorly engaged executive sponsors, which is often a function of them being overextended. On average, sponsors spend 13 hours per week on each project they sponsor, in addition to their primary responsibilities.”

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Workshop Introduction

A Project Sponsor:

• Defines, funds, defends, and supports major project activities
• Is link between project manager / team and executive management
• Executes strategic goals
• Allocates resources
• Makes decisions
• Needs to be present in all phases of the project
• Ensures benefits (ROI) of project’s intended outcome are realized

All projects need an executive sponsor. Upper management support for projects consistently surfaces as a critical success factor. However, organizations often do not spend the time and money to understand what sponsorship is, why doing it better is important, and how to improve. Please join us in this workshop to experience the possibilities for excellence in sponsorship within your organization.

Project Sponsorship is a two day workshop that offers participants the opportunity to create an environment that achieves greater project prosperity as a result of excellence in project sponsorship. It may also be offered as a half day Executive Briefing.

The primary audience for this workshop is upper managers and executives. This workshop provides you with the knowledge, tools and practices to be an effective sponsor. Get clear understanding about your roles and responsibilities to ensure that all projects achieve successful outcomes. Another audience is project managers who work with sponsors on a regular basis and seek a better outcome from this interaction. The ideal audience is project manager and sponsor attending the workshop together. Learn together and prepare joint action plans.

Assessment

Complete the Sponsor Evaluation Survey 2020we to assess the state of project sponsorship in your organization. When done, print the document for reference and Submit the document to record your scores via email.  Receive benchmarking data back about how you compare to other organizations. Use the data together with the Project Sponsorship book to develop an action plan to develop more effective sponsorship.

What are the roles of a Project Sponsor? Get answers in the book and the virtual training course.

Workshop as Opportunity

This is a great opportunity to interact with two international experts in the organizational, behavioral, business, and technical aspects of project management. Randall Englund is the co-author of Creating an Environment for Successful Projects and Creating the Project Office. Alfonso Bucero is the author of A New Vision of Project Management, Today is a Good Day, Tomorrow Will Be Better, Passion, Persistence, and Patience, and The Influential Project Manager. Together, Englund and Bucero co-authored Project Sponsorship: Achieving Management Commitment for Project Success (2006, 2015) and The Complete Project Manager (2012, 2019). You also have the opportunity to network and share experiences with other executives and senior project managers.

Who Should Attend?

All managers and executives involved in sponsoring projects, either currently or in the near future, PMO managers, senior project managers, and other stakeholders interested in experiencing a multi-media, transformational approach to the topic of effective sponsorship, in order to greater results from projects.

Workshop Purpose

· Understand what sponsorship is all about
· Define how sponsors impact project success
· Discover how to obtain the right sponsor
· Identify what sponsors need to know and “teach the old dog new tricks”
· Keep sponsors involved
· Extract learnings from case study examples
· Reap benefits from effective communications
· Make organizational culture work for you
· Explore the power of feedback
· Achieve excellence in project sponsorship

Workshop Content

Introduction

· Why sponsorship is necessary?
· What’s the value?

Sponsor Responsibilities

· Definition, objectives
· Problem escalation
· Asking questions

Obtaining a Sponsor

· Criteria
· Negotiation
· The sales process

Sustaining Sponsorship

· Proactivity
· Support/interference
· Reviews

Relationship with Others

· Steering Committees
· The culture
· Clients
· A Balanced Scorecard
· Execution and feedback

Sponsorship Development

· Positioning
· Curriculum
· Example

Conclusions

Testimonials

From PMI SeminarsWorld 2010 in Milan, Italy (May) on “Achieving Management Commitment for Project Success,” Maria from HP says,

“Regarding instructors (Randall L. Englund & Alfonso Bucero), they do an outstanding job on driving the seminar, involving the attendees, maximizing the learning and take aways. It is of great value to the seminar that they are both very experienced on the topic they are teaching. And they still achieve, that they know what they are talking about and what is realistic and can be actually implemented and used on a daily job. Their real-life examples are of high added value.”

Online Northeastern University course:

The textbook on Project Sponsorship helped me get a better understanding of the role sponsorship plays and how vital it is to the project manager. I obviously knew it was important and had an influence, but had not fully appreciated this component of project management previously and it gave me some useful idea’s of how I (as a project manager) could influence the sponsor relationship to make it a more effective one. It also reminded me that there are lots of resources, articles and text’s to help a project manager be a project manager, but there is not as much training for sponsors, therefore I should be more understanding that people in these positions are often ‘learning on the job’ regarding what their role is.

Many thanks,

Laura

The Facilitators

Alfonso Bucero, MSc, PMP (Project Management Professional). He is an independent consultant and a frequent speaker at multinational Project Management Congresses. He is the founder, partner and director of BUCERO PM Consulting in Spain. Alfonso authored the book Project Management – A New Vision, and he was a contributor to the book Creating the Project Office, published by Jossey Bass (2003) and authored by Randall L. Englund, Robert J. Graham and Paul C. Dinsmore. Drawing from many years as an HP project manager, he has presented and written numerous papers in the project management field. He is a Contributing Editor of PM Network (Project Management Institute). He co-authored with Randall L. Englund the book Project Sponsorship, published in April 2006 and updated in 2015. His latest books are Today is a Good Day! Attitudes for Achieving Project Success (2010), Tomorrow Will Be Better: Maintaining a Positive Attitude for Project Success (2017), Passion, Persistence, and Patience (2019) and The Influential Project Manager (2015). Alfonso received accolades from the Project Management Institute with the Distinguished Contribution Award (2010), Fellow of the Institute (2011), and Eric Jenett Project Management Award of Excellence (2017).

You can reach Alfonso at: alfonso.bucero@abucero.com and at www.abucero.com.

Randall L. Englund, MBA, BSEE, NPDP, CBM. As the Englund Project Management Consultancy, he is an independent consultant who trains and prepares executives and teams on project culture. He was a senior project manager at the Project Management Initiative at HP, a Project Office leading the continuous improvement of project management across the company He co-authored with Dr. Robert J. Graham the book Creating an Environment for Successful Projects: Second Edition (2004, Third Edition Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2019). He is a frequent speaker and facilitator of professional events. He is co author with Dr. Robert J. Graham and Paul Dinsmore of Creating the Project Office: a Manager’s Guide to Leading Organizational Change. He co-authored with Alfonso Bucero the book Project Sponsorship: Achieving Management Commitment for Project Success (2006, 2015), and The Complete Project Manager (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2019) and The Complete Project Manager’s Toolkit (2012). Randy received accolades from the Project Management Institute with the Distinguished Contribution Award (2013) and Eric Jenett Project Management Award of Excellence (2018).

You can reach Randy at: englundr@englundpmc.com and on the web at www.englundpmc.com.

NOTE that our book on PROJECT SPONSORSHIP has been translated to Hungarian!

ALERT: A Second Edition of Project Sponsorship was published by PMI in October 2015!

If, after reading this far, you still do not believe upper management support and more effective sponsorship is a problem, please view the video below: