The Art of Sponsorship: Balancing Vision, Support, and Governance

As Project Managers, we have the opportunity to be trained in good practice, in principles, in behaviours that will improve the chances of us delivering a successful project. The same is not true for Sponsors. There is not a body of knowledge, a suite of training courses, or good practices that are commonly held by all project sponsors. There’s a perception that a Sponsor is senior and therefore already knows how to do this stuff. In reality, what a Sponsor knows is how they’ve seen other sponsors do the role as they’ve grown through the organisations that they’ve been in - and that’s not always good.

The problem is well recognised. I see many PMOs correctly identify a lack of sponsorship quality in their organisations, only to then not support them with anything that will improve the situation. And I’m not going to fix that problem in a small blog post. I will, however, share 8 things that I think sponsors should think about and embrace in their day to day dealings with the project.

1. Ask what the Project Manager needs from you. Part of your role is support and if you understand what support is needed, you are (i) more likely to bring it and (ii) more likely to positively influence the project outcomes.

2. Have a clear conversation about your authority level - what you can and can’t do, what you can and can’t influence. Talk about what’s important to you and the compromises that you’re not prepared to make. As a Project Manager, if I know what my Sponsor can change and is willing to change, I am more likely to bring things to her that I may never have mentioned if I didn’t have that knowledge.

3. Be available. I don’t mean schedule a bi-weekly one to one where the Project Manager can give you a brain dump on what’s happening on the project. There’s little value in that. I mean be available as and when needed. My best Sponsor always made time for me in the same day. I would notify them I needed 5 minutes of their time and they would find it, maybe on a walk between meeting rooms, or over lunch. That project hummed along at a great rate, in large part to the Sponsor genuinely making themselves available.

4. Ask questions. You are not the Project Manager, don’t try and do the project management job. Influence the direction of the project through asking questions. The best exec sponsor I ever had would always ask the difficult questions. “I see you’re making decision X, how will person Y feel about that given their priorities are Z”. Those questions where powerful because they got me to think about things I wasn’t thinking about, but they didn’t disempower me. In fact, they did the reverse.

5. Interrogate when things don’t go right. I see too many Sponsors annoyed at the slippage, disappointed at the scope creep, upset at the risk materialised - and then move on. Instead, take the time to do a retrospective, learn what really influenced the negative situation and work together with your Project Manager to put in place changes.

6. Be vocal throughout the organisation. Good sponsors stand up in townhall meetings and talk about the projects they’re sponsoring, why they are important and what changes they are going to mean for the organisation or its customers. When a Sponsor proactively talks about this stuff, the people working on the project feel proud, they commit a little bit more and the wheels of motion are better greased for the Project Manager to get the organisational support needed to get things done.

7. Model behaviour and encourage stakeholders to be the same. Only once in my career have I had a Sponsor pull a Stakeholder to one side and tell them they needed to support the project better and how they needed to do that. But hundreds of times I’ve sat on a governance meeting where the Sponsor didn’t ask a single question and the stakeholders took that lead and sat silently too. As a Sponsor, you are the leader of the stakeholders. Lead them.

8. Recognise and celebrate. When a particularly difficult thing is achieved, personally go and see the project team and thank them. Take them a cake. Small gestures go a long way because nobody does them.

A good Sponsor can have a huge influence on a project. If you even did 2 things in this list, you’ll be better than a lot of Sponsors. Do them all and you’re on to winning the World Sponsor Awards, should that ever become a thing!