Do poor project sponsors drive failure?

I was speaking at a PMI conference early in Sweden in March, which gave me the opportunity to sit in on a number of other sessions. This one is all about programme and project sponsorship. It is a topic close to my heart and one I have blogged on before and no doubt will again . . . but is is a topic that business leaders actually care about?

In programmes and projects, sponsorship is not like sponsoring Tom to run a Marathon. Do too many business leaders believe it is someone else’s job?

On the point of sponsorship, here are the key messages Peter Taylor gave out at his presentation on sposorship:

• 85% of organisations had sponsors in place
• 83% of organisations don’t train/support/guide sponsors
• 100% of respondents believed that having a good sponsor was key to project success.

PMI’s recent Pulse of the profession showed that those organisations with active sponsors are more likely to have better project outcomes. This is supported by Colin Price’s research (McKinsey). Standish believes ‘The most important person in the project is the executive sponsor. The executive sponsor is ultimately responsible for the success and failure of the project’. I agree.
BUT most spend business leaders spend less than 5% of their time on sponsor related activity, yet this is all about making change happen – leading change. . . . and mismanaging change is the commonest reason CEOs get fired.
If you look at project failure, six reasons are cited and the top FOUR of those come under the accountability of the sponsor.

• 40% Unrealistic goals
• 38% Poor alignment of project and organisation objectives
• 34% Inadequate human resources
• 32% Lack of strong leadership
• 21% Unwillingness of team members to identify Issues
• 19% Ineffective risk management

So despite all this wealth of research and learning, many business leaders continue to ignore the issue or treat it informally. Everyone says they believe it is critical to project success and yet:

• Sponsors are not ‘trained’ to be effective
• Sponsors do not have the ‘time’ to be effective
• Sponsors are just expected to ‘know’ how to do the job.

Is that right?
Is it even worth bothering about?

Peter then showed some broad-brush estimates of the value of good sponsorship:

1. Meeting Project Goals +29% variance with good sponsorship in place
2. Project Failure -13% variance without good project sponsorship in place

So if you have a £1bn portfolio, the range of benefits and costs is:
+ £290m
– £130m
Peter argues that those figures are certainly worth thinking about.I certainly agree. I also wonder that if senior leaders are only spending 5% of their time on sponsorship, what are they actually doing and who do they think is looking after the future of the business?

You can see Peter’s paper here – Project managers are from Mars, project sponsors from Venus