Your Sponsorship Shortlist

Andrea Brockmeier is the Director of Project Management at Watermark Learning. She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training.

  Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Even the best project managers stand to fail without sponsorship. So how do you get sponsorship for projects when there may not be organizational support for the role? Identifying a shortlist of sponsorship needs in simple terms can help set the stage for developing that critical PM-sponsor partnership.

What is it with sponsorship? If I had a nickel for every story I heard about poor or completely non-existent (!) sponsorship, I’d be writing this from somewhere more exotic than my cube. Sponsors who aren’t available for meetings. Sponsors who don’t have time to read reports. Sponsors the project manager never sees. Ever. Who is driving the project train here?

If an organization really wants their projects to succeed (and if you’re not convinced of that, you’re really in trouble) then why is good sponsorship so elusive? As a project manager, is there anything you can do to improve the chances of a real partnership with a sponsor? That partnership is, after all, one of the top indicators of project success.

So what should a PM expect from a sponsor? Actually, let me rephrase that: What is reasonable for a PM to expect from a sponsor given the project and the organization? The key word here is reasonable. If regular attendance at team meetings isn’t feasible, for example, then let’s not set anyone up for failure.

PMs need …

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