The Sponsor and Client Conspiracy

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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I have spent a lot of my career managing products for external customers, and that can lead to some interesting challenges. While internal clients can be difficult at times, there is a tendency for external clients to be a bit more high maintenance. Their attitude is often that they are paying the bill and therefore have the right to change things up, ask for more details, etc. As outsiders from the organization, there is also a good chance that they will have a little less trust of the project team than internal customers and will therefore want to manage things a little more closely.

I’m fine with that approach in general; I am the same way if I am with the customer organization. But where things start to go awry is when the sponsor starts “taking sides” and picks the client. To be fair to sponsors, the pressure can be great--a product manager who is getting pressure from a customer to do more for them may well apply pressure to the PM and the project team to accommodate the customer’s request--they don’t want to upset the client, and requests to change the project are more acceptable to the product manager than reduced revenue or a lost sale.

That can have major implications, and that’s what I want to look at in this article.

Caught in a vice
When the sponsor agrees to a client request for faster delivery, additional …

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