Making Sponsorship Work

  Decision Making   Leadership   Stakeholder Management   Strategy   ProjectsAtWork  

As catalysts for collaboration to providers of protection, sponsors can bring many benefits to strategic initiatives. But a hierarchical culture can severely limit this potential value. Project leaders need substantive interaction with sponsors that goes beyond review/approval and offers end-to-end engagement and support.

Randall Englund and Alfonso Bucero may be separated by an ocean for much of the year, but even over Skype their connection is unmistakable.

As long-time collaborators, Englund and Bucero are persuasive evangelists for excellence in project management. And, more specifically, advocates for elevating the importance of project sponsorship as a key to project and corporate success.

This is the theme Bucero and Englund laid out in a recent conversation — Englund from Utah and Bucero from his native Spain.

Project sponsorship — also known as executive sponsorship — is a familiar term to any project leader, but many would agree it remains one of those concepts that can easily fall into ‘good-to-have’ territory versus what it really its: An absolute must-have.

But with so much written and taught about the benefits of sponsorship, aren’t we, well, there yet? It turns out, no.

“The state of project sponsorship,” Englund said, “is poor.”

And it’s not because project managers don’t …

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