The Last Word on Sponsorship

 

As September’s theme comes to a close, I want to make a few remaining points on project sponsorship that may, of course, strike many as being counterintuitive. But, hey, counterintuitive is what I do, so…

The ability to demonstrate your organization’s “superior” project management information systems means less than you think to your typical free-market potential customers. All they care about is your performance on their scope, as evidenced by what happened with projects similar to the one for which your company is being considered (and whether or not your company’s bid is lowest, or at least reasonably arguable). Obviously, if your organization’s PMs are informed on a timely basis of their cost and schedule status, they are far more likely to make the decisions that lead to successful project completion, making the overall performance against the portfolio look good. But from the outside looking in, the existence of such systems, in and of themselves, is pretty much expected.

Those organizations that have spent time and energy developing their proposal and contract backlog management information systems have a distinct advantage over those that haven’t. The information feed from these systems influences decisions in all three management areas, Strategic, Project, and Asset.

The Strategic Management angle is obvious. You can’t know what your position is relative to the competition without a handle on the likely contract backlog going forward, as calculated by the proposal backlog management system (your proposal management backlog system can’t calculate the most likely revenue stream going forward? Dude!).

Project Management is more of a contributor to the portfolio management system, since a key component to managing your projects’ sponsors is knowing which types of projects your organization performs better than others (your project management information system doesn’t inform you which projects perform better than others? DUDE!).

The General Ledger comes in dead last when it comes to providing the management information needed to help in the project sponsorship management arena.  I mean, seriously, when was the last time you predicated a purchasing decision on whether or not the vendor’s last profit-and-loss statement contained good news?  That won’t stop your Chief Financial Officer from asserting a place at the manage-the-sponsor table, though. He’s convinced that every single piece of management information that has anything to do with budgets or revenue simply must come from the General Ledger. He’s wrong about this, but can’t be convinced as such. You simply must release Amazon Basin Goliath Moths into his office prior to the project sponsorship board meeting, and see if he can extricate himself from the situation in time to “contribute” to the meeting (you don’t have ready access to Amazon Basin Goliath Moths? DUDE!!!).

There’s a reason why scope creep is so deadly to the prospects of brining projects in on-time, on-budget. Many (if not most) project sponsors realize that their vendors are eager to cultivate positive relations, and this eagerness can be leveraged into asking for the occasional “extra.” During the transition period, from contract award to baseline approval, these sponsors will attempt to gauge the extent that they can presume upon the contractors’ good will to get more than what was specifically spelled out in the contract. The managers of these new pieces of work need to be clear-eyed about how far they are willing to go to cultivate these relationships, and know how far is too far. Again, there’s a reason why scope creep is so deadly to the successful completion of projects.

And that reason is only tangentially associated with a lack of ready access to Amazon Basin Goliath Moths…