Death by Project Sponsorship, Part I

 

To send a little sunshine Cameron’s way, the selection of the ProjectManagement.com theme for September, Project Sponsorship, was brilliant. Almost all of what’s written about project management begins when the contract is in the door. But a ton of that management stuff goes on before that blessed event, and it’s high time we insightful bloggers turned our gaze upon it.

A little history – my first gig out of college was working for a beltway bandit, assigned as a technician at an Air Force Weapons Laboratory radiation effects test site (I assure you, the title is far sexier than the actual work was). This organization (the beltway bandit, not the lab) was all about project sponsorship, and to excess. In fact, its over-the-top focus on project sponsorship led to its eventual downfall.

I first got a taste of this skewed perspective when I was making the transition from hourly-pay technician to staff member. All new staff members were required to go through a ten-hour training session, over three evenings, after normal working hours and on our own time. I recall the high-point of this training, where we were presented with a case study involving two managers, nicknamed “The Craftsman” and “The Wizard.”

The Craftsman’s story was this: he had been the senior engineer on a high-dollar, high-profile Department of Defense project, which was coming to a close. The project was coming in on-time, and under-budget, with all of its technical goals achieved in satisfactory fashion. The customer had written glowing letters of commendation to the project team. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, except for one little detail: the project engineer had failed to procure any follow-on work, not with the program, and not with the customer. For this reason, The Craftsman was being held up as an abject failure.

Then came the story of The Wizard (I swear I am not making up these names – they’re actually the ones this company used in the training). The Wizard was also a senior engineer on a project, but this project was in  trouble. It was late on several key milestones, and it was running a sub-par Cost Performance Index for some time. Everything appeared to be going hideously, except for one little detail: this project engineer had already procured several follow-on task orders with the program.

The instructors were making a brave attempt at depicting each scenario as equally troublesome, but the truth would come out when one of them was pressed to compare the two. “I can tell you” the instructor stated ruefully, “we have a lot more Craftsmen than Wizards.”

And, indeed, upon becoming a staff member, it was quite obvious that the organization’s main focus was on attracting new business, with performing at a high level on the existing contract backlog coming in at a distant second place (if that).

Here was the basic problem with this approach: since the extra effort at marketing for new business had to take place after the nominal 40-hour work week, and since the staff was forbidden from charging for it, all of this extra effort was free to the organization, but burdensome (to say the least) to the staff. The unstated, but very real hierarchy in-place involved essentially spending 50, 60, 70 or more hours per week at work in order to avoid the layoff list. Predictably enough, while the proposal backlog expanded, the performance on the existing work fell off. The truly talented members of the staff could readily obtain employment under better terms elsewhere, while the mediocre (or poor) employees were left behind, spending more and more of their evaporating free time in an attempt to prevent the inevitable.

The company, as big and successful as it had been early-on, entered into an elongated decline cycle, and was sold to one of its rivals who, presumably, had a more realistic perspective on the relationship between project sponsorship and project management. The company went under, and the direct cause was its “success” in the project sponsorship arena.

Next Up: the other side of the spectrum. I will discuss my next serious gig, where project sponsorship was neglected, and the entirely predictable outcome.