The Difficult Sponsor

The project sponsor is usually a senior or a very senior employee from an organization that has ultimate decision power over the projects he/she has started.

I don't want to offend anyone but I find it a non-sense for a much junior employee such a project manager to question the decisions taken by a much more senior employee (the project sponsor). Not to mention that the PM effectively works for the sponsor even if there may be no direct line management subordination.

It is not the job of the PM to evaluate how good or poor the sponsor's decisions are but more importantly how can we know for sure that the PM is right and the sponsor is wrong?

Not to mention that the sponsor may have other priorities for which he needs founding so he may consider some projects to be less important than others or than other non-project activities. If needed the sponsor should be able to cut founding to a project in order to allocate the founds to other more important activity.

Don't frame the issue as junior employee v. senior employee. Instead, see yourself as the expert in project management. Sponsors are typically not experts in project management. As a project management expert, you have a moral and professional obligation to provide honest advice and information. If the sponsor wants to cut scope that you know will significantly decrease quality or increase risk or increase long-term operational costs, etc., then you have a responsibility to speak up and let the sponsor know. If they don't believe you, then educate them with research and case studies. Be nice, but firm. Do stakeholder analysis. Seek out peers or supervisors of the sponsor that you can appeal to and see if they can help resolve the situation. If you find yourself on a project that you are confident will fail due to the mis-management of a sponsor, you may be better off removing yourself from the situation as you don't want to be associated with project failure, and blame tends to be directed at the project manager when projects fail.

I agree, the PM must help the sponsor with advices and also must warn him when he is about to take decisions that from a project management perspective are wrong.

Still the sponsor must make best use of the resources that he has and since the resources are limited he must often withdraw resources from a project in order to use them for other activities.

Cutting the scope of a project and/or reducing the resources allocated to it could harm that particular project but overall for the organization this can be a good thing as the resources could be of better use on other activities, for instance on other projects.

Cutting the resources of a project is not automatically a mismanagement from the part of the sponsor but it could be a strategic decision that would benefit the organization. Anyway it is not the job of the PM to question this kind of decisions, the project manager must just advice the sponsor about the potential consequences of his actions.

Stand your ground. You understand change management and quality. The PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct is based on 4 key values: responsibility, respect, fairness, and honesty. Responsibility and honesty require that you not let anyone make changes without adjusting the cost, schedule, risks, etc. Project estimates should include the impact of scope changes, use of under-qualified resources, etc. You will need to do some research and find sources to back up your estimates and educate stakeholders on the implications of their decisions. The project manager has a responsibility to make sponsors aware of the true expected impact of proposed changes.