1. Is it ill-advised to have a sponsor be part of the project team doing the "hands-on" work of the project?
2. If you have a small organization and the sponsor is also a member of the team during planning, execution and monitor&control, how do you handle a situation where the project sponsor is over-involved and won't cede control, as the team works through planning, decision-making and other activities?
Thanks. Saving Changes...
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Anonymous
Sounds like your sponsor is confused on the role of a project "sponsor". The role should be limited to: 1. validating, justifying and protecting the project - at the executive level. 2. Providing business case approval and funding, and 3. acting as final arbitrator and decision maker (business decisions) when needed.
If the project scope (cost / impact) is high enough you may want to have an executive steering committee to act as the sponsor's delegate and provide broader input into the business decisions. The commitee meets infrequently and handles ONLY those decisions and problems the project team cannot handle themselves on their level of authority and political influence.
If you have invited the sponsor to become too "hands on", then you need to coach her / him on what role and activities they can best help the project (see above).
If the sponsor is ALSO a SME and/or super user - then you need to help them understand where and how that role participates in the project activities. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Per your part #2 question.
It sounds like the sponsor is taking on (over?) the role of the PM - perhaps unintentionally. Perhaps they already have a management role and they feel that is their typical role? Perhaps they are too controlling by nature?
Regardless- you can't have multiple individuals project managing a single team / project - this will cause confusion, extra work and potentially conflicting assignments.
Can you have a quiet chat with this person about that challenges of managing people in a project context? During such a discussion (perhaps couched as a coaching session for yourself) can you lead the sponsor towards understanding how "too many cooks spoil the broth"?
Might you formalize the project status / progress reporting process such that (during that event) you carry the voice of the project? thus subtly re-inforcing the need to have 1 PM?
Might you seek coaching from someone on the sponsors level to see if you can get help from within the organization? (this would need to be done very sensitively since it could lead to bad political consequences with your sponsor!).
Saving Changes...
In my experience, in small companies the sponsor is heavily involved in doing the actual work of the project, and there is no way to avoid that. The suggestion to limit their role to just validation and a pure sponsor-only role is simply not reasonable in a small company.
I worked on projects in a company of 300 people, for departments as small as four people. The department head was the sponsor, I was a project manager, and the department head plus one of her staff people did virtually all of the project work.
In a situation like this, the sponsor can and should be heavily involved in the work and the planning. They must be hands-on, otherwise the project will fail.
For the question about what to do when a sponsor is "over-involved", I would challenge you to reflect on what you mean by "over-involved":
* Is the work suffering because of something the sponsor is doing?
* Is the team losing morale because the sponsor is not delegating enough?
* Do you see the sponsor as "over-involved" just because it is reducing your OWN role in the project?
I have seen project managers who resent an active sponsor because they feel that it takes away from their prestige, role, and responsibility. Those concerns are not helpful, in my view.
On the other hand, I have seen sponsors that really hurt a project effort by undermining the project manager. In these cases, it is critical to confront the sponsor privately and talk about the damage that he or she is causing.
A lot of these issues depend heavily on the size of the organization and the criticality of the project. I hope my answers help. I think Timothy's answer is great for a larger company. I was trying to balance his response by responding from a very different point of view. You may find that your situation combines the two. Saving Changes...
Both Alex and Tim are right. Over participation by a project sponsor can hurt as well as help the project. Small organizations may have no alternative to having the sponsor very active and participate intimately with the project delivery. However, even in large organizations, some sponsors want a higher level of control, or reassurance that you as the project manager can handle the tasks. Sometimes it's both.
If you feel that you've been set aside by the sponsor - talk to them about how you feel. Seek their advice on how best to proceed. It may be that they brought you in so that they would have someone to document the plan, and they intended to run the project all along, but didn't want to do the documentation work .
Lastly, if the sponsor has significant skills that provide additional expertise and solve several key issues, then great - utilize them as a project resource, assign them work, hold them accountable for delivery, just like anyone else. Saving Changes...
Thanks, Donald, for your reply. You bring in an excellent point. Problems like these are difficult because they operate on so many levels:
* Governance
* Emotional
* Control
* Authority
* Relationships
It has also occurred to me that sometimes I have seen sponsors dominate a project manager because they do not trust the PM. It is possible that the sponsor does not feel the PM is doing an adequate job, so he or she is trying to do their job for them.
Sometimes there are people who just do not have the temperament to be a sponsor. They do not want to delegate anything, especially not decisions. Those people might be better suited to serving as a project manager. Sometimes the old sponsor can become the new project manager, and the old sponsor's boss can become the new sponsor.
Alternately, perhaps the current project manager should remain in place, but someone higher in the company should be appointed as sponsor. That higher-level sponsor is less likely to manage all the details of the project, and they can intervene if the old sponsor tries to control the project in an inappropriate way. Saving Changes...
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