Situational Sponsorship of Projects and Programs: An Empirical Review

Project Management Institute

SITUATIONAL SPONSORSHIP OF PROJECTS AND PROGRAMS: AN EMPIRICAL REVIEW

Lynn Crawford, Terry Cooke-Davies, Brian Hobbs, Les Labuschagne, Kaye Remington and Ping Chen

ISBN: 978-1-933890-46-3

©2008 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Executive Summary

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

What is the Sponsorship Role?

Limitations of this Research

The Organization of the Report

CHAPTER 2: Literature Review

Sponsorship in the Literature

Representation in Relevant Project Management Standards

Representation in the Project Management Research Literature

Representation in the General Management Literature

Summary and Conclusions

CHAPTER 3: Research Design and Methodology

Research Design

Phase One: Pilot Studies

Phase Two: Cross-Regional Qualitative Study

Phase Three: Practitioner Workshops

Research Ethics

CHAPTER 4: Analysis of the Case Study Organizations, their Projects and Programs and their Governance Arrangements

Analysis of Organizational Data

Analysis of Program and Project Data

Organizational Governance Arrangements

CHAPTER 5: A Conceptual Model for Making Sense of the Sponsorship Role

The Emphasis on Governance

The Emphasis on Support

Behaviors

Relating Project Sponsorship Roles to Mainstream Management and Leadership Literature

CHAPTER 6: Conclusion

What It Takes to Guide and Facilitate

References

APPENDIX A—Study 1: Effective Project Sponsorship

APPENDIX B—Study 2: The Influence of the Executive Sponsor on Project Success

APPENDIX C—Study 3: An Exploratory Investigation of Project Sponsor Competency—Brian Hobbs

APPENDIX D—Study 4: Defining the Role of Project Sponsorship Based on Governance Requirements

APPENDIX E—Study 5: Exploring the Role of the Project Sponsor

APPENDIX F—Summary of the Results of the Five Pilot Studies

APPENDIX G—Table of Codes and Code Families

APPENDIX H—Interview Guides

APPENDIX I—Human Research Ethics Committee Approval and Consent Forms

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the organizations that participated in this research for their time and effort. However, these organizations will remain anonymous. The project was supported by the PMI Research Department and by the authors’ employing organizations: Human Systems International Limited, University of Technology Sydney, ESC Lille, Bond University, University of Johannesburg, Tsinghua University, and University of Quebec at Montreal.

Executive Summary

This report presents the results of an investigation of project/program sponsorship conducted by a team of six researchers working on five continents. Following a literature review, the empirical work was organized in three phases: Phase 1, five preliminary studies conducted independently; Phase 2, case studies of 36 projects/programs in nine organizations; and Phase 3, validation workshops. The research results are summarized as lessons learned:

It is useful to think of the sponsor as a manager in the permanent organization that serves as a bridge to the temporary organization, the project/program.

The sponsor is a more senior manager than the project/program manager, but not necessarily an executive. Only senior management people have the experience, knowledge, perspective, credibility, and authority necessary to fill this role.

Sponsors are, therefore, very busy people who cannot provide adequate sponsorship for large numbers of projects/programs. Delegation of this responsibility is, therefore, necessary. This often leads to a hierarchy of sponsorship.

The corporate governance structure provides the framework within which project/program sponsorship is exercised.

The sponsorship role is often filled by multiple actors. Diverse boards and committees often play an important role. This practice is well-recognized in the project management literature in general and in standards in particular.

The sponsorship structure can be quite complex with multiple sponsors, project/program managers, and committees and boards.

For these reasons, the research moved from a study of the role of the sponsor to a study of the sponsorship role.

Despite the variety in the structures within which sponsorship is exercised, there is a consensus as to the nature of the sponsorship role.

There are two dimensions to the sponsorship role: governance and support.

In some situations, one dimension may be dominant. Also, a particular person or group may be primarily involved with either. For this reason, we have named the resulting model the Situational Model of Project/Program Sponsorship. The model is presented in the following table.

The description of the sponsorship governance role can be structured around the following six dimensions:

Governing the project,

Taking accountability for business case and realization of benefits,

Giving direction and making decisions,

Reviewing progress critically,

Managing internal and external interfaces, and

Having sufficient seniority to represent the project/program.

Situations that call for an emphasis on governance include:

The parent organization has a high level of risk exposure to the consequences of failure of the project,

The project is persistently performing poorly against the parent organization's expectations,

The parent organization faces rapidly changing market conditions;

Corporate governance requirements (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley) have drawn attention to the particular project,

There is suspected illegal or noncompliant behavior on the part of the project team,

The project is mission critical or has a high level of exposure, and

There is a need to realign the project to new strategy or organizational context.

The description of the sponsorship support role can be structured around the following four dimensions:

Have credibility, and utilize networking ability,

Provide leadership,

Maintain effective relationships,

Be available, and provide timely support.

Situations that call for an emphasis on support include:

The parent organization is failing to provide sufficient resources to the project,

Some parts of the parent organization are resisting the project's implementation,

Different stakeholders in the parent organization are seeking to impose on the project team conflicting definitions of its objectives or scope or to impose untenable constraints,

The parent organization is failing to provide the project with decisions that are necessary to maintaining planned progress,

The project manager and/or team is known to be inexperienced or weak, and

There are early signs of difficulty with the project, such as a possible shortfall in benefits realization.

Effective sponsorship is largely dependent upon the personal characteristics and behaviors of the individuals carrying out the role.

Effective sponsorship requires:

Excellent communication skills, including the ability to listen,

Ability to handle ambiguity, and

Ability to manage self, including time and stress management.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Several factors have combined to draw attention to the importance of the sponsorship of projects and programs. One factor that has attracted attention to the sponsorship role is increased focus on corporate governance, resulting from numerous high-profile corporate collapses, which has highlighted the need for accountability, transparency, and ability to implement strategy. Another factor is that after several decades of attempting to improve success rates of projects by focusing on project-based management and the project management competence of practitioners, convincing evidence demonstrates that success or failure of projects is not entirely within the control of the project manager and project team. Contextual issues are crucial in influencing the progress and outcomes of projects and a key theme that has emerged is the importance of top management support (Baker, Murphy, & Fisher, 1988; Lechler, 1998; Zimmerer & Yasin, 1998; Lechler & Thomas, 2007).

We propose a conceptualization of the sponsor role as the link between the permanent (business) and temporary (project) organizations. We adopt the conceptualization of projects and programs as temporary organizations, established within the framework of the permanent organization (Sahlin-Andersson & Söderholm, 2002; Turner & Müller, 2003). The majority of the literature on the project as a temporary organization focuses on the analysis at the project level, with less focus on the link to the permanent organization. Here the focus is on this link. The sponsor is the member of the permanent organization that provides a bridge between the project or program manager and the temporary organization that this individual heads.

The permanent organization is required to conform to corporate governance requirements such as those established by the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 and similar regulatory instruments. It is the responsibility of the directors to ensure accountability and transparency throughout all activities of both the permanent organization or ongoing operations and the temporary organization(s) or projects and programs undertaken. In satisfying corporate governance requirements, management must ensure coordination between governance of the permanent and temporary organizations. The sponsorship role constitutes this point of intersection. The sponsorship role can, therefore, be seen as important both in terms of ensuring that governance requirements are met and in providing support to projects and programs.

In designing the research reported here, the aims were to address both formal and informal aspects of the sponsorship role and to provide guidance to organizations and professional organizations in:

Defining the role and responsibilities of the sponsor within corporate and project governance frameworks, and

Identifying the characteristics of effective performance of the sponsor role.

First, the role of sponsorship in the governance context is introduced and this is followed by a review of the literature relating to the sponsorship role, including its treatment in project and general management literature and in standards.

The research methodology was specifically designed to take a holistic view of the sponsorship role by examining the role in its project/program and organizational context and ensuring inclusion of the views and experiences of sponsors as well as those of project managers, team members, and other stakeholders. The research was conducted in three phases: a series of five pilot studies; a cross-regional qualitative study and two workshops with practitioners to test the face validity of results. The cross-regional study is the heart of the empirical research. For this phase of the study, a qualitative approach was adopted focusing on a small number of case study organizations and projects/programs enabling researchers to gain a rich understanding of the environment in which the role of the sponsor is realized. Data was collected from five preliminary studies and over 108 interviews, relating to 36 projects/programs in nine organizations from five geographic regions, namely, Australia, China, Europe, North America, and South Africa.

Analysis of the literature and the extensive qualitative data lead to development of a conceptual model for making sense of the sponsor's role. This model, which we have named the situational sponsorship model, reflects the differing perspectives that may exist at the interface of the act of governing the project, which requires that the project be looked at from the perspective of the parent organization (governance), and the act of providing top management support, which requires looking at the parent organization from the perspective of the project (support). Under differing circumstances, the sponsor may need to emphasize the provision of governance, or support, or both. The situational sponsorship model has significant potential to provide organizations and sponsors with guidance in understanding, defining, and contextualizing conduct of the role.

An important finding from this research, however, was that there is no single definition or manifestation of the sponsorship role. So before we go any further in presenting findings about the typical and expected responsibilities of the role and how they can most effectively be conducted, we need to provide some background on how the sponsorship role is manifested in organizations.

What is the Sponsorship Role?

When we embarked on this research, we were asked to explore the role of the executive sponsor. What we found when we approached organizations was that there was a clear understanding that a sponsor, by definition, is a senior member of management. This individual is in a more senior position than the project/program manager, but may not be an executive, because this term is reserved in many large companies for the most senior people. For this reason, we have dropped the qualifier executive and use the term sponsor to refer to the individual who takes responsibility for a particular project or program. Although there is general acceptance by organizations that responsibility for investments in projects and programs must be taken at the executive level, this responsibility and the associated authority tend to be delegated