Project sponsor

Revision as of 15:24, 5 February 2018

Abstract

I decided to write about this subject but an abstract was already done, i'll leave it here for the moment, i will delete it afterwards:

%%When a project get out of track the first causes we will think about is the technology, economics, schedules, lack of professional skills or something in that way, and we absolute forget to look back and reflect about the distribution of roles in a project. To get succeed with a project, four key roles should be staged in an early stage at the project:

- Project sponsor - Project leader - Entrepreneur - The Target %%

This wiki-article is made in order to reflect on how important the role of project sponsor is in a project, and actually is the backbone for the entire project, and without whom the project would not be started. This role is often skipped or misdone, which can explain why some projects are failing, or not doing as good as they should. A powerful quote wasn't given by a seniot project manager "I now understand that a project I recently sponsored was not nearly as successful as it could have been—partly due to my not having understood my role as sponsor." ^[1] We will use some informations taken from the PMI Certificate presentation held in France.^[2]. I add there some more references for personnal research^[3]. [ Project Management Institute (PMI) ^[4] Visited 02-02-2018]].

Role and definition of the project sponsor

A project sponsor is: "an individual (often a manager or executive) with overall accountability for the project." ^[1] .

In other words the individual or group within the performing organization who provides the financial resources, in cash or in kind, for the project. ^[5] It needs to be clarified that the project sponsor is not the customer nor the client, but someone from the performing organisation that understands the organization's business and the corporate strategy.

Responsabilities

A project sponsor is typically responsible for initiating, ensuring, approving, and establishing a series of key aspects in relation to the project, which can be summed up under categories of vision, governance, and value/benefits realization

Relationship with other Stakeholders

As mentionned before, the project sponsor is accountable for all the aspects of the project and at every step of the project progress, and becasue of that, he has to interact with all the stakeholders of the project.

Good practices

Even though there are no official certification about project management, some insight might be releavnt ot take into acocunt:

Common Mistakes

The role of project sponsor is often not well defined in a project and some project sponsors are not even well aware of their role. It often happens that a project anager is not even aware of whom is the project sponsor. This issue arises from the fact that unlike project management, project sponsorship doesn't have an official organization, institute that defines methodologies, and approaches for the project sponsor.

Some people might think that the role of project sposnor interfeers with the role of project manager, but if the tasks are well defined, then their work is complementeray and they need each other to achieve the best result possible for their project. The project manager has success and performance criterias based on time and money (triangle?) while the project sponsor has a gloabl overvue of the strategy of the company and focuses on different criterias .

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} Project sponsorship: senior management's role in the successful outcome of projects. Schibi, O. & Lee, C. Project Management Institute. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2015. EMEA, London, England. Newtown Square.
2. ↑ PMI certification.
3. ↑ International Project Management Association.
4. ↑ [https://www.pmi.org/
5. ↑ Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK).