The Project Book

CHAPTER 53 THE BUCK STOPS WITH YOU

Let me be clear from the start. In becoming a project sponsor, you accept full accountability for the project. You understand how it links to the organisation’s vision, you give it your wholehearted support and you commit to seeing it through to the end, with the realisation of the benefits that justified the project in the first place.

Or, as Professor Peter Shergold stated in his review of how the Australian Public Service continues to get projects so badly wrong, ‘Having a single point of accountability is a cornerstone of project management …’

The project starts with the appointment of the sponsor and ends with the sponsor’s ensuring that the benefits of the project are realised. You’re in it for the long haul, through thick and thin, light and dark, good times and bad … You get the picture.

It may seem like an obvious statement to make in a book on project sponsorship, yet time and again senior managers fail to fully grasp that if the project sinks, they go down with it. In a 2016 PMI report, only 27 per cent of organisations specify executive accountability for project success. Put simply, senior managers aren’t stepping up and doing their bit for their projects.

Endless reviews into project failures around the world say the same thing. For example, a 2012 Victorian Ombudsman investigation into ICT-enabled projects (all of which had failed, I hasten to add), reported, ‘Too often there was muted acceptance that all ICT-enabled projects ...