The Project Book

PROJECT SPONSORSHIP

For all of our good intention with regard to projects, it’s a fact that most organisations still aren’t very good at them and haven’t been for some time. Attempts to build new products or fix existing problems are continually met with expanded time frames and budgets, often leading to disappointed stakeholders and, in some instances, front-page horror stories.

And it’s not just ‘some’ projects that fail. Most research put failure rates at between 50 per cent and 75 per cent. The upshot of this appalling statistic, according to the Project Management Institute (PMI) in their Pulse of the Profession report in 2018, is that a million dollars is wasted every 20 seconds on projects around the world.

One of the main reasons projects fail is that senior managers are fully engaged only in those projects in which they have a vested interest. In my experience, these ‘pet projects’, as we call them, very rarely add any material value to the organisation, yet they consume countless hours of precious people time.

In fact, as I’ve noted, there are only two reasons for project failure: poor project management and poor project sponsorship. This part of the book addresses the second of these reasons to provide senior managers with a blueprint for continual success, just as the first part did for project managers. Every reason we can come up with for project failure (and reports and statistics frequently list between 14 and 16) comes back to these two reasons.

To put a much-needed ...