It’s a fact: Projects go better with executive support. Study after study shows that active sponsorship is a factor in project success. The more the buy in comes from senior levels in the enterprise, the more likely it is that your projects will deliver against your business case forecasts and achieve the benefits they set out to.
But why is that? Why do we need so much executive support? Proactive project managers have been trying to get things done with sponsors anywhere on the ambivalent to the engaged-but-don’t-bother-me-too-much scale for years. Does your business really need to level up the amount of exec support aligned behind projects?
Yes, it does.
Success Has Changed
It’s harder to achieve success these days, and the project managers in your team who have been at their job for more than 10 years may well be stuck in the mindset of delivery.
Of course delivery is good. You need that to get anything done. But in order to excel as a business you need to move beyond simply delivering projects, time after time. You need to choose the right projects, prioritize your portfolio against strategic objectives and realize the benefits routinely. That doesn’t happen when your project delivery resources are focused on hitting milestones and moving on to the next piece of work.
The definition of success has expanded to include far more than reaching the final black diamond on your Gantt chart on the day you said you would, with your budget hovering more or less at the expended spend. Today, we need to look at success in a holistic way, and we need execs to help us get there.
What’s Stopping Your Executives from Fully Supporting Projects
Senior managers have a huge role to play in project success – that’s not going to be a surprise to you. But what stops them giving project teams the support they need?
There are a number of things that stop senior managers weighing in on projects in the way that they need to:
- They actually don’t have the authority to make the decisions required, so they are the wrong person to have in that project sponsorship role.
- They don’t have access to grant the resources that would help the project team remove roadblocks, so again, they aren’t the right person to have in the role.
- The organization has limited maturity when it comes to managing projects, so they don’t have the data support information, reporting or tools required to give them the information they need to make the right choices.
- The organization rewards heroics and not steady performers, so there’s the attitude that success is based on the individual’s ability and not tried-and-tested robust methodologies and supporting technology.
- There’s office politics at play which change or limit the decisions the exec is prepared to make or the support they are prepared to give.
- They don’t know how to support the project team because no one has ever told them what’s required or they think the project manager can be largely self-sufficient.
These are the roadblocks that you need to remove if you want to make it easy for senior managers to actively and openly support the projects that are going to move your business forward.
Boosting the Level of Executive Support
While it’s relatively easy to see the issues that cause managers not to provide the support that project teams require, it’s much harder to fix them.
This is where a strong Project Management Office can come in: this impartial team has great insights into the effectiveness of sponsorship in your organization and can work with the relevant senior managers to ensure they know what is required for sponsoring a project. They can also act sensitively and with support of their senior line team if they identify that a project sponsor position is being filled by the wrong individual. Changing project sponsors midway through a project doesn’t happen as often as it should, and it’s certainly a quick way to generate support for a team, if the sponsorship role can be moved to someone with access to the resources to make a difference.
Exec support goes beyond sponsorship because it’s baked in to how the business feels and thinks about getting work done. Having a project manager assigned to important projects is part of the puzzle – the easiest part. The rest of it comes with ensuring there is support for the work of the PMO, and that portfolio management is adequately carried out with the right data to make the best decisions for the business.
You can also support your project managers and teams to ask the right questions of their executives and to help their project sponsors to do what is required on projects. Training project teams in influencing, negotiating and communication skills will improve their ability to get other people to take action towards the successful delivery of their projects, whatever their level.
Underpinning all of this is the ability for project teams to show that they can be successful. Without solid project management methods, tools and techniques, there’s very little for sponsors to be supportive of. Consistent execution goes a long way to showing that the work that is happening is worthy of exec support.
In summary, you can tackle ambivalent managers from two angles. First, make sure that you understand what is stopping managers from acting in ways that demonstrate support for your projects. And second, make sure project teams are doing their utmost to deliver projects successfully.
When you’ve got both of these angles covered, you should start to see a change in the way senior execs talk and think about projects, which in turn should be reflected in their attitudes towards supporting their teams. And that leads to better project outcomes every time.