Working with a Sponsorship Committee

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Sometimes, the time and extent of authority needed to sponsor a project is beyond what one person can handle. In that case, a sponsorship committee is the answer. Here are tips for working with a sponsorship committee.

  • Request an individual to represent the committee when you need quick responses. At times, you will need a quick decision. Communicating with multiple sponsors is time-consuming, so it’s important to have a single sponsorship representative you can contact on short notice. That person can make decisions for the project, or they can poll other committee members if needed.
  • Propose logistics for the committee. A project manager can’t dictate how steering committee logistics will work, but the committee usually appreciates reasonable recommendations. Consider the priority and risk elements of the project. Then propose meeting frequency, definition of a quorum, and a standard agenda. The committee may not adopt your suggestions. But proposing sound logistics increases the chances things will run smoothly. Sound logistics also centralize communications, easing the burden on the project manager.
  • Strive for a single set of priorities. Work with the sponsorship committee to develop a common set of project priorities. If you’re lucky, members of the committee will agree on the priority of project requirements and the relative importance of project constraints (cost, time, scope, and quality). Hold discussions early to identify potential conflicts. These talks can set the stage for future debates and decision making.
  • Propose a decision-making process. It’s important for the committee to agree upon a decision-making process. Will all decisions require a consensus, or is a majority decision acceptable? Will a committee chairperson break ties or logjams? Agreeing to a decision-making process in advance saves considerable time. Without a process, needed decisions might not be made. Influential stakeholders in conflict can kill a project whether you have one or several sponsors. An unmade decision could stall or halt projects,  as the committee tries to develop a decision-making process and make a controversial decision at the same time.
  • Define the relationship between the sponsorship and steering committees. Many organizations appoint a steering committee for major projects. Members are typically key managers and customer personnel. Things can get confusing when you have both a steering committee and a sponsorship committee. So, it’s wise to draft a mission statement for the steering committee and one for the sponsorship committee, explaining how the committees work together. This can avoid confusion about where project related decisions will be made.

Have you ever worked with a sponsorship committee? What were the pros and cons? If you have tips or questions about sponsorship committees, share with us in the comments section.

For more about working with sponsors, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Common Project Approval Blockers

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Photo by Quick PS on Unsplash

Critical projects sometimes die prematurely when blockers prevent projects from getting management approval. Here are some tips for addressing these common approval blockers.

  • Your organization hasn’t established project success metrics. A lack of success criteria can raise obstacles to project approval. Is the payback period 1 year or less than that? Do you need a significant reduction in the risk of using old processes or systems? What does significant mean? Do projects have to achieve a cost reduction of greater than 10%? Or is it a combination of these? Sometimes, the best way to get a project approved is to propose success criteria so management can talk about them and make a decision.
  • Conflicting stakeholder goals prevent agreement. Goal conflicts between senior stakeholders are common. Financial personnel might focus on reducing costs, while marketing personnel want to spend more on initiatives to increase profit. Stakeholder conflicts that aren’t understood or identified can kill your project. They may have started from past projects or personality clashes. Work with your sponsor to facilitate conversations between conflicted stakeholders. Meet one-on-one with influential stakeholders who aren’t enthusiastic about your project. That way, you can identify these conflicts and work to resolve them.
  • Past project failures. Many organizations have a poor project success rate. Stakeholders remember the pain and pressure of those failures, which makes them hesitant to take on new projects. Work to understand their fears. Review documented lessons learned, but don’t assume they tell the full story! If possible, talk with the people involved in past project failures. Personnel and contractor failures might not be identified. Do research to understand these failures and put risk plans in place to address them. Discuss how you will manage the project differently. 
  • “We are too busy.” Does busy mean the organization is productive? Often, antiquated processes and languishing projects persist. Time wasters may contribute to being busy, but don’t help the business. People don’t like stopping a project that has consumed resources without delivering value. As a project manager, you can do your homework to help your sponsor why they should stop a project. This can free up critical resources to work on more viable projects. If that doesn’t work, at least it raises awareness of the need to examine whether busyness is producing anything of value. 

Have you encountered other obstacles to project approval? If you have tips or questions, share with us in the comments.

For more about project approval, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

The Benefits of Baselines

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Many project managers work hard to build an accurate schedule and then, omit the final step of saving a baseline! A baselined schedule provides so many benefits you don’t want to miss. Here are some key benefits of schedule baselines:

  • Track your project against the original plan. Experienced project managers know that no plan survives contact with reality! To get automated project status, you need to use a scheduling tool (such as MS Project, Primavera, and others). And those tools need a baseline before they can provide reports comparing actual progress and cost to your original plan. Actuals compared to the baseline can then be used to forecast time and cost going forward.
  • Improve your estimating. Baselined project schedules help show when actuals diverge from the original plan. Seeing the variances from the plan can help improve estimates. Estimators get feedback on the accuracy of their estimates. Without this feedback, estimation won’t improve. Say you ask someone to estimate a task, and they tell you it will take two weeks. It ends up taking four weeks. If the person never hears about that variance, they’ll still say two weeks next time, when the task will likely take four.
  • Reinforce accountability with team members and management. Sharing a baselined schedule reinforces the schedule and the time team members have committed to your project. The same is true for management. It helps reinforce management’s commitment to dedicate staff to the project. As business priorities change, project staff time might change as well. You can compare the baseline staff allocations to the actual time spent  to show why a project is behind schedule.
  • Manage thresholds. Project status reporting often uses traffic light indicators. Green means all is well. Yellow indicates trouble brewing. And red means there are issues. These colors usually indicate a level of variance from plan. For example, 0-2% over schedule may be green. 2-5% over schedule is yellow. And greater than 5% over schedule is red. Tracking actuals against the baseline plan forms the basis for these variations.
  • Make program planning easier. When managing a program, a deliverable from one project can be a predecessor to a task on another project. In this instance, it’s vital to understand when tasks will be completed. A baselined schedule along with updated, actual task completion dates helps you understand how one project’s performance will affect another in a program.

What other ways do you use baselines to improve project performance? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about schedule baselines, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course, which is unlocked through the end of 2025 with this link.

A Spreadsheet Isn’t a Scheduling Tool!

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Spreadsheets have so many uses, but project scheduling tool is not one of them. You can use one to create something that looks like a Gantt chart schedule. But you can’t manage that schedule without a ton of menial work. Here’s why you should use a scheduling tool rather than a spreadsheet:

  • You can manage lag and lead times. Task relationships aren’t always straightforward. Scheduling tools manage this automatically through lag or lead time between two tasks. Say you submitted a building permit application. You need to receive approval before starting your first construction task. In a scheduling tool, you can add lag between the predecessor and successor to automatically maintain the delay between the tasks. You can also overlap tasks. For example, you have to draft a long book chapter. Editing that chapter could start before the entire chapter to shorten the schedule. Lead time specifies when the successor task can start before the predecessor tasks finishes. For the chapter, you add lead time between the two tasks to give the author a head start before the editor starts editing the chapter. With a spreadsheet, you would have to keep track of lag or lead time as the schedule changes.
  • A scheduling tool automatically updates start and finish date when you input actuals. Project schedules change all the time. Tasks go more quickly or take longer than expected. Resource availability isn’t what you planned for. A good scheduling tool automatically recalculates dates to show the revised schedule. Try this with a spreadsheet and you’re in for a resource-intensive, and error-prone exercise even for a small project. You can also use a scheduling tool to explore what-if scenarios. Have a change you’re considering that would add or delete several tasks? Make those changes with a scheduling tool and evaluate the results.
  • Calculate costs based on actual hours spent (without having to building those calculations in a spreadsheet). Scheduling tools have built-in functions to calculate costs. The calculated cost is based on the time spent to complete tasks that you enter in the tool) and the hourly rates for each person. Scheduling tools can also calculate equipment and materials costs. The tool calculates overall project cost from the individual task costs.
  • Automatically compare the status of your project to your baseline. Knowing where you are on the project compared to what you originally planned is crucial to keeping a project on track. The differences, called variance, are a fundamental part of status reporting. With a scheduling tool, you can save a baseline of your schedule, and then compare the actual time and cost spent to that baseline. A scheduling tool can also forecast the variance from the baseline finish date and cost based on where the project is today.

For more about what several scheduling tools can do, check out my Project Management: Choosing the Right Online Tool course.

When do I Share Issues With my Sponsor?

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Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

Sharing issues with your sponsor is like walking a tight rope. You don’t want to bother them with trivial matters. But you want them to feel informed. And you never want them to be blindsided. Here are situations when you need to share issues with your sponsor.

  • The sponsor’s confidence is low. Sponsors are afraid of not being in control. They also don’t like to report project concerns to their superiors. To address their fears, give them detailed project status. In status reports, include issues that you are addressing and how. If the project progresses well, your sponsor’s confidence will increase and the need to discuss minor issues will decrease. Use your perception of the sponsor’s confidence to determine which problems you should review proactively.
  • Issues will affect project time or cost. The potential impact of an issue is a good measure of when you need to talk with your sponsor. How do you get this right? By setting a threshold in advance for when the sponsor wants to be informed. Is it when there’s a 1% impact on the budget, 5%, or some other number? Do the same for impacts to your schedule. (The percentages might be different for budget and schedule. Sometimes, meeting the schedule is more critical than staying within budget, or vice versa!)
  • An issue affects a critical stakeholder. Influential stakeholders watch your project carefully and are likely to talk to your sponsor if problems arise.  Prevent surprises by sharing details of brewing problems and what you’re doing to address them. That way, your sponsor will be ready to address stakeholders’ concerns. And it’ll also keep stakeholder follow-up tasks out of your to-do list!
  • You might need a decision. If you have a problem that might require your sponsor to make a decision, tell them about it! For example, let’s say you have problems with a new component and that component is the only way to meet some lower priority requirements. Dropping those requirements from the project might be best, but only your sponsor can drive decisions like that. By sharing the problem early, your sponsor has time to consider options and make the best decision.
  • The problem might affect the sponsor’s critical performance measures. Sponsors and key stakeholders typically have operational responsibilities with measures to assess their effectiveness. For example, a target for the weekly output of a production line. If your project could impact that production line, speak up as soon as possible. That way, the sponsor and stakeholders can work with their operational team and the project to manage business impacts.

As you develop a relationship with your sponsor and confidence grows, you can shift your focus. You can spend more time resolving problems versus reporting on them. Use these guidelines along with your sponsor’s concerns to decide when you should work to solve a problem or focus on reporting it to your sponsor first.

Are there other situations where you share issues with your sponsor? Or do you have questions about how to handle sponsor discussions? Share in the comments section.

For more about working with your project sponsor, check out my Project Management Foundations course.