Supporting Your Sponsor’s Decision Making

 

Sponsors provide financial support, champion the project and make key decisions. So, it’s crucial that you understand how your project sponsors make decisions. By watching for these types of decision-making, you can adjust your approach to get the best decisions and support your project’s success.

• Fact-based decisions. Project sponsors want facts and data they can use to guide their decisions. For fact-based decision-makers, you need to know the data sources they value most. For example, internal trusted advisors or external entities like consulting companies. Find the data and the data source that your sponsor values to help them make decisions.
• Intuition-based decisions. Leaders with sponsorship experience are often swayed by their intuition, which helps produce quick decisions. To support this type of sponsor, identify when they’re using intuition for decisions and then validate the assumptions they make. That way, you reduce the risk that flawed intuition presents.
• Decisions based on team experiences. Many sponsors will poll their team members before making decisions, because they value the team’s experiences and opinions. This typically results in more buy-in from the project team. However, attempts to  gain consensus can delay decisions. For this approach, add buffer time to the schedule to offset these delays.
• Political decisions. All too often, sponsors make project decisions from a political standpoint. Their bosses or other key stakeholders have expectations and sponsors hesitate to make decisions that may disappoint those stakeholders. While these decisions can be sound, they may add risks. Work with your sponsor to make sure you both understand those risks and their potential impact.
• Market-driven decisions. The driving force for a sponsor’s decision making could be what’s happening in the marketplace. That makes sense because project success often depends on leap-frogging the competition. With a market-driven sponsor, keep a close eye on the status of the triple constraints (scope, cost, and time). Scope is often fixed, so you need to watch how that affects cost and schedule.

Have you seen other types of decision-making? If so, what advantages and disadvantages did they present? What can you do in those situations? Share with us in the comments section.

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 33,000 subscribers. If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________