How to train your sponsor

In this podcast, Ricardo addresses one of the biggest challenges in the project environment, how can we educate the sponsor to make a decision based on facts, not just feeling. He also gives tips on how we can escape the dangers in this process.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today. I like to tell you how to train your sponsor. And this is of course, its just a quick joke with how the train your dad or the movie. So I want to talk to you about the relevance of the sponsor and how to prepare your sponsor to be an effective sponsor. This sponsor or the sponsoring group is the highest authority in the projects. Most of the time they lack knowledge on project management. So they have very experienced people.

They have a lot of field experience, but not always. They have a lot of project management experience. So when you can do Diane with WBS, with risk register for them, this sounds something like thinks on the planet or a things that engineers do, how to avoid this. So let me share with you what I do in my projects. So the first thing is that you need to understand what creates incentives for this sponsor.

So if you work in a very financially oriented organization, you need to support your information with facts related to costs related to profit. It's a fact base it process. So you need to show information, but don't show a very complex information unless you think that this is the drive and this is the style of your sponsor. Most of the sponsors, they like sharp approach. They like simple decision making process that help them to decide.

So you need to present yourself as a project manager, as someone not to confront, but someone to support someone to give advice to the sponsor. So the sponsor can make better decisions. So this is the route and I do this always. If I have a sponsor in a group or a project board, I talk to each of the board members, the project board or each of the sponsors individually and not try as much as I can to Taylor the information to each of them before we have something like a formal session or a formal project, the liberation, because with that, there will be much more comfortable when they are about to make the decisions.

I call this socialize when you need to socialize the topic before. So let's suppose you have a project board meeting or a change control board meeting a next Friday. So talk to the key sponsors, the key people explain to them. And what do you intend to present? Don't try to create any kind of surprise. You know, all look surprised because usually when people receive an information in the last minute, the natural reaction is the avoiders is to say I'm a guest, okay?

Now prove me because they don't have the full information. So you need to prepare them. And remember, let's suppose that you have a big project with very different sponsors. You need to tailor the information to each of them. They are very critical stakeholders on your project. They're a very critical, they have most of the power and most of the time they're not prepared. They don't know technically how to manage the project. Like, you know, they don't know technically what is critical path.

They don't know technically how you were planning to spend your budget progress. Corfe they don't know this terms. They don't know. So if you do not educate them and help them to make a better decision, they will be very painful to you in a project, very painful. And what really matters. It's a fact based decision and this is what makes your project is successful. Don't only play the politics without being that, attach it and prepare it to effect based a decision.

Think about that and see you next week with another five minutes to be a bad guest.

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