Eeyore & Cheerleaders?

Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series! We’re currently talking about building trust and credibility for your transformation programme.

And this week we’re looking at project sponsors.

Having seen what feels like hundreds of projects over the years, I feel confident in saying that a good sponsor doesn’t always guarantee that a project is going to succeed. But a bad sponsor usually means a project will go badly.

Project sponsorship is one of the biggest areas of impact we can have as digital transformation leaders.

Great sponsors encourage organisational trust in the project. Great sponsors generally make project life rewarding and engaging for their team members.
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There are three critical factors to being a great sponsor – are you doing the right things, do you have enough time and do you understand your role as a project sponsor? It’s a lot more than just chairing the steering committee!
 
A great project sponsor is also:

One: The Ultimate Champion for the project.

Number one fan; biggest cheerleader; proud project parent. It doesn’t matter how you frame it, your first and most important job as a project sponsor is to be its biggest supporter. This means promoting your project to stakeholders and being enthusiastic to your teams, no matter what.

Setting a positive tone is essential (whilst obviously being realistic that your new website is not going to solve climate change or cure COVID).

It is really really noticeable to project teams if their sponsor is disinterested or dislikes their project. Don’t be that sponsor.
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Being a champion also means putting in the time. Going to showcases, talking to the team, asking questions. It’s not enough to be enthusiastic, you have to show your enthusiasm.

Two: The Solver of Big Issues.

I was once lucky enough to see President Barack Obama speak and one of the things that he said that stuck with me was that presidents only get to make the really hard decisions, because the easier decisions have all been made by the teams who work for the president. It’s only when faced with a truly tough decision that it gets escalated up to the top.

On a much smaller (less likely to blow up the world) scale it’s the same for project sponsors. If you have a great team filled with empowered capable people, then the only decisions they will need your help with are the hard decisions.
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And you have to do that, clearly and quickly, when needed, so the project can move forward.

Three: The Eeyore.​

“Eeyore nodded gloomily at him. "It will rain soon, you see if it doesn't," he said. Roo looked to see if it didn't, and it didn't…”

Ok this sounds like it contradicts the Ultimate Champion. Maybe the better advice is to channel the pessimism without the gloomy-ness.
 
A great sponsor is always thinking about what can go wrong and this is useful for two reasons. Firstly, it helps you proactively identify and address likely issues associated with your project (how are we going to migrate customers, how do we make sure our tool is secure, etc).

​And secondly you start thinking about plan B’s for when things don’t go as expected.
 
Forward-thinking about what can go wrong and how you can address it, is very useful for de-risking digital delivery. A great sponsor asks their team to think about these challenges long before they happen, so your project is well prepared.

Four: The Perspective Setter.

Most of us are not solving world peace or caring for neo-natal babies. Digital transformation is generally not life and death stuff (although full credit to you if you’re doing life and death AND digital transformation, you’re awesome).
 
People who work on projects that are important to their organisations can often feel that it is life and death. Caring deeply is great, but it can also impact stress levels and relationships with others in the team.

One of our most important jobs as sponsors is to provide our teams with comforting reality checks and help the team calmly plan alternative approaches when things go wrong.
 
 
A great sponsor plays a lot of roles. Often the support you need to provide your team will differ depending on the capability of the people in the team and how mature the team is as a whole.
 
Next time we’ll talk some more about doing the right things as a project sponsor.
 
We’ll be taking a break over the next few weeks. Our next newsletter will be Wednesday 13 January.
 
Thanks for reading my weekly efforts and for the great feedback you send me. Have a safe and happy break.
 
Meri Kirihimete

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