Understanding Your Project Sponsor: A PM’s Checklist

Understanding your project sponsor’s habits and perspectives can mean the difference between delivering business value and wasting time and money. To maximize your likelihood of success, here’s a checklist of key things to know about your project sponsor.

• Preferred reporting format and style. Some sponsors want to see all the details, while others prefer an overview with links to the details if they want to dive deeper. Design project reports for your sponsor that meet their preferences.
• Motivators and fears. Develop an in-depth understanding of your sponsor’s project objectives and primary project-related concerns. This information helps you guide the project toward their goals and avoids stressing them out by inadvertently triggering fear-based reactions.
• Additional hot buttons. Most people have behaviors that irritate them. Some are business-related, while others aren’t. For example, a colleague had an otherwise easy-going sponsor who got upset if someone didn’t tuck their chair under the table at the end of a meeting. Identify your sponsor’s hot buttons so you can avoid strain in your relationship.
• Schedule constraints. Regular status updates with your sponsor are typical. But you also need ad hoc meetings to work through unexpected issues. Asking a sponsor for time when they’re busy (e.g., during a weekly customer meeting) won’t go over well. Get to know their scheduling constraints and the process to get on their calendar ASAP when issues occur. Alternatively, ask the sponsor to appoint a backup when they’re unavailable.
• Triple constraint priority. Ideally, your project will deliver to the triple constraints of time, cost and scope. Sometimes, that’s difficult, if not impossible. Work with your sponsor to identify the constraints that causes the least pain to them if it’s missed. That knowledge supports good decision-making throughout the project lifecycle. (Bonus: this knowledge also helps you build the most relevant risk plan by focusing on what impacts the sponsor and the business the most.)
• Preferred communication method and timing. Some sponsors want to get reports before a meeting so they can review them. Others prefer an informal communication session that they facilitate. If there’s an emergency, some prefer a text message, while others want a phone call and leave a message if they can’t answer. That way, work with your sponsor runs more smoothly no matter what’s going on.
• PM background and experience. You can identify the best ways to share information and build project artifacts when you understand your sponsor’s PM experience. For example, if their project management experience is deep but limited to finance-related projects, you should ensure that cost management methods are in place and sufficiently detailed to reassure the sponsor that costs are well-managed. If they have little PM experience, take time to guide them through all project management artifacts.
• Knowledge of political landmines. As a project manager, you often don’t know the nuances of how senior leaders interact with one another, and the hot buttons they may have. Your sponsor can significantly reduce unintended tensions by guiding the project through these political landmines. Ask your sponsor what to do and what NOT to do so you avoid relationship issues with senior leaders.
• Risk appetite. Your job as PM is not to avoid risk; but to manage it and inform your sponsor about the project’s risks. Sponsors might be very risk-averse or could be willing to take big risks to drive an aggressive agenda. By understanding your sponsor’s risk appetite so you can properly assess and manage risk on their behalf.

Consider creating a checklist to get to know your sponsor and keep it with your project planning template. That way, you can gather this key info in your first couple of meetings.

For more about project sponsors, check out the How to Be an Effective Sponsor course by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez.

 

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