What Sponsors Should Do, and What They Shouldn’t
Sponsorship gets described in terms of support, which is too vague to act on and lets a great deal of unhelpful behaviour pass as engagement. A sponsor who attends every meeting, asks interested questions about the design and never settles the funding question is not supporting the project. They are attending it.
Section 2.5.2 of The Standard for Project Management describes the sponsor alongside the customer and product owner as roles that influence direction, value and decisions, and the practical version is narrower than most job descriptions: there are four things a sponsor holds that nobody else can, and everything else they do is optional.
The four things only a sponsor can do
Hold the business case. The sponsor owns why the project exists and whether it still makes sense. That means answering, when circumstances change, whether the thing is still worth doing, and being willing to stop it. A project whose sponsor cannot say what would make them cancel it does not have a business case; it has a budget.
Take the decisions above the project's authority. Money beyond the delegated limit, a date that affects other commitments, a trade between two objectives owned by different parts of the organisation. These arrive a handful of times on any project and they arrive urgently, and the sponsor's availability at those moments is most of the value of the role.
Clear organisational obstacles. Another director's team that will not engage, a policy that makes the design impossible, a queue the project cannot jump but the sponsor can ask about. The project manager can escalate; only the sponsor can pick up the phone to a peer and have the conversation land as a request between equals.
Be visibly committed. What a sponsor says about the project in rooms the project manager is not in decides how the rest of the organisation treats it. This is not ceremonial: teams asked to prioritise project work over their own operations take their cue from whether the sponsor appears to care.
Three ways sponsorship goes wrong
Absence. The most common failure and the easiest to diagnose. Decisions queue, obstacles persist, and the project manager escalates into a diary. The damage is cumulative, because an organisation learns within about two months which projects have a sponsor who answers.
Design by sponsor. The opposite problem and the more destructive one. A sponsor with expertise in the subject starts making technical choices, which overrides people who know more, removes the team's ownership of its own work, and blurs the line so that nobody can tell which decisions are genuinely theirs any more. An engaged sponsor with strong opinions needs an agreed boundary more than an absent one does.
Reopening what was delegated. A decision is delegated, taken, and three weeks later revisited because the sponsor has heard something at lunch. Once this has happened twice, the project stops taking delegated decisions and everything routes upwards, which is precisely the outcome the delegation was meant to prevent.
Two display units in the same aisle
A retailer was fitting new in-store technology across a hundred and forty stores: self-service points, staff devices, and a redesigned service counter. The sponsor was a retail director who was genuinely enthusiastic and almost never available.
One decision needed her. Two counter designs had been shortlisted, one taller with an angled top that suited the queue layout in larger stores, one square and lower that worked better in the small format. Choosing between them required somebody to decide whether store formats would be treated separately, which had implications for cost, training and merchandising, and it was not the project manager's decision to take.
It waited eleven weeks. The fit-out programme could not wait, so the pilot store was built with both, one of each, installed side by side in the same aisle while the decision was pending. That was a sensible improvisation and it became an embarrassing one, because the pilot was visited by two other directors and the story that travelled was that the project did not know what it was doing.
The decision, when it came, took eleven minutes. The director looked at both, asked two questions about staff training and merchandising space, and chose the lower unit for small formats and the taller for the rest, which is what the project team had recommended in a paper she had not read.
What changed afterwards was a standing monthly slot of forty minutes in her diary with a fixed agenda: decisions required, obstacles needing her, and anything that had changed in the business case. Attendance was not optional and the meeting happened eleven times. No decision after that waited more than five weeks, and most were settled inside two.
Getting the sponsorship you need
Contract the behaviours at the start. A short conversation at initiation covering what you will bring them, how often, what you will decide yourself, and what you need them to do when something is stuck. Sponsors rarely refuse this, because most of them have had projects go wrong through exactly this ambiguity and are relieved to be asked.
Bring them decisions, not updates. A sponsor who receives a status report each month has nothing to do and will fill the meeting with whatever interests them, which is how design by sponsor starts. A sponsor handed two options, a recommendation and a date by which the choice is needed has the job the role was designed for, and will usually do it in minutes.
For a PMP® candidate, the useful reading is that the sponsor holds the business case and the decisions above the project's authority, so a scenario where a project is stuck on an organisational obstacle is asking what the sponsor has been given to act on. A response that escalates without presenting a choice has passed the problem upwards intact. Situations where the sponsor is willing and the project has never asked them for anything specific are a staple of a structured PMP exam preparation course.
Look at the last three things you sent your sponsor and ask what each one required them to do. If the answer to all three is read this, you have a reporting relationship. Converting one of them into a choice with a recommendation and a deadline is usually enough to establish a different pattern.
Interested in going further?
Most project managers inherit their sponsor and few ever negotiate the relationship, which is where the difficulty starts. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through sponsorship as a set of decisions somebody has to be asked for.
The sponsor's role is described in The Standard, published with the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
Ad · Amazon affiliate link.
References
A027: Project Manager, Sponsor, Product Owner and Team: Who Does What?
A021: Project Management Meets Product Management
A028: Project Manager vs Scrum Master vs Product Owner
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
A099: Customer-Centric PMOs: A Better Test of Relevance
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
