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Come on you Senior Managers. Play your Project Roles Effectively
April 9, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: People Issues, Project Stakeholder Management
Come on you Senior Managers. Play your Project Roles Effectively
By Ron Rosenhead
Running training events is often a dumping ground for people’s frustrations. I guess we have all done it thinking this guru will help us solve all our problems. However, some of our problems are deeply ingrained and take a lot of shifting.
One such problem is the role that senior manager’s play or should play in projects. The terminology does get in the way however we believe that all projects need a sponsor someone who gives executive support to the project manager and project. This is a person who among other things:
- Commissions (asks, tells, informs discusses) others to undertake the project
- Briefs the project manager about the project, its history and any ‘political issues’ surrounding it
- Agrees the level of accountability and responsibility the project manager will have
- Signs off the business case and other project management documents
- Actively reviews the project with the project manager at agreed dates ensuring it is ‘on track’
We have surveyed over a 1000 people who have been on our project management events and the report makes poor reading. When asked whether roles, responsibilities, and levels of authority are always clear in projects we received the following results:
| Strongly agree: | 2.8% | 32 people |
| Agree | 34.3% | 394 people |
| Disagree | 51.0% | 586 people |
| Strongly disagree | 9.7% | 111 people |
| Don’t know | 2.3% | 23 people |
People feed back to us that the role of the sponsor is often missing. In one organisation sponsors earned the unenviable title of sleeping sponsors. Sponsorship is an active process and one of the keys to project success. Without active participation in projects senior managers are contributing to poor project performance e.g.:
- giving a project an impossible delivery date without approving extra resources
- not giving the project manager the authority to carry out the project having to gothrough various decision making processes to get approval for spending small sums of money
- not approving project changes in a timely way delaying progress
Sponsors need to be trained and developed to ensure that the sponsor role is carried out effectively. They got to a senior management role through their expertise and training and when they take on a senior role project sponsorship comes along with it. It is not a criticism of senior managers more a plea for them to take their sponsorship role seriously, including attending formal training events.
If you are senior manager then you need to be aware of what your role entails, what decisions you and the project manager should be making. You should be agreeing the level of control that is appropriate for each project and ensuring there is a system in place for managing project changes, capturing project risks and identifying and managing stakeholders. These are a few of the key things that are needed.
But senior managers beware! Project managers are starting to bite back! They are using risk management as a tool to explain that the project is in danger. They are quite clear they are not hiding from delivering their project but to deliver they need the active involvement of senior managers.
They are identifying on the risk log the lack of involvement by their sponsor. When project problems occur, the project manager directs the sponsor to the risk log - a copy having been received by the sponsor!
Now it takes a brave project manager to do this but it has had some positive impact with senior managers beginning to realise that if the project is to be delivered they had better be more involved.
As one of our clients suggested, a good project manager often has to put their head above the parapet. Come on you senior managers; reduce project risk by getting more involved.
About Ron Rosenhead (In his own words)
I first became involved in project management quite accidentally! While working in a large organisation which was going through huge change I realised that these changes would only be successful if people delivered projects effectively. But, no one had received any training in this area!
I ran a series of workshops and saw that this was an important area - working to help organisations deliver projects on time and to budget.
I have personally trained many thousands of people to deliver projects effectively. In addition, I have spoken at conferences, coached individuals and worked with project teams. After encouragement from a couple of grateful workshop participants I wrote Deliver That Project - a practical guide to delivering projects.
Alongside this my big project is to make my company Project Agency even more successful. We work with a wide range of clients providing them with project management training alongside developing in-house project management systems to ensure a uniform approach to project delivery.
Related Articles
- Delegation - 8 Tips To Help You Hand Off Projects And Tasks Effectively
- Successfully Interviewing Your Project Customer and Gathering Project Requirements - Part XIV - Guidelines To Communicate Recommendations Effectively
- Skill Building Exercise for Project Managers
- The 7 Habits of Brilliant Project Managers
- Project Managers vs. Executives - Part 3
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