Relationship to Project Customers

Projects impact businesses, both inside and outside of the sponsoring organization. Whether we are talking about end users within a business or dollar paying customers outside of the sponsoring organization, how a sponsor is perceived and what control a sponsor has over that group is pivotal. An assessment should be made of the effectiveness of the relationship your sponsor has with end users within the company. If the customer for your project deliverables consists of stakeholders outside of your company – real dollar paying customers – than the ideal sponsor will have responsibility for the product marketing or customer relationship. Give your sponsor an “A” is they have a good relationship with end users and control the customer marketing plan for your organization. For each level of management or number of managers your sponsor has to gain acceptance from to implement a project initiative, drop one letter grade. If the sponsor does not understand the impact your project will have on end users or customers, grade your sponsor a “D” or “F”.

Time Dedicated to Project Sponsorship

Good grades on all of the preceding topic areas are great, but become useless if the sponsor doesn’t allocate any time to support you with REAL sponsorship other than holding the title. Give your sponsor an “A’ if they request regular status meetings or if they willingly open their calendar for status meetings upon your request. The sponsor gets a “B’ if they delegate to a capable person, who is then empowered to help on a regular basis and/or if they describe the situations in detail in which they want to be involved. The sponsor gets a “C” if they ask to be updated via email and only want a visit “if there is an issue.” “D” is the appropriate grade if they delegate without empowering their replacement and the sponsor gets an “F” if they are unresponsive to your requests for time and/or decision making.

What GPA is acceptable?

As project managers, we’d all love to have our sponsors get “Straight A’s” – however that rarely happens. Also, knowing how your sponsor will actually perform during the course of a project can sometimes be a bit like reading a crystal ball.” However, preliminary conversations with a sponsor during project initiation are usually very telling. Between that conversation and doing your homework on how this person has performed in the past as a sponsor, the diligent project manager can usually complete this report card with a fair degree of accuracy.

So what is “good enough”? Using this quick grading system, an overall GPA of “3.0-B” or better usually will be workable for a good project manager. However, please note that your sponsor should not be assigned a GPA higher than what is assigned to the “Time Dedicated to Project Sponsorship” area. As stated earlier, all the good traits and positioning within the organization become useless if the sponsor won’t spend time as a sponsor.

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