A huge amount has been written about the role of project managers in, uh, project management – makes sense, right? A lot less has been written about the vitally important role of the project sponsor. That’s a trifle odd, seeing as in theory they are the most important person in the project – they are who the project manager and the whole team are delivering the project for. Without the sponsor, there is no project.
Sometimes it feels like it would be nice if someone explained that to the sponsor.
Look, the project sponsor job is not easy. Quite the opposite. While they are the person the project manager works for, they are also the person that owns the responsibility for the project for the organisation – to be blunt, it is their neck on the block. They have to be clear about what the project is delivering, and how it fits into the organisational strategy. That also means they need to be fully clear on the organisation’s strategy, so that as it changes they can course-correct the project. They also need to clear barriers beyond the project manager’s reach, and help to deliver success.
Even harder, they have to push back on the organisation. There will be other projects and sponsors, and they need to ensure those competing priorities and resource pressures don’t damage the project. They also need to make sure that the stakeholders understand what the project is delivering, and push back on changes that haven’t been agreed, and risk damaging the project’s success.
If you have a sponsor that can do all that with ease, congratulations. Also, can I come and work there?
For the rest of us, there are four major ways that sponsors fail at what they do, and become a problem, rather than a support.
The Problem Sponsors
The Figurehead is the most common. This is the senior person who agreed to sponsor the project because it fell within their directorate, because nobody else was available, or because saying yes seemed easier than saying no. They understand themselves to be lending their name and seniority to the project — attending the steering group, receiving the highlight report, being visible at the launch event. They do not understand themselves to be accountable for outcomes, because nobody has ever clearly told them that they are. When the project goes wrong, they are genuinely surprised to find that the failure is considered to be partly theirs.
The Abdicator knows perfectly well that they are the accountable person, and has made a quiet, unofficial decision to delegate that accountability entirely to the project manager. This is sometimes dressed up as trust — “I’ve got a great PM, I don’t need to be involved in the detail” — but it usually means that when decisions need to be made, the PM has to chase them, when escalations are raised, they go unanswered, and when something goes wrong, the sponsor’s absence from the process becomes very visible very quickly. The Abdicator often genuinely believes they are being a good sponsor by staying out of the way. They are not.
The Intermittent is engaged in bursts. They are across the project in week one, enthusiastic and full of good questions, and then something else absorbs their attention and they are effectively absent for six weeks. Then there is a crisis, or a governance milestone, and they reappear — but they have missed the context that has accumulated in their absence, so their engagement is partially informed at best. They make decisions based on an outdated picture, ask questions that were resolved weeks ago, and then disappear again. The project team learns not to rely on them, which means they stop being told things, which means the next time they engage they are even further behind.
The Delegator maintains all the appearances of an engaged sponsor while ensuring that none of the actual sponsorship happens. They remain named on the project documentation, they appear at the right meetings in the project initiation phase, and then they send someone from their team — a deputy, a business manager — to every subsequent meeting on their behalf. The proxy is usually capable and well-meaning. They are also unable to make any of the decisions that the sponsor role exists to make, because the authority was never transferred along with the meeting invite. So the steering group convenes, the project manager raises the things that need a decision, and the proxy takes an action to go away and check with the sponsor. The answer arrives three days later, usually by email, often incomplete, occasionally contradicting something that was agreed in a previous meeting that the sponsor also didn’t attend. The project manager is left chasing decisions through an intermediary who is doing their best but is structurally incapable of helping. The sponsor, meanwhile, has technically fulfilled their governance obligations. They were represented. This is not the same thing as being present, and everyone in the room knows it.
None of these are bad people. They are almost all very busy people with many competing demands, operating in organisations that do not give them a clear account of what the sponsor role actually requires. The accountability is structural, not personal. But the consequences are real regardless.
What actually goes wrong
A disengaged sponsor creates a specific pattern of project failure that is recognisable once you’ve seen it a few times.
Decisions don’t get made. The project manager identifies something that needs a call — a scope question, a resource trade-off, a change to the approach — and escalates it. It sits. The sponsor is unavailable, or doesn’t respond, or responds with a request for more information and then goes quiet again. The project team, faced with a decision that isn’t being made, does one of two things: they wait, which creates delay, or they make the call themselves, which they may not have the authority to do and which stores up a problem for later. Either way, the absence of the sponsor from the decision is felt downstream.
Problems get hidden. A project team that has learned that escalations go nowhere, and that the sponsor’s engagement is unpredictable, gradually stops escalating. They manage around the gaps. They develop workarounds for the decisions that haven’t been made. They absorb risks that should have been owned at a higher level. The highlight reports stay optimistic, because there is no functioning channel for honesty, and because the team has stopped expecting that honesty will produce a useful response. The sponsor, seeing green reports, concludes the project is fine. The project is not fine.
The steering group becomes theatre. Without an engaged sponsor, governance meetings lose their function. Decisions aren’t made in them because the person with the authority to make decisions isn’t really present — physically present, perhaps, but not engaged with the material in a way that enables real decisions. The meeting becomes a reporting exercise. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it.
What the project manager can actually do
This is the awkward part, because the project manager is almost always more junior than the sponsor and is rarely in a position to directly challenge them.
There are a few things that help, and they all need to happen early — before the pattern is established, before the project is in trouble, before the conversation carries the weight of a failing project.
The most important is to make the role explicit at the start. This sounds obvious, but it frequently doesn’t happen. The project initiation process should include a direct conversation with the sponsor about what the role requires: specifically, the time commitment, the kinds of decisions they will be asked to make, the escalation path, and the expectation that they will be available for it. Not a general conversation about how important sponsor engagement is, but a specific one — how much time a month, what does available actually mean, how quickly do escalations need a response. Getting this on paper, in the project brief or a simple role description, gives you something to refer back to later.
The second thing is to make it easy for the sponsor to be a good sponsor. If they’re a busy person — and they are — then every interaction with the project should be as efficient as possible. That means highlight reports that are genuinely brief and genuinely honest, not eight pages of RAG statuses. It means escalations that are framed as clear decisions, not sprawling context documents. It means being explicit about what you need from them and when, rather than sending them information and hoping they’ll do something useful with it.
The third thing — and this requires some nerve — is to name it when it isn’t working. Not aggressively, but directly. “I want to flag that we have three decisions that have been waiting for a response for three weeks and it’s starting to affect the timeline” is an uncomfortable thing to say to someone senior. It is considerably more comfortable than the alternative, which is saying nothing until the project is in serious trouble and the sponsor is asking why nobody told them.
The organisational problem underneath this
Individual project managers can manage a difficult sponsor to some degree. They cannot fix the structural problem, which is that most organisations appoint sponsors without explaining what the role involves, without giving them the training to do it, and without holding them accountable when they don’t do it.
Sponsor accountability sits in a strange gap. The project manager is accountable for delivery but doesn’t have the authority to hold the sponsor to account. The organisation — whoever sits above the sponsor — often doesn’t have good visibility of how the sponsorship is functioning until something goes wrong. By then, it’s usually too late for accountability to be useful.
Organisations that run projects well tend to have a few things in common on this front: they have a clear, written description of what the sponsor role requires, they brief sponsors against it at the start of every project, and they have someone — a PMO, a programme director, a senior responsible owner — with enough standing and enough visibility to have the difficult conversation when a sponsor is absent. Not every organisation has that. In those that don’t, the project manager is largely on their own, doing their best to compensate for a structural gap that is not of their making.
That is a difficult position to be in. The least useful response to it is to pretend the gap isn’t there.
Project reviews and turnaround engagements through Dull Industries frequently surface sponsor engagement as a contributing factor in project difficulty. If your projects are struggling to get decisions made, it’s worth asking where accountability actually sits. Get in touch.
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.