Chief distraction officer

A good executive sponsor shields your team from distractions.

A bad executive sponsor?

They are a distraction.

Let me tell you a quick story from this winter.

A mid-sized software company hired me to figure out why their projects were not performing.

On paper, they did everything right.

They had qualified and motivated people, a strong culture, engaged executives, and project plans to die for. They ticked all the boxes, and projects usually started strong.

But there was a strange pattern…

Somewhere around the midway point of their typical project, things started to unravel.

Deadlines started slipping, issues popped up left & right, and the team started falling apart.

The result? Late projects that rarely delivered the expected value.

Or worse.

Another one on the list of things that started as the next best thing since sliced bread, but never made it to the finish line.

Strange…

As I started digging, it became clear that this usually happened after a few months, when the first internal demos had been done.

The project manager would show the first prototype to their sponsor, who would enthusiastically drag them into the management team meeting and share it with her peers.

They’d do a demo for the other executives, get some rapid-fire feedback, and go back to work.

Or so it seemed…

Within days after such a demo, other executives started showing up with requests. Most of them were small and harmless, but you know as well as I do that small changes add up.

So what happened?

The project manager felt the pressure and started trying to please everyone.

Maybe not consciously, but it’s a slippery slope.

In most projects, this is where a sponsor would slam on the brakes. Because a good executive sponsor shields a project team from such distractions.

But in this case, the executive who sponsored most projects was relatively new in her role.

So instead of trying to shield the team, defend the scope, and play her part in stakeholder management, she would urge the project manager to find a way to keep everyone happy.

Now that is a big, red flag.

The hard part in this situation was that no one was trying to mess things up on purpose. Everyone was just trying to do the best job possible.

But both the project manager and the sponsor were avoiding the hard conversion.

The line in the sand.

The firm yet polite no.

So this company thought they had a project management issue. One that they could solve with a better checklist, a stricter process, or the latest AI-powered tool.

While in fact, they had two problems. And neither one is solved by switching from ClickUp to Asana (a real suggestion).

The first issue is one of role definition and expectations. To solve this, we did a workshop with the entire management team about the role of the sponsor, and the implications of “a few small questions” on a project manager.

The second issue is the hardest one, and one that I bet you can relate to.

Managing up.

Stakeholder management is hard enough. But what if it’s your direct manager or the founder of the company who is putting in informal change requests?

That’s a hard one to say no to.

But it’s crucial if you want to deliver your project on time.

And guess who the first ones are to point out that your project is late? Yup, the same people.

Funny how that works.

So the second solution to this problem is a structured approach to stakeholder management. One one of identifying, categorizing, and managing each stakeholder group according to their agenda and influence.

Because every project has a few key stakeholders that can make or break your project with a text message sent from the toilet.

Ignoring them will backfire.

You need to know you take them along in your project and manage them from day 1 like your career depends on it.

Because it does.

The material I used to train the project managers in this company on stakeholder management is part of my course, Project Management Unraveled.

It shows you step by step how you identify and analyze your stakeholders, make a stakeholder map, understand their needs, and make a watertight communication plan that takes them along in your story.

Sounds good?

Sign up for the waitlist here and you’ll be the first one to hear about the new release next month, and you’ll secure some extra bonuses.

Talk soon,
Jasper