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12/03/2015
01/04/2015
Project Sponsorship
Example of me posting an image via mobile phone.
01/03/2015
Role Interaction
Projects are all about people. Nothing happens in projects without people.
In a project, someone is going to want something (let call it “it”) and once a project’s been delivered, someone’s going to use “it” and also someone’s got to deliver “it”, so everything is about people. Without people nothing will happen.
But where do you start with that?
There are three key interrelationships of any project. First off, somebody has got to want this project to happen in the first place: why are we doing it? what’s it for? If it’s a business, what’s the business need? If it’s a “not for profit” organisation, how can we provide more service for the same money? Whatever it happens to be, someone’s got to have the clout to start it and see it through and get it done and that individual is called the project sponsor.
There are other names but at the moment, let’s call that the “project sponsor”.
And at the end of the day, somebody has got to use this “project”, whatever the deliverables are and they are the “user” but you can’t go to the user straight away because who is the user? So who manages the user? Perhaps you want to think about more the “user manager” and if it’s a business, it’ll be the business manager, the operations manager.
I’ll give you some examples of this in a minute.
But if the user manager or the operations manager is busy running his bit of the business, then he won’t have time to deliver a project so you need somebody called the “project manager” who actually delivers the project.
So what is the relationship between these three? Well again, in business speak, the sponsor owns the business ( the why are we doing this?) So he says I want to get a certain benefit from having this project so when the project’s delivered, I get some benefit. So who delivers the benefit? Well it’s the operations people so the relationship between the sponsor and the operations manager, the user manager is this is what I want you to give me after the project’s delivered and after the project’s delivered, this is what I’m giving you. This is the profit I’m going to give you, the benefit I’m going to give you and I will deliver it. So let’s do an example, it’s probably easier that way. You want to reduce the number of fare dodgers on the railways. I want to make sure everyone pays their fares and we get the revenue. That’s the sponsor. So if the business manager is, let’s say the station manager. So the sponsor says to the station manager reduce your fare dodging. Do something to get the fare dodging reduced and the station manager says yeah, great, I’m all for that but I haven’t got time to do it. I’m busy running the railway station. I need someone to do it for me. Oh, well let’s appoint somebody to do that. So he appoints a project manager. Now between the project manager and the user manager, in this case the station manager, we’ve got to reduce fare dodging, here’s a range of options we could do, let’s go for ticket barriers. So we’ll put ticket barriers in. So between them – the project manager and the station manager – work out a requirement which is the station manager’s requirement, and a solution, which probably the project manager comes up with. So the relationship there is requirements from station manager to project manager and solution from project manager to station manager and between the project sponsor and the project manager, the sponsor gives project objectives. I want it done within a certain time and cost whatever it happens to be and in return, the project manager gives the sponsor the confidence it’s going to happen to time and to cost but throughout the whole project, the three individuals or their teams are working closely together to make sure that the whole lot works but each with discrete responsibilities and accountabilities and if you can set that up, it works brilliantly. But remember, of course, it is only a model and you’ve got to make that model… You’ve got to adapt the model to fit your own context.
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