Use Sponsors and Steering Commitees More Effectively

Thanks to Booz's S+B for this summary of recent research in the INSEAD paper, Supervising Projects You Don’t Understand — Do Your Major Projects Receive the Leadership They Need?. It provides a very useful framework for the challenges and how to address them that arise from serving as a sponsor of or providing guidance for large programs and projects.  Authors Christoph Loch, Magnus Mahring, Svenja Sommer provide insights from their research on what makes a sponsor or steering committee (SC) successful. We address these types of issues in our Stanford Advanced Project Management Program (SAPM) courses, such as, Executing Complex Programs and Leading Change from the Middle, and welcome research supporting what we find in practice.  Below is an example of findings from the paper provided by S+B.

1. Steering committee (SC) composition and self-management. SCs should include important stakeholders, create their own governance systems, and work as a team.

2. Goal agreement. Team members should clarify and agree on the project’s objectives, producing workable compromises. Although vague goals are easy to agree upon in the beginning, they often merely postpone unpleasant confrontations and create future pitfalls, the interviews showed. To avoid problems down the road, SCs should begin their work by producing a detailed scoping document, with the help of subject matter experts, stating the business goals and translating them into operational aims.

3. Relationship with the project team. SC members should decide how to evaluate and motivate those charged with executing the project. To keep project teams motivated, SCs should find a middle ground between micromanaging and dodging the tough calls.

4. Supervision and control. This area involves keeping the project team on track within the context of the company’s goals. SCs should question assumptions throughout the project, the authors write, and insist on translating technical jargon into business language whenever possible (in other words, can the marketing department sell what the technical department is inventing?).

5. Managing surprises and changes. Modify the project’s direction when objectives or opportunities shift — and they always will. When large modifications are needed, small-scale experimentation, paradoxically, often leads to breakthroughs. And when surprises occur, the best response is to get insight into why. Rather than focus on final results, SCs should make use of “intermediate insight milestones” to keep plans flexible and moving forward.