To the project managers out there: do you know who your project sponsor in your organisation is? To those not calling yourselves project managers: in your activities, is there anybody who makes sure that what you makes the company go forward. To those of you leading organisations (be it companies, your own startup, volunteer organisations, etc.), how do you make sure all projects are taking you forward.
If your organisation has a decent size, there’s two scenarios. Either it’s a patchwork of projects that you hope people are driving in the right direction, or you actually have started your journey into having project sponsors for each of the projects.
What’s a project sponsor, you might be thinking? It’s the person (generally in the board of the organisation, or at some more strategy-oriented position) who’s ultimately responsible for the project’s business objectives, and the person who should make sure the project is aligned with the corporate strategy.
IPMA Young Crew Management Board follows this model (as many, if not most, project-oriented organisations do), and IPMA Young Crew Finland is planning on following it as well to make sure they can sustain growth. That’s why yesterday I had a presentation over there, talking about these topics. Do you want to learn more? Check out the verbose version (with more text, so that you can follow) below!
A very relevant question that was brought forward was the link to external communication. How do people find out about those groups? Where is the strategy presented, what type of information sharing is that? The presentation above only focuses on internal project communication. For external communication and public relations, there should be indeed a team taking care of it! It seems that we’ll be discussing that soon, so stay tuned!
A relevant question on this is what does it mean to go forward, or rather what is success. And we’ll visit that one some other time. Don’t worry, well visit that some other time!