How Secure Is Your Project Budget?
- Are you concerned that your project might not receive the next phase of funding?
- Does your project sponsor have less time to talk about your budget?
- Is leadership funding priorities starting to shift to other projects?
- Do you have to justify project costs at every leadership meeting?
- Are you getting pressure to reduce your overall project budget?
Project management can be challenging when you have to fight to keep your project budget. Project funding is the lifeblood of a project. Without continuous funding, projects either stop immediately or slowly lose necessary resources over time to continue. Sometimes projects should stop or hold because they are no longer relevant to the business climate. Unfortunately, many projects lose funding not because of relevancy, but “sponsorship atrophy”.
Keeping Sponsors Motivated
Sponsorship atrophy is when project leaders and sponsors lose interest in a project. Leaders are often faced with changing and sometimes conflicting priorities throughout a budget cycle. Projects that are critical path today can be back-burner tomorrow.
Keeping Sponsors Engaged
So, how do you keep project sponsors engaged? Here a few tips the top consulting firms use to keep budget funds flowing in your direction.
1. Reinforce the Business Case – Most project managers make the mistake of creating a business case in the first phase of the project and never revisiting it with leadership. Often the reason for this is that the ROI and NPV values of a project don’t fluctuate all that often so it’s hard to revisit previous topics with a busy leader if there’s nothing new to report. Rather than revisit the business case, the opportunity is to reinforce it. The best way to reinforce the business case among leadership to maintain momentum is to create memorable and emotionally motivating stories, videos, current state case studies or issue summaries from customers, employees or partners. These types of communication devices reinforce the business case and often reinvigorate a sponsor to continue the project.
2. Cancel the Status Meeting – While it may seem like a good idea to continue providing regularly scheduled status updates to sponsors, if you’re dealing with sponsorship atrophy it could actually backfire. Try providing written updates and saving the meetings for key decisions where the sponsor’s input is needed. This way you’re always demonstrating progress at every meeting while at the same time respecting your sponsor’s time.
3. Focus on Quick Win Milestones – Reaching a milestone creates energy and enthusiasm. When you’re winning, you want to keep winning. Show the big picture, but focus on how the team is achieving quick wins.
How Can Darby Help?
Darby Consulting is a boutique firm specializing in project consulting. We help project managers and executives improve their effectiveness in planning and delivering successful projects by accelerating the time required to start-up, plan and execute a project.
The way we differ from other consulting options is our project consultants have on average 10 years of project management experience along with a master’s degree or equivalent certification. We’ve provided project consulting services to several leading Fortune 100 companies including BP, Chevron, Baylor Healthcare System and Hewlett Packard. We’ve also developed over 50 project management tools and templates our clients continue to use every day to deliver projects on-time, on-budget and within original scope.
Our specializations:
- Strategy + Planning
- Scope Management
- Stakeholder + Change Management
- Cost Control
- Schedule Management
- Contracting + Procurement
- Risk Management
- Communications Management
Contact us today to learn more.
