Project – A Sponsor’s Survival Guide

Duration
A sponsors survival guide for Projects is available in a variety of formats to suit organisational maturity and commitment.

• Lightning introduction and awareness session 2hrs.
• Standard awareness session ½ day.
• Awareness and introduction to tools 1 day.
• Awareness and application of tools and techniques 2 days.

Course Benefits
Know the Critical Success Factors that improve business outcomes enabled by projects.
Sponsors understand what is expected of them and their role in project success (and in project failures) and onwards into successful return-on-investment (or not).
Project sponsors and project managers share a common view of the project landscape and the responsibilities of each role.

Who Should Attend
Management staff interfacing with projects as either project owner, project sponsor, resource owner or impacted stakeholder.
Programme office staff with responsibility for supporting senior managers with visibility into projects and/ or for supporting project managers plan, execute and deliver project results.

Audit staff and all staff members with oversight & reporting responsibilities (eg is a Sarbanes Oxley capacity).

Content

• Projects start and end with the business case.
• After the project comes benefits realisation.
• Ask yourself & your project manager the right questions at the right time.
• How to critique a business case, an estimate, a risk, a progress report, a quality review, etc.
• Control a project with the minimum necessary level of involvement, Tolerance, Stages, Lifecycles and gates.
• Assess project status data and audit outputs.
• Select projects to authorise and cancelling projects when appropriate.

Workshops
The course uses a variety of exercises and workshop sessions depending on the format selected. In general: tools and techniques are introduced and practised via multiple exercises. Concepts and application is clarified through application to a case-study.