Perspectives · Project Governance
M.O.R.E. Needs a STEWARD
PMI's call to action set a broader standard for project success. Responsible sponsorship is how an organization meets it.
In 2025, PMI ran its largest research effort to date — more than ten thousand project professionals and over a hundred and fifty in-depth interviews — and used it to move the definition of project success. The report draws a line between project management success, which is execution against scope, budget, and schedule, and project success, which is value that holds and is recognized by the people the project serves. M.O.R.E. is PMI's call to action for closing the distance between the two.
M.O.R.E. is four behaviors. Manage perceptions, because a project is judged successful only when the stakeholders who matter see its outputs as worth the investment. Own success, because accountability runs past the literal mandate to the tangible and perceived value the project produces, with as little waste as possible. Relentlessly reassess, because change is constant and the perception of value has to be rechecked and the plan adjusted as conditions move. Expand perspective, because every project sits inside a larger set of enterprise goals and impacts, up to and including the wider world. As PMI frames it, M.O.R.E. is not about doing more work; it is about doing work that delivers more success.
What M.O.R.E. asks, and who can deliver it
Read as a call to project professionals, M.O.R.E. asks a great deal, and most of what it asks cannot be delivered by the project manager alone. Managing the perception of value depends on a mandate that defined value clearly in the first place. Owning success beyond the literal requirements depends on someone having set what success means past the deliverables. Reassessing and adjusting depends on a governance structure that allows a project to change course. Expanding perspective to the enterprise and beyond depends on decisions about scope, trade-offs, and impact that sit above the delivery team. Each of these has an owner, and that owner is the sponsor.
STEWARD names the accountability
The PMI-GPM Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship names that owner's accountability with a construct of its own: STEWARD. A sponsor is accountable for sponsoring the mandate, setting tolerances and decision rights, enabling delivery, weighing trade-offs explicitly, acting as the escalation point, realizing and protecting value, and disciplining the governance system. Placed next to M.O.R.E., STEWARD reads as the other half of the same argument. M.O.R.E. describes the success the profession is now accountable for. STEWARD describes the governance that lets that success happen.
Where they line up
The two frameworks line up decision by decision. Managing perceptions is a downstream behavior that only works when the mandate upstream said what value the project exists to create, and for whom. That is the sponsor sponsoring the mandate and, later, realizing and protecting the value it promised. When a sponsor leaves value undefined, the delivery team is left managing perceptions of a target no one set.
Owning success beyond the deliverables is the behavior M.O.R.E. asks of professionals and the accountability STEWARD places on sponsors. A delivery team can own its part of the outcome. Whether the project as a whole remains worth doing is a sponsor's call, made by weighing trade-offs explicitly and keeping the project justified as it runs. Owning success at the level M.O.R.E. describes needs a sponsor who has not delegated that judgment away.
Relentless reassessment is the behavior most dependent on governance. A team can flag that conditions have changed. Acting on it — reauthorizing, adjusting the mandate, or stopping — requires the decision rights and tolerances that only the sponsor sets, and an escalation point that actually responds. Reassessment without governance produces reports that note the change and plans that never move. Setting tolerances and acting as the escalation point is what turns reassessment into a decision.
Expanding perspective is where the two reach furthest. PMI's fourth behavior asks professionals to see the project inside the enterprise and the wider world. Governing that view — the environmental, social, and economic impacts a project carries for years — is the sponsor weighing trade-offs and realizing value over the long term. This is the ground the sponsorship guide develops in detail, connecting the P5 sustainability standard to the sponsor's decisions, so the expanded perspective M.O.R.E. calls for is carried in the mandate and tested at the same gates as cost and schedule.
Two readers, one model
M.O.R.E. and STEWARD are written for different readers. M.O.R.E. speaks to the profession about what success now means and the behaviors it requires. STEWARD speaks to sponsors about the accountability that makes those behaviors possible. Read on its own, M.O.R.E. can land as a set of expectations the project manager is left to meet without the authority to meet them. Read with STEWARD, it becomes a shared model: the profession commits to a broader definition of success, and the people who authorize and govern projects are given a defined role in producing it.
The 2025 call to action set the standard. Responsible sponsorship is how an organization meets it.
The PMI-GPM Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship is available now. Download it from GPM at gpm.org/sponsor or from PMI at pmi.org/standards.
