Perspectives · Governance & Accountability

What Project Managers Absorb When Sponsorship Is Undefined

On August 31 I presented a webinar on the sponsor's role in project failure, tied to the release of The PMI® GPM® Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship. More than 800 people attended. Eleven questions reached me in the chat during the session, and I answered them as they came. Reading them together afterward turned out to be more useful than any single answer was.

All eleven came from people who work with sponsors. None came from a sponsor asking how to perform it better. And almost every question was presented as a problem with a person, then resolved into a problem with a structure that had never been set.

The questions came from the audience

The eleven questions covered the right level of sponsor involvement, how to raise the subject with an executive without causing offense, whether a committee can hold the role, what to do when the sponsor and the project owner disagree on money and operations, which management layer belongs in the charter, sponsors who delegate by saying they do not want to be bothered, short-term financial pressure set against long-term commitments, the role of the PMO, how often and in what detail to report, whether the project manager should train the sponsor, and whether a small request carries any real risk.

Eleven different surfaces, one condition underneath them. In each case the person asking already knew what the project needed decided. What they did not have was a defined way for that decision to reach someone with the authority to make it, and a defined moment at which it had to.

The role is assigned before it is defined

Organizations name sponsors. A charter carries a name in a box, and the appointment is treated as complete once the box is filled. What the charter usually leaves out is which decisions belong to that name, at what threshold they are triggered, and by what route they arrive. The guide uses the phrase named, not developed for this condition. The organization defined a title and stopped there.

Two of the eleven questions were about tone. Both asked how to raise the subject with a senior executive without implying that the executive is doing something wrong. That anxiety is direct evidence of the gap. When the role has no written definition, there is nothing available to point at except the individual, so the conversation becomes personal by default. A project manager can ask an executive to confirm decision rights when those rights exist on paper. Without that, the same request lands as a comment on the executive's performance.

The same gap explains the charter question about which management layer should be named. There is no fixed answer by level. The working test is whether the person could terminate the project on their own authority. If the answer is no, the appointment produces a messenger rather than a sponsor, and every decision that matters acquires an additional delay before it reaches anyone who can make it.

Tolerances were the missing mechanism in five of them

Five separate questions described symptoms of one absent mechanism. How involved should a sponsor be. What to do with a sponsor who has too many commitments. How often to report and in how much detail. When to escalate. How to open the conversation at all. In each case the missing element is an agreed boundary: a set of limits inside which the project manager proceeds without the sponsor, and beyond which the sponsor must engage.

Without that boundary, every interaction becomes a judgment call and a negotiation. The project manager guesses whether a given issue is worth the sponsor's attention. The sponsor cannot tell whether being contacted means something serious. Absent sponsors miss the boundary because there is none to miss, and over-involved sponsors reach past it for the same reason. Both behaviors are usually read as personality. They are the predictable output of an undefined threshold.

What gets absorbed

Two questions described the same failure from different angles. One asked what to do when the sponsor and the project owner disagree on both money and operations. The other asked how to handle a sponsor who wants the project to happen without being involved in it. In both cases the decision has no assigned owner, and the work still has to move.

What happens then is quiet and consistent. The project manager makes the call. When two authorities conflict, the project manager chooses which one to follow and keeps delivering. When a sponsor declines to engage, the project manager decides on their behalf and hopes the decision holds. Neither is presented as a governance act. Both are.

That gap between where the decision is made and where the accountability sits is where the failures in the webinar title actually occur. The project did not fail because the schedule slipped. It failed because a continuation decision was made at the delivery level, by someone who could see the delivery position and could not see the justification, the funding conditions, or the commitments made to anyone outside the project.

The correction available to a project manager is narrow and worth using. Conflicts between two authorities go back, in writing, to the level that appointed both of them, because the two cannot renegotiate their own boundaries. A sponsor who wants distance is offered tolerances instead of meetings, which protects their time and establishes the point at which they must decide. Decisions that stay unmade get recorded as pending, with their consequence, so they remain visible at the level that owns them.

Reporting keeps standing in for governance

Three questions touched reporting. One assumed that more frequent and more detailed status would produce a better-informed sponsor. One asked what the PMO can contribute. One described a sponsor requesting duplicate copies of the monthly report. Together they describe an organization compensating for weak decision routing by increasing documentation.

Volume is the wrong measure. The test for sponsor communication is whether it routes decisions. Three things need to reach the sponsor reliably: tolerance breaches at the moment they occur, framed as a decision with options and a deadline; anything that changes the project's justification, including shifted assumptions and eroding benefits; and trade-offs that affect value before they are absorbed into delivery. Everything else can be periodic and light.

One warning sign is easy to check. If reporting volume is rising while the number of decisions actually reaching the sponsor is falling, the communication system has replaced the governance system rather than serving it. The sponsor in that arrangement is well documented and poorly informed, and their relationship to the project runs through paper instead of judgment. That is the passive sponsorship pattern, and it is the one that costs projects.

What the project manager cannot fix

One question asked whether the project manager should train the sponsor, particularly in organizations with no PMO. The answer is no, and the reason is structural. The authority runs the wrong way. An offer to teach an executive their own role fails regardless of how carefully it is worded.

Sponsor development belongs to the organization. Chapter 8 of the guide places it with the PMO alongside governance oversight, benefits tracking, portfolio visibility, decision support, and continuity across sponsor transitions. Organizations train project managers heavily and expect sponsors to acquire the role through experience. Governance accountability is not intuitive, including for capable executives, so that expectation produces variable results at best.

The boundary matters as much as the contribution. The common failure is substitution. Governance weakens, the organization responds with more PMO reporting, visibility improves, and the decisions stay unmade. The PMO enables governance. The sponsor exercises it. What a project manager can do inside a single project is bring the sponsor a working agreement at the start: the decisions taken within tolerance, the decisions that come to the sponsor, how they arrive, and the gates where continuation is genuinely reconsidered. That is a request to confirm decision rights, which executives handle routinely. It teaches through the structure without anyone being instructed.

What nobody asked

No question asked whether a project was worth doing, how a sponsor should test a justification that has changed, or what the sponsor owes after handover when the benefits are supposed to appear. The closest was a question about balancing short-term financial pressure against long-term commitments, and even that was framed as a matter of executive judgment in the moment rather than a criterion inside a gate decision.

That absence is worth naming. Practitioners have learned sponsorship as a delivery support function: the person who unblocks, funds, approves, and attends. The decisions that determine whether the project should exist, and whether it produced the value it was authorized to produce, are the ones least represented in what people asked. Long-term criteria that stay outside the gates get filed rather than weighed, because short-term pressure arrives with a date, a number, and someone waiting, and long-term consequence arrives with none of those. A useful check for any sponsor is whether they can point to a gate decision where a long-term criterion changed the outcome.

Eleven questions is a small sample from all of them and from everyone on the webinar, and the people who asked them were the ones already thinking about the problem. What they described is an accountability structure that gets assigned without being specified, and a workforce filling the specification gap by absorbing decisions that were never delegated to them. Each of those eleven questions names a decision that currently has no owner. For most organizations, that list is a reasonable place to start.

¹ The PMI® GPM® Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship, V1. Project Management Institute and GPM Global. pmi.org/learning/sustainability · gpm.org/sponsor

² Audience questions submitted during "Why Some Projects Fail: The Sponsor's Role," ProjectManagement.com webinar, August 31, 2026.