Having spent many years working in IT, I have been used to testing being continually squeezed as milestones have slipped towards an immovable end date. However, my experience in a number of projects recently, where timelines have been tight from the word go, is that the first activity to suffer under the Project Manager’s editor’s cut is Stakeholder Engagement.
This year’s Best Practice Showcase took place at the QE11 Exhibition Centre and I had the pleasure of facilitating a round table discussion on Project Sponsorship, entitled ‘Project Sponsors – Too Cool for School’. It became obvious that the competency of sponsors is a real issue across all industry sectors. I was joined by individuals from a range of charities, public and private organisations who were all actively trying to address poor sponsorship.