Reason #4: Sponsor Expectations - Why Your Training Project Is Doomed to Fail… and How You Can Make It a Success Instead

Welcome to what I plan to write as a regular column over the next few months. Shockingly, over 70% of all business projects fail. Fortunately for me, I have a lot of material for this column because there are more than enough reasons why a training project can fail, which means that not only are the odds stacked against you, but the challenges are numerous and sometimes not so apparent. The purpose of this column is to identify these issues and challenges and offer concrete solutions to mitigate the risks associated with each.

Feel free to check out prior posts in the series:

• Reason #1: You are trying to solve something that is not a training problem
• Reason #2: No Metrics
• Reason #3: Your Training Program only Addresses Training Issues

Reason #4: The Project Sponsor’s Expectations

Projects are complicated things. They have lots of moving parts, and those parts are comprised of both things and people. With everything in flux, and not always moving in concert, it’s easy to forget about one of those moving parts.

Broadly speaking, there are three levels to each project, and those involved are on one of the three levels:

• High level:          The project sponsor
• Ground level:     The ones actively working on the project
• Target:                The recipients of the project (i.e. end user)

At any given time, project sponsors are usually involved in numerous projects. While they may not be familiar with all the details of each project, they have an overall sense of where a given project stands and what the ongoing issues are, courtesy of the someone like a project manager, who is more intimately involved with that particular project. In this model, the project manager deals with the issues, reports on their progress, and only escalates to the sponsor as necessary (which is usually rare).

For various reasons, while the project sponsor is usually aware of all the issues happening on the ground level, the team on the ground level is not always aware of the project sponsor’s expectations. The result is that the overarching goals of the project sponsor are unknown to the majority of the people working on the project, nor are they articulated anywhere in any of the project documents. Yet again, we can have a situation where the project meets its written mandate, but fails to reach the objectives that are only known to a select few.

The solution is to this is obvious: stronger methods of two-way communication. There needs to be protocols in place where those delivering the project understand the macro goals from those above and how they transpose onto the minutiae of the project details. If the project sponsor is the COO and has an operational requirement for a training project, then every training professional involved in the project (and even ideally the end user) needs to be aware of it and ensure that this requirement is met at each juncture of the project: from the initial analysis until the evaluation and beyond. It also means those on the ground level need to be more proactive. If they don’t know what the sponsor wants, they need to find out through the project manager. By having stronger two-way communication, it will help ensure that the needs from the top two levels are met.

And what about the project recipients on the third level: the end users? What about their needs and expectations? That’s for the next post.