Credit: www.stockmonkeys.com
A great post here on traditional Project Sponsors (PS) from the Project Management Institute (PMI): http://blogs.pmi.org/blog/voices_on_project_management/2012/04/what-does-a-project-sponsor-re.html
In my opinion, this is a different role to the Product Owner (PO), which is kind of equivalent to the Project Manager (who is split into two roles, PO and Scrum Master (SM))
Role of the Product Owner
The Product Owner works with all stakeholders and communicates to the team the backlog of highest value items to the business. The role consists of:
- Acting as the "voice of the customer"
- Clear communication, especially good writing skills - writing excellent user stories is a craft.
- Stakeholder management - being able to work with lots of different people who all want different things - sometimes contradictory things - from the system.
- Prioritisation - this is a key skill. Working out precisely what order scope should be delivered in to satisfy most parties sprint-to-sprint - while at the same time not overburdening the team - is often a key challenge.
- Availability. Doesn't always need to be present; but needs to be highly available and responsible to the team to provide answers, direction, guidance.
Role of the Project Sponsor
The role of a Project Sponsor depends on the scale of the agile project. Let me define the scales first.
Traditional: A single team of 7-9 people, plus stakeholders.
Team+: There are two-ish teams in the same program of work, a number of stakeholders and adjacent teams that may or may not be agile. This may be a transitory phase.
Scaled Agile: There are 3 or more teams; working in the same program of work.
A Project Sponsor for a traditional team is the same as outlined by the PMI blog, with slight tweaks for Agile. They create alignment, communicate to senior stakeholders, gain commitment, arrange people and resources, facilitate impediment, support the team, build durability.
When a team arrives at the Team+ scale; a Project Sponsor needs to consider acting as a Uber Product Owner. With more than one team, co-ordinating between Product Owners becomes exponentially more difficult with the more team that are involved. If the scope is complex, they would work more closely with the POs. If the executive stakeholder environment is complex, they may run a scrum-of-scrums and/or steering committee.
At Scaled Agile, a Project Sponsor should definitely run a scrum of scrums, the facilitation of which they can delegate to a Uber Product Owner (i.e. a PO of POs). At this level, a scrum of scrum (scope facing, PO focussed) and steering committee (impediment facing, executive-focussed) as separate entities is inevitable.
There's more to discuss in the changing role of the governance of Agile teams, including lightweight Business Cases, a more responsive and proactive support; and changing the culture at the top - cutting through red tape to reach simplicity, visibility, speed and collaboration. We'll leave that for next week.
What do you think? Got a comment to make? I'd love to hear from you!