Can a good supplier be truly effective without a good customer? This is a key question for the chief information officer (CIO).

Historically, IT has been viewed as a supplier to the business. And many of the failures in IT projects have been attributed to a lack of professionalism and maturity in managing the technology.

Partly in response to such an image, the new Professionalism in IT agenda has been launched and is being promoted by a number of organisations, including the BCS, Intellect and NCC/Impact.

Building on such work, the Change Leadership Network requested research into the factors that drive successful IT-enabled change. We looked at the history of successful and unsuccessful IT-enabled business change, reviewing with focus groups of experienced practitioners to help develop new insights.

Many of these insights related to the role of a sponsor who has the overall view covering both the supplier and the customer of change. We use the term business sponsor to denote the lead individual accountable for the delivery of the agreed business outcomes.

Why is the sponsor role so challenging relative to project and programme managers. Partly it is a question of maturity.

Many project managers have several initiatives to their credit, where they have been able to navigate and balance scope, time and cost in a well-bounded business area with proven technology.

Experienced programme managers are more scarce, although many now understand and can handle the complexity of managing interdependent projects. Yet relatively few sponsors have taken on multiple initiatives and seen the full consequences of their decisions.

A key finding from evaluating large IT projects is that reported failures are often not so much a consequence of the technology as they are associated with any large-scale business change. So much rests on the shoulders of the sponsor of the change.

We categorised the scope into the dual roles of stewardship and leadership. Stewardship ensures that the business case is sound and that funds and resources are available and used appropriately. Leadership is about creating a persuasive, compelling vision delivered through engaging with stakeholders.

What advice is available for new sponsors? Useful guidance exists from the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), which recommends a change programme whereby a senior responsible officer should be appointed to take a sponsoring role directing both the programme manager and the business change manager. These roles should be clearly defined within an overall structure.

Stewardship and leadership

Generally, most of the advice on IT-enabled change tends to stress the necessary foundation of a methodological approach. Little guidance is available on the behavioural aspects that are vital in a context of complexity and uncertainty.

The more complex the change, the more critical the sponsor’s role. And the skills required of a sponsor are often not well understood by the organisation, nor by the holder of the role.

We concluded that the biggest challenge for the sponsor is balancing stewardship and leadership in the different phases of an IT-enabled business change initiative. Such phases move from innovation opportunity, through to solution implementation and then on to benefits realisation. There may also be multiple iterations of such phases in a large programme.

The scope of change is much less defined at the front-end of an initiative than it is by the time it has been crafted as a project. Here, there is more focus on innovation than management. In the fuzzy front-end period there is a great deal of ambiguity, with diverse aims from multiple stakeholders in different parts of the business.

Reconciling these perspectives into a clear scope and mandate for a programme that is agreed with the sponsoring group is a leadership challenge, even for the most skilled of sponsors. We see a need for passion, decisiveness and the political ability to form alliances that engage the support of the chief executive (CEO).

Sponsors must also be clear on their stewardship accountabilities, particularly for identifying and delivering the benefits. This is the phase – innovation opportunity – to generate a range of options aligned to the business strategy, and the sponsor must evaluate the benefit/risk scenarios.

The focus group recommended that a new sponsor should always seek a mentor or programme coach to help navigate the inevitable twists and turns that come from deep analysis and stakeholder engagement. A big issue for sponsors is clearing their diaries to make time for the role.

In the next phase – solution implementation – there are many stewardship responsibilities. The sponsor should ensure that implementer resources are dedicated as much to business change as to the IT solution. The focus group felt very strongly that you can never communicate enough, although correspondence needs to be targeted to the right range of stakeholders, suppliers and customers.

Be alive to the dangers

It is also important to avoid complacency – it is when things are going well that sponsors should concentrate much of their energy on potential risks. The sponsor needs to stay alert to pertinent changes in the environment and to signals that the programme is at risk.

One way of reducing risk is to simplify, at least as much as is possible, and then the challenge is to cope with the resulting complexity. As a corollary when things are not going well, that is the time to be bold.

On the leadership side, the sponsor supported by the business change manager needs to ensure that the business users are ready to receive the change. This is as much about motivation as it is about competency. Without focus, the organisation will not reap the benefits and the programme will be deemed a failure, even with the most professional IT solution.

In the final phase – benefits realisation – the political skills of the sponsor (and we use this term in a positive sense) come very much into play in the definition of success.

Success has many forms, with personal as well as organisational ambitions changing over time. It is an important leadership role to celebrate success and recognise that on a tough and long journey, it may need to happen more than once.

Being able to articulate and drive through the financial and strategic benefits is a key stewardship skill required by a sponsor. The last task of the sponsor is to ensure a smooth closure, with confirmation of benefits delivered and lessons learned.

The bottom line for the CIO and the CEO is to evaluate the importance and the difficulty of IT-enabled change.

Many have recognised the need to appoint a programme manager who understands both IT and business change aspects. Yet few organisations apply the same commitment to ensure a skilled and motivated business sponsor supports the company.

Where there are gaps in skills, it is essential to be open and help the sponsor in a practical way. cb

The role of the sponsor was explored during research into IT-enabled business change by Tim O’Leary and Sharm Manwani, with the sponsorship and active support of the Change Leadership Network and Serco Ltd.

Dr Sharm Manwani has an executive background as a CIO and coach to sponsors and programme managers in major organisations, such as Electrolux and Diageo. He is now an associate professor researching and lecturing in IT-enabled business change at Henley Management College.

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