Let me be clear from the start. In becoming a project sponsor, you accept full accountability for the project. You understand how it links to the organisation’s vision, you give it your wholehearted support and you commit to seeing it through to the end, with the realisation of the benefits that justified the project in the first place.

Or, as Professor Peter Shergold stated in his review of how the Australian Public Service continues to get projects so badly wrong, ‘Having a single point of accountability is a cornerstone of project management …’

The project starts with the appointment of the sponsor and ends with the sponsor’s ensuring that the benefits of the project are realised. You’re in it for the long haul, through thick and thin, light and dark, good times and bad … You get the picture.

It may seem like an obvious statement to make in a book on project sponsorship, yet time and again senior managers fail to fully grasp that if the project sinks, they go down with it. In a 2016 PMI report, only 27 per cent of organisations specify executive accountability for project success. Put simply, senior managers aren’t stepping up and doing their bit for their projects.

Endless reviews into project failures around the world say the same thing. For example, a 2012 Victorian Ombudsman investigation into ICT-enabled projects (all of which had failed, I hasten to add), reported, ‘Too often there was muted acceptance that all ICT-enabled projects go wrong; responsibilities were so diffused that it was difficult to identify who was accountable; or there was a tendency to blame those previously involved’.

We saw this play out five years later, when the aforementioned online Census submissions project was hacked by a foreign country. Here a complex project led from the very highest levels of government ignored 15 years of lessons learned (including the Victorian Ombudsman’s report) and failed embarrassingly.

In the US, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is responsible for a $45 billion housing program each year. In a 2016 report to Congress on its $35 million financial systems implementation disaster, the Government Accountability Office pulled no punches over who was at fault (‘The failure of the project was due to management weaknesses’) and outlined where the sponsor could have taken corrective action and demonstrate strong accountability.

Accountability is one of those words we hear a lot in our organisations, yet people rarely stop to think about what it actually means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘the fact or condition of being accountable; responsibility’, which frankly isn’t helpful at all and only adds to the confusion. The Japanese use the expression setsumei sekinin, the literal meaning of which is ‘duty to explain’. I like this better.

When you are accountable for a project, it is your duty to explain the progress of the project to anyone at any time. Most sponsors see this as a project manager’s job, when in reality it’s a shared responsibility. It is the project manager’s job to plan, lead and motivate a team of committed people to deliver the products required to achieve the benefits as described in the business case. A business case that you, as the sponsor, own. It’s your job to make sure all of that happens — in the right way and at the right time, in line with corporate policy.

If it’s starting to sound like hard work, then that’s good, because it is. Nothing great was ever easy.

As a project and program manager myself, I thought the transition to the role of project sponsor would be easy. After all, I was the guy who made sure my sponsor knew what their role was and what was required of them. I fed them the right information at the right time and kept them informed of the things that could potentially go wrong. How hard could it be to make a bunch of decisions on some projects?

The difference was that as a project manager I had a maximum of three projects to manage and —personalities and product-building issues aside — keeping track of them all was relatively straightforward. I mostly knew what was happening and when, and I knew if I needed help I had a willing sponsor on hand.

As a project sponsor, however, I had three projects that I was accountable for as well as a day job that seemed to take up at least four of the five days I was in the office. Where was I going to get the time to fully immerse myself in each project? To meet with my project managers? To drop in on the teams to find out how things were going? To get involved in the planning, celebrate the successes, and seek feedback and input from my peers?

The short answer was that I had to change, because the role of sponsor isn’t something you can half-commit to.

I had to delegate more of my business-as-usual work in order to accommodate the project work, not the other way around. Projects are the vehicles through which we deliver transformation and achieve the goals we set our organisations. Often bonuses or performance pay is linked to our projects, and if it’s not, it should be in my opinion. To turn around the numbers outlined in the part introduction, you as the sponsor need to take the role seriously. I’d love for your organisation’s vision or purpose to ignite this fire, but we tend to use money instead. So be it.

Better still is a visible demonstration that you own the project. Former AT&T Chairman Michael Armstrong once said, ‘The ancient Romans had a tradition: whenever one of their engineers constructed an arch, as the capstone was hoisted into place, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most profound way possible: he stood under the arch’.

Are you prepared to take all of the blame and none of the credit? Are you prepared to defend the decisions you’ve made and manage poor performers? Are you prepared to fight for your project when the organisation wants to chase shinier objects instead? Can you personally guarantee success? Are you prepared to ‘stand under your arch’?

The team need to know you’re 100 per cent in from the start, whatever it takes. The project is yours and the buck stops with you.