You Have a Choice — and Most Sponsors Don’t Know It

Let me be honest with you. Not corporate-honest, where everything is framed as an opportunity. Actually honest.

You became an ERP project sponsor because someone decided you were senior enough, influential enough, credible enough. Maybe you volunteered. Maybe it landed in your lap. Either way, here you are — your name on the charter, your face in the steering committee, your reputation quietly attached to something that has a well-known track record of going sideways.

And here’s what nobody says out loud: the pressure you’re feeling right now isn’t just about the project. It’s older than the project. It’s the same pressure that got you into this chair in the first place.

We look outward — to norms, to reputation, to what people at our level are supposed to do — rather than inward, to what we actually know and believe.

I sketched something in a notebook the other day. A mind map about freedom. At the centre was a simple question: do we actually have a choice, or do we just follow the path that’s been laid out for us? The more I sat with it, the more I realised it applies almost perfectly to where you’re sitting right now.

There’s a version of ERP sponsorship that is essentially a performance. You attend the right meetings. You send the right signals upward. You approve the consultant’s slide deck. You frame every risk as being managed. You push toward go-live because the board wants momentum, the vendor wants to invoice, and the project manager has a Gantt chart that says it’s time.

This version feels safe. It looks like leadership. And it almost always ends badly — not for the optics, but for the actual humans using the system, and for the organisation that needed real change and got a very expensive replication of its old problems.

The corporate ladder. Reputation. Peer pressure. Looking good rather than actually being good. These aren’t abstract concepts — they’re the invisible hands steering sponsorship decisions every single day on ERP projects around the world.

You probably know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it, or you’ve felt yourself moving toward it.

Here’s what I think freedom looks like in this role.

It starts with being honest about why you’re really sponsoring this project. Not the official answer. The real one. Is it because you believe this transformation will genuinely make life better for the people in your organisation? Or is it because it’s your turn, and this is what people at your level do?

There’s no judgement in the question. But there’s everything in the answer, because the two paths lead to completely different decisions when things get hard — and they will get hard.

Freedom in this role looks like asking the question nobody wants to ask: are we actually changing, or just automating the old way? Most ERP projects fail not because of the software, but because the organisation configured a new system around old processes and old politics. The sponsor is the only person with enough authority to stop that from happening. But only if they’re willing to be disruptive.

It looks like delaying go-live when people aren’t ready, even when the vendor is pressuring you, even when the board is watching, even when every instinct says just get it live and deal with it later. That moment — that one decision — is where real sponsorship lives.

It looks like knowing yourself well enough to understand your own blind spots. Which parts of this project are you protecting because they matter, and which parts are you protecting because they’re yours?

I’m not going to pretend the free path is comfortable. It isn’t. It means having conversations that feel politically dangerous. It means holding the line when the whole room wants you to move. It means caring about the outcome more than about how you look in the process.

But the sponsors who lead this way — the ones genuinely trying to create something rather than consume a project — they’re the ones who remember the work fondly. They’re the ones their teams talk about years later. Not because everything went perfectly, but because something real changed.

The others — the ones who played it safe, who approved the go-live to protect their reputation, who let the consultants drive because it was easier — they tend to carry a quieter kind of regret. The system went live. The consultants left. And the people left behind quietly found workarounds for the next three years.

You do have a choice. That’s the thing I wanted you to know. It doesn’t always feel like it, but you do.

You can look inward — at what you actually believe, what you see in this organisation, what kind of leader you want to be — and let that drive your decisions. Or you can look outward — at the norms, the politics, the reputation, the optics — and let those drive instead.

Both paths are available to you right now, in this project, probably this week.

The free path is harder. It asks more of you. But it’s the one that leads somewhere worth going.

I’d love to know which one you’re on and the question remains- Are you leading this project, or is it leading you?