Four Questions Every Project Sponsor Is Asking Wrong
Most project sponsors think they’re doing their job well. They track the budget. They chase the timeline. They ask hard questions at steering committee. They read every status report before it’s presented.
None of that tells you whether they’re thinking like a custodian or an investor. And that distinction decides whether the technology program creates value or just consumes it quietly, on schedule, with every report staying green.
A custodian protects what’s already there. A budget line. A go-live date. A vendor contract that was signed eighteen months ago. The custodian’s job, as they see it, is to make sure nothing goes missing on their watch.
An investor asks a different question: what is this spend supposed to return, and how would I know if it isn’t?
Most sponsors default to custodian mode without ever deciding to. Nobody chose it. It’s just what the role feels like when the reporting structure hands you a budget to guard and a date to hit. But the questions a custodian asks and the questions an investor asks are not the same questions — and once you see the difference, you can’t unsee it in your own steering committee.
Here are four of them.
“How much should I spend on technology?” vs. “How do I ensure return on it?“
The custodian’s version of diligence is negotiating the vendor down. Ten percent off the licence cost feels like a win, and it gets reported as one. But nobody in that negotiation asked what return the remaining ninety percent needs to generate to justify the spend at all.
The investor’s version starts earlier. Before a dollar is committed, they’ve named what the technology is supposed to produce — hours saved, errors removed, decisions made faster — and priced the investment against that, not against last year’s budget.
A cheaper ERP that returns nothing is not a good deal. It’s a discount on a mistake.
“How can we implement this in-house?” vs. “Have we put the right people in the right seats?“
Sponsors love to get into implementation detail. Data migration approach. Module sequencing. Whether to build the workflow this way or that way. It feels like oversight. Mostly it’s a sponsor doing the project manager’s job because it’s more comfortable than doing their own.
The investor question is uncomfortable in a different way: is the person representing the business on this project actually senior enough to make a decision when one is needed? Are they in the room full-time, or fitting the project around their real job? Does the project sponsor have the authority — and the willingness — to say no to the vendor when the vendor is wrong?
Get the seats right and the implementation detail mostly takes care of itself. Get the seats wrong and no amount of migration strategy saves the program.
“When will the project be complete?” vs. “When can we evaluate the return, after go-live?“
Go-live is treated as the finish line. The steering committee closes the project, the team disbands, everyone moves on to the next thing. That’s custodian thinking — the asset was delivered, the job is done.
For an investor, go-live is the start of the clock, not the end of it. The return doesn’t exist at go-live. It exists — or doesn’t — in the months after, when people either change how they work or quietly revert to the old spreadsheet because nobody’s watching anymore. An investor sets the review date before go-live, not after: six months out, twelve months out, a specific question — did the benefit case we approved actually happen?
If nobody owns that question after go-live, the project was never really about value. It was about delivery.
“Why is the project over budget and over time?” vs. “What will additional investment actually return?“
The custodian’s instinct when a project runs over is to find out whose fault it is. Vendor blamed the client, client blamed the vendor, the steering committee gets a root-cause slide, and everyone feels like accountability happened.
The investor’s instinct is different: forget blame for a moment, and ask what the next dollar buys. If another $200,000 and eight weeks gets the organisation a working system with the benefits case intact, that might be the best investment decision available — better than the one made a year ago, because now there’s more information. If the next dollar buys nothing but more delay, that’s a decision too, and it’s better made now than in another six months of over budget, over time.
Neither answer is automatically right. What’s wrong is asking “whose fault is this” as if it were the same question as “what should we do now” — and never actually asking the second one.
None of these four flips require new governance, a new methodology, or a new consultant in the room. They require a sponsor willing to notice which question they’re actually asking, and swap it.
Most steering committees have someone tracking the budget. Few have someone asking what the money is actually buying. That’s not a resourcing problem. It’s a posture problem — and it’s the sponsor’s to fix, not the vendor’s.
