PMO Voices
Jacek P.
Trust the Team, Own the Decision — Fifteen Years of Sponsoring Change
In this PMO Voices conversation, we hear from a sponsor — not a PMO practitioner. Jacek draws on fifteen years of sponsoring complex transformation, technology, and cybersecurity programmes to share what effective sponsorship actually looks like, why the portfolio office needs a seat at the strategy table, and why trust runs backwards very quickly.
This conversation is different. Most PMO Voices interviews feature people who build and run PMOs. Jacek sits on the other side — he’s the sponsor. The person who owns the outcome, makes the hard calls, and has to trust the team to deliver. After fifteen years sponsoring change across Europe, his perspective on what PMOs need from sponsors — and what sponsors need from PMOs — is sharp, practical, and refreshingly honest.
THE CONVERSATION
Where the Sponsor’s Power Actually Sits
The sponsor has no influence over the “what” — the organisation has already chosen the value to deliver. The sponsor has huge influence over the “how” — by whom, with whom, understanding the team’s capabilities and building the environment around the initiative. The sponsor must remain responsible for whether the programme creates a sustainable business capability and delivers the intended organisational outcome.
What He Doesn’t Like: Five-Second Managers
Someone hears about a problem and — without asking the team, without letting them show where they’ve got to — throws a solution at it. That isn’t decisiveness. A sponsor should be genuinely ready to make hard decisions — changing team members, closing a programme. But the decision has to be based on the work and recommendation of the team.
“If you do not listen to the people who surround you, you will very soon be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.”
— Jacek P., quoting Andy Stanley
Sponsorship Sits on Top of the Day Job
Your day is a box filled with smaller boxes. Empty one of them. Jacek referenced Peter Drucker: “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” Do a repeatable task five or ten times, then hand it over. Delegation isn’t offloading — it does two jobs at once. It promotes people — they feel responsible, they present to your superior, they get the recognition. You’re preparing your own deputy. And it frees you — space inside your own box, so you can tell your boss you have the time and knowledge to pick up the next challenge.
Sponsor and Portfolio — The Proper Sequence
Both serve the greater good of the company. The sequence runs: Strategy → Enterprise Architecture → Capabilities → Portfolio. Sponsor-controlled capabilities should create more capabilities. The sponsor focuses on delivery of expected value; the chain of deliveries must be overseen by the portfolio office. Too early is as expensive as too late. The portfolio’s job is to manoeuvre and steer the workforce between sponsors and transformations so the company gets the biggest value out of what it actually has.
Road Maps Are Getting Shorter
Long-lasting infrastructure is the basement. Everything else fits in two- and three-month slots. Concept-to-market has shortened across whole industries. Maybe a road map shouldn’t run a year — maybe a quarter. Whatever you commit to gets delivered beginning to end, so the value is actually visible. The worst outcome is projects that appear and disappear — consuming money and people, delivering nothing.
“Where is the champagne you open at the end of the project? There are people who have never once celebrated the end of one.”
— Jacek P.
ADVICE TO A FIRST-TIME SPONSOR
- Know your place in the strategy — be honest about how important your initiative really is, and stand aside when a colleague's matters more
- Build the team and ringfence it — protect them from being pulled onto other initiatives. Trust runs backwards very quickly
- Be ready to make the decision — including the hard ones. And reach out to the PMO — it's a supporter, not an obstacle to circumnavigate
Where the Portfolio Office Belongs
A strong mandate and a seat on the strategy team. What doesn’t work: sitting inside IT governance owning only IT projects, or sitting inside finance controlling. What works: allocated to the CEO, supporting the strategy of the company, with sponsors using its mature methods to govern in a repeatable way — a loop, not a one-off. Service catalogue or conversation? Jacek says they’re the same thing. The mandate is what matters.
Agile or Waterfall?
They’re only tools. Like a hammer. What matters is that the project manager and team are fluent with the one they use. Waterfall to sequence teams across the organisation, agile sprints inside it — why not? The sponsor shouldn’t intervene there. The team agrees the way of working and communicates it. Methodology should serve the solution and the team — not the other way around.
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Q1 — What types of projects or programmes do you prefer to sponsor?
As a leader, you ultimately serve the needs of the organisation. Therefore, I have not always had substantial influence over the type of project or programme I was asked to sponsor.
My responsibility has been to understand why the initiative matters, determine what success should look like, and create the conditions under which the team can deliver. I am particularly comfortable with complex transformation, technology, cybersecurity, and organisational-change programmes, where success depends on coordination across multiple business and technical functions.
Geographically, my work has had a worldwide scope, although the majority of my working years and project experience have been in Europe.
Q2 — How did you get into projects and programmes?
It was a long and natural professional journey rather than a single career decision. I began by working as a project manager, where I learned the practical realities of delivery: planning, dependencies, budgets, resources, risks, and stakeholder expectations. I then progressed to managing a team of project managers, which required me to focus less on individual tasks and more on delivery standards, leadership, consistency, and organisational obstacles. Eventually, I became responsible for an enterprise project portfolio office. At that point, my perspective expanded from asking, “Are we delivering this project correctly?” to asking, “Are we investing in the right initiatives, and do they collectively support the organisation’s strategy?”
That progression — from project management to managing project managers and then to enterprise portfolio management, prepared me well for sponsorship responsibilities.
Q3 — Do you remember your first sponsorship responsibility?
I don’t remember the precise first project for which I formally held the sponsor title. However, one of my earliest significant sponsorship-type responsibilities was most probably connected with building cybersecurity as a new business line for an IT service operator. It was a substantial transformation programme rather than a narrowly defined technical project. It involved developing capabilities, services, processes, organisational structures, skills, and a market proposition. It also required coordination between technical specialists, operations, sales, finance, and senior leadership.
That experience shaped my understanding of sponsorship. The sponsor cannot focus only on whether project activities are being completed. The sponsor must remain responsible for whether the programme creates a sustainable business capability and delivers the intended organisational outcome.
Q4 — How does your approach change when sponsoring different methodologies?
I regard project-management methods as tools, not objectives. Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall and hybrid approaches all have strengths, but each can also create unhelpful habits or unnecessary complexity when applied mechanically.
My role as a sponsor is not to prescribe a fashionable methodology. It is to ensure that the delivery approach supports the problem being solved, the maturity of the team, the level of uncertainty, and the organisation’s governance requirements.
For example, a project with uncertain requirements and a strong need for experimentation may benefit from short iterative cycles. A highly regulated implementation with fixed dependencies and formal approvals may require more structured stage gates and documentation. In many enterprise environments, the most effective solution is a pragmatic hybrid.
The fundamental sponsorship responsibilities do not change: establish the intended outcome, ensure accountability, secure resources, remove obstacles, manage strategic risks, and make timely decisions. What changes is the way progress is demonstrated and governed.
I always ask two questions:
- Which elements of the method genuinely help the team with the current challenge, and
- Which elements merely introduce complexity without improving the outcome?
Q5 — Did you receive any training about what was expected from you as a sponsor?
No, I did not receive formal sponsor training. That is an interesting question because organisations often invest in training project managers but assume that senior leaders will automatically know how to be effective sponsors. That assumption is not always justified. In my case, sponsorship developed naturally through experience. I grew professionally in an environment of constant business constraints — limited time, finite resources, competing priorities, and restricted budgets.
As a result, evaluating trade-offs, challenging assumptions, setting priorities, and making decisions under constraints became a natural part of my leadership approach.
My earlier experience as a project manager and later as a leader of project managers was also extremely valuable. It helped me understand what delivery teams genuinely need from a sponsor — and which sponsor behaviours can unintentionally make delivery more difficult.
Although I did not receive formal training, I would advocate structured sponsor education. A sponsor should understand that the role involves active ownership and decision-making, not merely attending governance meetings or receiving status reports.
Q6 — What do you look for in a delivery team and project manager?
I look primarily for professionalism, openness, and self-discipline.
Professionalism means understanding responsibilities, maintaining quality, preparing properly, and escalating issues before they become crises.
Openness means presenting the real situation — not simply the most comfortable or politically convenient version of it.
Self-discipline means following through on commitments and maintaining appropriate delivery controls without waiting for the sponsor to supervise every detail.
I strongly believe in teamwork. I do not appreciate what I sometimes call the “five-second manager”: someone who hears about a complex problem and immediately proposes — or even imposes — a solution developed in five seconds, without appreciating the team’s analysis, knowledge, or previous work. Fast decisions can sometimes be necessary, but speed should not be confused with good judgement.
I want to be able to trust the project manager and the team. My starting position is positive, but full trust develops through consistent behaviour: reliable information, early escalation, evidence-based recommendations, transparency about uncertainty, and delivery against commitments.
A strong team does not tell the sponsor only what the sponsor wants to hear. It provides an honest assessment, explains the options and consequences, and then takes ownership of execution once a decision has been made.
Q7 — If your PMO were removed tomorrow, what would the organisation notice first?
My first question would be: Which PMO do we mean? The Project Management Office or the Portfolio Management Office? They are related, but they solve different organisational problems.
If the Project Management Office disappeared, the organisation would probably first notice the lack of consistent and comparable information about project progress, risks, dependencies, milestones, and overall status. Different teams would begin using different definitions, reporting formats, and measures of health. Senior management might still receive information, but it would become more difficult to compare projects or identify problems early.
If the Portfolio Management Office disappeared, the organisation would lose transparency over where its time, people, and budget were being allocated. It would become harder to understand whether investments were aligned with strategic priorities, whether the organisation had sufficient delivery capacity, and what should be stopped or deferred when new priorities emerged.
Put simply and textbook:
- Project management is about doing things right.
- Portfolio management is about doing the right things.
An effective organisation needs both perspectives. Reliable project execution is important, but executing the wrong portfolio efficiently does not create strategic value.
Final Thoughts
The sponsor needs to trust in the team. Solving every issue, imposing every decision, micromanaging the project is not the role of the sponsor. The sponsor gives the space for the team to grow and deliver the value.
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