My first book was non-fiction. I was commissioned by Gower Publishing (now Routledge) to write a book on Project Sponsorship. I shall therefore blog about projects every now and again. Today is one of those occasions.
Every so often I type project sponsor into google and see what the suggested search terms return. This is apparently a good way to see what people are trying to discover on the subject. There seems to be some interest in the difference between project sponsor and project owner. In my book on project sponsorship I certainly state that the project sponsor “owns” the business case for the project, but I don’t use the term “project owner”.
There seem to be three schools of thought.
1) Project Owner is simply another name for Project Sponsor
2) The Project Owner is the person who has most of the tasks and resources of the project within their department
3) The Project Owner is the head of the business unit placing the order, i.e. the customer. This is part of the definition on the ict (information and communications technology) standard forum.
PRINCE2 says that all projects have three primary stakeholders.
1) Business Sponsors
2) Users
3) Suppliers
The PRINCE2 term for Project Sponsor is Executive. The Executive is responsible for the business case and has to balance the demands of the business, the user and the supplier. So I’m afraid that the schools of thought for Project Owner seem to be wandering between these three PRINCE2 stakeholders.
I think it’s helpful if titles are a useful guide to the role of the titleholder. Nevertheless the most important thing is that there are competent people taking responsibility for the roles identified in PRINCE2:
1) Business sponsor / Project Sponsor / Executive = responsible for the business case.
2) Senior User = representing those who will use the project’s products
3) Senior Supplier / Project Manager / Project Director = controller of all the consultants, contractors, suppliers etc. delivering the project.
So try not to worry about titles, just make sure that these roles are competently filled for your project.