Executive support: The fundament of successful projects

Project cycle, management elements, teamwork, and common vocabulary are essential to project success. Executive support, in return, is the fundament of all. Why?

Projects are cross functional endeavors. Project teams form from people of various branches of the organization. With few exceptions, project managers are not line managers, most team members are part-time resources for the project. Thus, projects compete for resources with the operational responsibilities of team members and other projects. This also means project managers compete for the time of team members with their line managers who have disciplinary power over them. When they set priorities in responding to their daily challenges, they need to know and feel that the project their work on is just as important as their base activities.

What does executive support means? Foremost, it means commitment. Talk is cheap. Saying that the project gets the resources it needs is easy. Carve out those resources from a limited pool also needed for other tasks and forsaking competing goals so the team has time to work on the project is a lot harder. Without this commitment, however, we cannot speak of executive support. Words without will are only words.