Executive sponsor (sometimes called project sponsor or senior responsible owner) is a role in project management, usually the senior member of the project board and often the chair. The project sponsor will be a senior executive in a corporation (often at or just below board level) who is responsible to the business for the success of the project.

Responsibilities

The sponsor has a number of interfaces and responsibilities for the project.

Board

The responsibilities for which the sponsor is accountable to the board are:

Project manager

The governance activities that take place between the sponsor and the project manager are:

Project stakeholders

In addition to these activities the following activities take place between the sponsor and other project stakeholders:

Impact

Due to the problem-solving needs of the role, the executive sponsor often needs to be able to exert pressure within the organization to overcome resistance to the project. For this reason a successful executive sponsor will ideally be a person with five personal attributes - understanding, competence, credibility, commitment and engagement. A few research studies have been published that not only detail the role of this individual within project management but also provide a way to ensure that the success of a project is increased if this individual plays a more active role.

Senior Responsible Officer role

The UK government treats the role of a Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) as distinct from the sponsor's role, referring to projects where the sponsor "may be considered to be at a very senior level or part of a sponsoring group, above the SRO". A Public Administration Select Committee report published in 2011 and critical of UK government IT procurement, noted that SRO's had often moved on to new roles during the course of an acquisition project, and this was one of the reasons why problems had been encountered.