We listen carefully to the challenges that our customers experience in deploying Project Workforce Management solutions. But one common challenge is not one that we can address with better software or implementation services.  That challenge is executive sponsorship.

Whether it is for eliminating the costly habits of meetings, email and spreadsheets, or simply getting employees to enter their leave requests using the workflow system, change is unlikely unless executives not only speak in favor of it, but embrace it in their actions as well as their words.

In a recent report from Forrester Research (cited here on CIO.com), executive sponsorship is cited as the number one way for companies to re-invent their business intelligence (BI) strategy–and the same goes for a project workforce management which, like a BI strategy, is all about keeping executives informed about the productivity of the organization. I also cited in the book, The Rise of the Project Workforce, an Aberdeen study that showed resistance to changes in work standards to be the number one implementation problem.

We advise our customers to enlist their executive sponsors early on in the implementation process, and keep these sponsors highly involved long after the implementation.  Executive sponsors should:

• Be the system’s "Power Users." Nothing works better than leadership by example. And when executives truly understand a project workforce management solution’s reporting and analysis capabilities, they can streamline their processes significantly.
• Participate in the same end-user training as the staff. Lead by example: show openness to learning and changing, and demonstrate a commitment to the solution in a public way.
• Evangelize the system, and the benfits for the employees, not just the organization. For example, to get employees to use a time and billing system, stress how much easier it is for them, explain the benefits for them, not for Accounting.

Higher user adoption, led by active sponsorship from the executive level, enables the highest benefits of a project workforce management solution: better data capture for better decision-making, and more efficient business processes. But more so than other enterprise solutions, project workforce management, when adopted properly, leads to true empowerment of the teams who use it.

The executives who sponsor project workforce management need to be comfortable with this empowerment shift. Then they can whole-heartedly endorse the organizational changes that are necessary to get the greatest benefits from the solution.