Dear Bob ...Over the years you have emphasized the important of a project having an executive sponsor. What do you do when you cannot find a single person who will ultimately take ownership for a project?In our recent case, we had a project with marketing and finance components. In reality, marketing hasn’t been too concerned about how their requirements impact finance, and finance has shown no desire to own the Dear Bob …Over the years you have emphasized the important of a project having an executive sponsor. What do you do when you cannot find a single person who will ultimately take ownership for a project?In our recent case, we had a project with marketing and finance components. In reality, marketing hasn’t been too concerned about how their requirements impact finance, and finance has shown no desire to own the process. Since both share the use of IT, IT has ended up owning the business knowledge and tried to keep to two areas happy. As we embarked on our new project, mainly to rewrite a system that fell behind on following business rules, we found once again that each area was more concerned about their part of the business. Marketing was shocked to learn that finance didn’t know about all the changes they made over the years and finance emphasized the accounting rules they needed to follow.The two business areas have different executive leaders who report to the CEO. The obvious answer was to not do the project without proper sponsorship. Since there were identified issues with customer billing, IT felt the project needed to be forced through. Now that the project is getting close to complete, the original dysfunction is showing up again, leading to potential long-term failure of the rewrite. This is a common scenario for teams, how do you recommend we can improve on the process of ownership?– Stuck in silosDear Silo-stuck … Back when I was in college, a popular form of revenge was to fill a mailing envelope with shaving cream, insert the open end under the offender’s dorm room door, and drop a dictionary on the envelope.If you’re going to insist on a more mature solution …Three possibilities occur to me and they aren’t mutually exclusive. They are: 1. Get the two offenders in a room (preferably before the project starts) and persuade them that they need to co-sponsor the project. In order for this to happen, you have to persuade them that their parts of the business will face serious hardships if the replacement system doesn’t get done. If neither will face serious hardships, the project isn’t that important anyway. To them.2. Find another officer who will experience significant pain without the replacement system. In many situations, Internal Audit or the General Counsel will do nicely, since out-of-date business rules sounds like it might result in unnecessary exposure to compliance problems.3. Escalate to the CEO. There are times when every silo does fine – it’s merely the whole corporation that suffers. That’s the case every time a system optimizes the parts at the expense of the whole, in fact. This option should, when done correctly, result in your making use of the first option as well. The CEO would serve as “Executive Sponsor,” the two business directors would serve as “Business Sponsors,” and the three together would serve as the project steering committee. I’ll also say this: At some point, no matter how important a project is to the business, IT can’t ignore what decades of experience have demonstrated: If nobody in the business cares about a project, it will fail. Since it will fail anyway, it might as well fail in the chartering stage, before IT expends time and effort making the actual system happen.– BobPowered by ScribeFire. Technology Industry