A playbook for when the project on your desk isn’t waiting for a better plan. It’s waiting for someone who’s allowed to say yes.

Trussell runs a national network of food banks backed by more than 36,000 volunteers. In the post-COVID years, demand skyrocketed. The organisation handed out almost 3 million emergency food parcels in 2022/23, a 37% rise in two years, and found itself running a stack of big projects at the same time: technology, fundraising, network development, and infrastructure. Each one had its own team, its own timeline, and its own way of reporting.

On paper, the governance was all there. They had a strategic plan, annual plans, and delivery reviews built to catch problems early. They operated like the perfect charity. And yet projects still stalled in ways that no one could explain. Project reviews would hint at progress, but weeks later, the reality was that the work was languishing on people’s desks.

The problem looked like inconsistency, because every team ran projects differently, used different formats, and had its own idea of what counted as a risk. The obvious fix is to refine processes, such as creating standard templates, maintaining a shared tracker, or agreeing on a reporting format that everyone signs up to.

But I’ve seen the flaws in this fix enough times to distrust it. You roll out a template, everyone gets used to it for a few weeks, and then crickets - everyone forgets or goes back to how they were doing things before. And that’s because the problem was never really that the information was badly formatted. No, the problem is that no one was responsible for keeping the project moving. 

So the real problem here isn’t about processes, it’s: 

Who is the person responsible for unblocking this work, and do they know it’s their job?

Trussell, though, got this right. And it had nothing to do with standardising processes. Trussell gave each project a sponsor, a named senior person whose job was to unblock work and make decisions that were stuck. 

It sounds so simple when put like that, but it’s oddly more complicated to do. The challenge lies in understanding the value of a sponsor. It’s for them to show up in small instances throughout a project, such as when an expenditure needs signing off, when a decision is stuck between two teams, each believing the other owns it, or when the only person who can say no is someone senior.

In a small charity, this is even more challenging, as a project function often doesn’t exist. Ops managers are running projects and chasing decisions at the same time, which means the person flagging the blocker and the person who should clear it are the same exhausted human. 

Very early in my career, I ran an event for a client, leading a team of graduates to deliver the work. They’d bring me blockers, and I’d escalate them straight up to the client until, one day, the client asked me, quite bluntly, why I was bothering them. I’d assumed I needed their sign-off on anything beyond my immediate remit. They’d assumed the role came with the authority to decide - after all, what were they paying me for? But neither of us had said it out loud, which meant the team couldn’t get a decision, the project was stalling, and it turned out the blocker was me. And since? I’ve always agreed in advance where my authority starts and ends. 

However, there’s one way this can still trip you up even after you’ve named a sponsor, and it’s worth paying attention to: when a sponsor agrees to the role but then slides back into being someone who is kept up to date, not someone of action. The meeting where they were meant to remove blockers turns into one where everyone just describes their work. Everyone leaves informed, but nothing is decided. The early warning sign for this is easy to spot. If you’ve left two sponsor catch-ups in a row without a single decision made or a blocker cleared, the role has already drifted, whatever the project plan says.

What’s worth stealing from Trussell is a single recurring meeting, run by one rule.

To set it up, first name a sponsor for the work or project, the one person who is senior enough to clear blockers without having to ask anyone else. And if there isn’t anyone senior enough within the structure, get a sign-off so that the person has the authority to unblock. 

Then put a short, regular ‘sponsor drop-in’ meeting in the diary with them. Thirty to forty-five minutes. This structure allows the role to remain involved throughout the life of the project, so it’s not just a one-off, ad hoc catch-up that everyone’s forgotten by week three.

Lastly, give this meeting one rule: it’s for decisions and blockers and under no circumstances is it for status updates. Circulate updates beforehand so that time is not spent in the session describing what happened - the sponsor arrives already informed, and in the meeting, take the updates paper as read. The time in the meeting then goes where it should: on what’s stuck, and what the sponsor is going to do about it. 

It’s one rule, simple and complicated at the same time, but it’s what can help small charity teams to keep projects running.

Stuck projects don’t often need better plans. Sometimes, they just need someone who’s allowed to say yes.