Eurostat

Sustainable project management how to embed sustainability in your projects

Crista Filip7 March 2017

What IS that?!

• "You turn off the lights, shop with recycled bags."

The concept of sustainability

‘forms of progress that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’

UN 1987

- future orientation as a basic element of sustainability

Sustainability is a very European brand

Enshrined in Article 3.3 of the Treaty on European Union: it builds on ” balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment”. Implementation requires equal attention to all three aspects: they must be addressed together.

Eurostat and… SDIs

• http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/

3 min. video

‘triple bottom line’ or ‘Triple-P (People, Planet, Profit)’

Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, John Elkington (1997)

Triple Bottom Line

Key concepts

• Sustainability is about integrating economic, environmental and social aspects.

• Sustainability is about integrating short-term and long-term aspects.

• Sustainability is about consuming the income and not the capital.

For public organisations?

• public organisations are integrating criteria on sustainability into their procurement policies, thereby stimulating companies to be more active in this area.

Sustainability is more thanan environmental initiative…it is an enabler of corporate strategy.

It’s about creating competitiveadvantage while doing theright things, in the right way, to ensure long-term success.

‘doing things right’ to

‘doing the right things right’

2008: ‘the further development of the projectmanagement profession requires project managersto take responsibility for sustainability’ (IPMA Conference)

Sustainability in project management is about integrating economic, environmental and social aspects in the content and management of projects

Sustainability in project management is about considering the full life-cycle of the project

• The project will ‘produce’ a result, bring a change in assets, systems, behaviour, etc.

• The asset produced should also be considered over its full life cycle.

• And the life cycle of the product or service that the asset produces should be considered.

• three life cycles need to be taken into account!

The impact of sustainability on project management processes

• A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide)

The best areas to integrate sustainable development into project management (based on Eid 2009)

GRI and sustainability reporting

• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has pioneered sustainability reporting since the late 1990s.

• The GRI reporting framework is the most trusted and widely used in the world.

• The implication of the goal of sustainability for project management is that this set of indicators is matched with the indicators on which a project is managed.

GRI and sustainability reporting

• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has pioneered sustainability reporting since the late 1990s.

• The GRI reporting framework is the most trusted and widely used in the world.

• The implication of the goal of sustainability for project management is that this set of indicators is matched with the indicators on which a project is managed.

there is a gap between the perception of importance and the actual use of sustainability in project management (SPM) practice (Martens & Carvalho, 2016a)

What can I do?

• Incorporate values into projects determining the performance measurement variables and the importance of each of these variables.

• Project planning evaluation focusing on sustainability, through Lean practices as research variables to define a level of performance.

What can I do?

• Link project success to sustainability

• Talk to your stakeholders

• Have good governance • Recent research from Robert Joslin and Ralf Müller

(2016) showed that good project governance has a positive influence on project success.

Projects for a sustainable world

• And sustainable project management for the world • Video, from minute 13:45https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neRO_nNtxUg

Prof Gilbert Silvius - Sustainable Project Management

YOU are the change agents!

References

• Sustainability Now! A European Vision for Sustainability

• The Project as a Social System, edited by Henry Linger and Jill Owen

• Sustainability and Success Variables in the Project Management Context