Many project-based businesses find sustainability to be a difficult subject, yet project professionals are considering it more than ever before. Sustainability is still relevant and crucial in projects, programs, and portfolios; in fact, it is a core competency that is essential for enhancing and supporting the good project, program, and portfolio management. One of the most important challenges of the moment is the need to address sustainability in project operations, including financial, social, and environmental sustainability. Let us explore more about sustainable project management in this post.

Also read: Project Risk Management: Identification, Analysis, Response and Control

What is sustainable Project Management?

The use of strategies, tools, and procedures to accomplish a stated goal while taking into account the project outcome’s whole lifecycle to ensure a net positive impact on the environment, society, and economy is known as sustainable project management.

This is because, as we’ve already discussed, achieving sustainability necessitates striking a balance among four separate factors.

Those include:

• environment, such as climate change
• economy, such as affordability
• society, such as community and
• administration, such as health and safety

Sustainability is important in all aspects of project-based work. For example, the procurement team may be looking for ways to acquire from sustainable sources and improve the supply chain’s efficiency. Project managers must guarantee that their work has a minimal impact on, or ideally, a positive impact on, long-term sustainability.

The application of Lean Management Principles and Practices such as JIT, 5S, and Kanban can also create opportunities for sustainability in project management by having less waste, higher quality, lower costs, appropriate resource utilization, application of advanced technology and skills, overall economic uplift, and many other benefits.

Benefits of Sustainable Project Management

The integration of sustainability into project management benefits organizations in various ways

• Sustainability can help an organization boost its value, provide possibilities, eliminate/reduce risk, increase profit, and lower costs.
• Sustainability may create new opportunities, increase profit by providing better access to certain markets, differentiate the company’s products from competitors, give it a competitive advantage, and increase sales as more people are drawn to the company’s brand in the market and its sustainable practices.
• Sustainability can assist eliminate/reducing risks and costs by improving relationships within the supply chain. Suppliers, regulatory agencies, and external stakeholders will be more supportive of the company; also, the reduction of energy and material use owing to more inventive and sustainable use of them may lower costs overall, pushing profit even higher.
• Sustainability also pushes for the use of renewable energy, which lowers energy costs. Sustainability improves process efficiency, allowing businesses to reduce expenses related to production and other activities during the project execution phase.

Conclusion

Sustainable project management is going to be the replacement for traditional project management as it includes future impacts into consideration when thinking of the project life cycle. The driver of integrating sustainability into project management varies but it has a large influence on organizations. For a project to be sustainable, the focus must be placed on value creation. Project requirements and constraints must include mitigation of negative environmental, social, and economic impacts and attainment of the benefits outlined in the business case.

Also read: https://www.projectmanagement.ie/blog/sustainability-in-project-management/