9. Project Management and Sustainability

Learning Outcomes

After reading this Chapter, students will be able to:

1. Discuss the role project management professionals play in sustainability.
2. Discuss the meaning of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
3. Link project objectives to one or more of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
4. Discuss the Project Management Body of Knowledge’s 12 Principles in the context of sustainability.

The role of project management professionals

Addressing climate change is everyone’s responsibility. Many countries have set ambitious goals for carbon neutrality.  For instance, the government of Canada and the United States of America have both set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 (Government of Canada, 2024)¹. Further, many of the world’s largest companies have set net-zero emission targets. To achieve these goals, many new climate change initiatives must be launched and successfully delivered.

Climate change solutions are often very complex and challenging to implement. The project management community can play an important role in helping organizations design and implement their sustainability objectives.

“The benefit that project managers bring to sustainability efforts is creating the most optimum way of getting the work done.” Nishita Baliarsingh, Co-founder and CEO, Nexus Power, India.

Baliarsingh believes that we need to build sustainability into projects by considering the entire life cycle of all the products we create and market. As you listen to the Building Sustainability Into Products, reflect on one of your recent purchases. Are you able to trace the entire cycle of the product from raw materials to procurement to distribution and ultimate consumption?

Lastly, the project management community can support net-zero emission goals by ensuring project objectives have a sustainability component.  The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provides a very helpful framework for the project management community to assess a project’s sustainability impact.

The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The Sustainable Development Goals can be integrated into the design, planning and evaluation of a project to ensure that environmental, social, and economic sustainability are considered during all stages of a project while leaving a positive impact to the environment.

Exhibit 9.1: The UN’s 17 SDGs.

The goals are a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future” (United Nations, SDG History, 2024). They are intended to encourage developed countries, which are the largest contributors to environmental, social and economic injustices occurring in the world, to take meaningful steps towards sustainable development.

The goals are not just about the environment. They represent a systems approach to building a sustainable future so that future generations can thrive in a world without poverty, hunger, and inequality. No single aspect of sustainability operates in a vacuum, as each goal is interconnected. Before we look at an example, take a moment to review the SDGs and identify the two or three that connect with you in your personal, academic or professional life. Watch this video for a quick overview of the 17 goals.

Linking project objectives to sustainable development goals.

Let’s imagine we are Amy Martin, Project Director for McDonald’s. Amy’s project will introduce a mobile order and pay system to consumers.  Learn more about Amy’s project here: McDonald’s Mobile Order and Pay Project.

How can the SDGs guide Amy in proposing sustainable objectives for this project?  There are many options.

First, we can recognize that this project supports SDG 12, Responsible Consumption and Production. This goal will help us recognize that this mobile order system will allow customers to place their own orders, thus improving order accuracy, which in turn will reduce waste.

It’s important to consider the carbon footprint of returns and reorders as well as the amount of new and unused items which go through the liquidation process, with many of those items going directly to the landfill, which also relates to SDG 15, Life on Land. Here’s an interesting video on the impact of one very popular retailer’s product returns.

Linking a project’s objectives to one or more of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals also involves identifying ways to ensure the sustainability objectives follow the SMART principles: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Here is an example for the McDonald’s mobile order project:

Project objective: Reduce the number of hamburgers that are thrown out by 10% in North America, 6 months after the new mobile order and pay system has been launched.

Let’s assess how “SMART” this objective is:

• Specific: The example focused on one food type – hamburgers. This is specific.
• Measurable: To measure the reduction, the project team would have to establish a benchmark prior to application launch. For instance, they may discover that an average of 5,300 hamburgers are thrown out every month in North America because they prepared incorrectly. A 10% reduction would be 530 fewer hamburgers or a new average of 4,770.
• Achievable: To establish if this goal is achievable, previous initiatives to improve order accuracy in other fast-food businesses could be researched. In addition, an assessment of the common mistakes made when preparing a hamburger can be identified to improve order accuracy.
• Relevant: Improving order accuracy is relevant to reducing food waste. When consumers open their hamburger and discover it has ingredients missing or incorrectly added, that hamburger cannot be resold and therefore becomes waste.
• Time-Bound: Lastly, the objective is time-bound because the measurement will occur 6 months after the new order application has launched.

SMART Analysis Conclusion:

This project objective to reduce food waste not only meets the SMART requirements but also supports two SDGs:

SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

SDG 15: Life on Land

Project Management Body of Knowledge’s (PMBOK) 12 Principles

The 7th edition of the PMBOK introduced 12 new principles that project management professionals can embrace to position themselves with a winning mindset for successful project delivery.  These 12 principles can be linked to the SDGs as follows:

1. Stewardship – use a project’s resources with care.
2. Team – ensure team members are aware of the UN’s 17 SDGs and the organization’s sustainability objectives.
3. Stakeholders – when identifying the impact of a project, future generations and the planet should be considered.
4. Value – a project’s contribution to addressing climate change should be considered in value measurements and will require a longer-term focus in benefit realization.
5. System Thinking – projects operate within a dynamic internal and external environment, including evolving climate change realities. Responsiveness to all system interactions is an important consideration for project success.
6. Leadership – project leaders recognize addressing the challenges of climate change is everyone’s responsibility and creative solutions to sustainability challenges are encouraged.
7. Tailoring – tailoring the approach used on the project involves an assessment of the tools and techniques required to achieve the organization’s sustainability goals.
8. Quality – in setting quality objectives, the organization’s commitment to sustainability becomes an important factor in determining if stakeholders’ expectations were fulfilled.
9. Complexity – achieving the UN’s 17 SDGs will not be easy. Complex solutions are a reality. Project teams will stay vigilant in identifying elements of complexity and ensuring they can be properly managed.
10. Risk – risk assessments move beyond cost, schedule and scope/quality impacts to also consider environmental impacts.
11. Adaptability and Resiliency – regular assessments of the project team’s ability to respond to changing conditions and recover from setbacks occurs as these attributes will enable the team to stay focused on value creation and the achievement of sustainability objectives.
12. Change – the project team recognizes the importance of ensuring a change is sustainable and the project scope includes equipping those impacted. Failure to do so would mean the resources applied to the project have been wasted on change that is not sustainable.

This Chapter highlighted the many ways we can incorporate sustainability into our project delivery life cycles. We can find ways to meet our immediate objectives while also contributing to the achievement of global sustainability targets.

Project management professionals are very good at identifying who is impacted by a change and developing ways to keep them engaged. Effective stakeholder management begins with effective needs analysis. It has become a critical success factor in the delivery of sustainable change. And now, the planet needs us too.  Climate change begins and ends with us.

Reference

¹Government of Canada. (2024, May 17). Net-zero emissions by 2050. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/environment/weather/climatechange/climate-plan/net-zero-emissions-2050.html