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Sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time. How can we develop prosperity, without compromising the life of future generations? Companies are integrating ideas of sustainability in their marketing, corporate communication, annual reports and in their actions. More recently, the concept of sustainability has also been linked to project management. Projects are "instruments of change" within organizations, which play an important role in the realization of sustainable business processes and practices. Project managers are therefore important "change agents" in organizations that have a strong influence on the sustainability of organizations. However, the standards of project management fail to address the role project managers' play in realizing sustainable development and project managers are lacking the competences to consider the sustainability aspects of their projects. For the implementation of sustainability in organizations, it is crucial that this competence gap is closed by the standards of project management competencies. This paper reports a literature-based analysis of the coverage of the competencies required for considering sustainability aspects, in the standards of project management competencies. The study aims to specify the competence gap of project managers with regards to sustainability, and to provide guidance on how to close this gap. The paper therefore makes specific suggestions on how the standards of project management competencies should develop in order to prepare project managers for their pivotal role in realizing sustainability of organizations.

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Sustainable project management is becoming important and the sustainability concepts of people, the planet and profit needs to be incorporated into any type of project. This article focuses on the behavior of the project manager per se and the stimuli patterns that motivate them to adhere to sustainable project management. Three stimuli patterns are used i.e., intrinsically motivated, pragmatic and task driven. To determine which of these patterns influence a project manager, a quantitative pair-wise comparison was used. Twelve statements were used in a pair-wise comparison resulting in a combination of 66 questions. A sample of 101 project managers was analyzed to determine the stimuli patterns. The results indicate that the most prevalent stimulus pattern is the intrinsically motivated pattern with the other two patterns equally important. The results are consistent across gender, age and types of projects as well as industries. It can be concluded that for this study, project managers incorporate sustainability because they feel that it is something they should do. The motivation to consider sustainability is dominated by their behavioral beliefs and the characteristics of the project, or the opinion of others, do not play a large role. This research contributes to the larger body of knowledge with regards to sustainable project management and specifically to the human behavior of project managers. This research addresses the gap that currently exists in current literature where the focus is on the product's sustainability and sustainable processes.

The relevance of integrating the concepts of sustainability into project management shows from the growing number of studies on this topic. These studies approach the topic mostly from a conceptual, logical, or moral point of view. Given the fact that the relationship between sustainability and project management is still an emerging field of study, these approaches make sense. However, they do not diminish the need for more empirical studies to understand how the concepts of sustainable development are implemented in practice. This chapter reports an analysis of 56 case studies on the integration of the concepts of sustainability in the way organizations initiate, develop, and manage projects. The research question of the study was: To what extent do organizations consider the concepts of sustainability in the initiation, development, and management of projects? The study found an overall average level of sustainability consideration in the actual situation of 25.9%. For the desired situation, this score is almost 10 percent higher, showing an ambition to take sustainability more into consideration. The study also showed that the way sustainability currently is considered in projects should be categorized as the traditional “making things less bad” approach to sustainability integration and not as a more modern “how can we contribute to making things good” approach. However, the scores of the desired situation indicate that the modern approach to corporate responsibility is certainly the ambition of the participating organizations.