Sustainability in Project Management: Two sides of the same coin or poles apart?

Abstract

Project management maturity influences the success of project management and project implementation. Based on project management international standards and other project management methodologies, various project management maturity models have developed. These models evaluate the level of project management maturity from many lenses; holistically, or in specific project management capabilities or specific to certain industry sectors. Projects are implemented in all human endeavors. Research and development, innovation initiatives, new ventures all harness projects as tool of change.Sustainability has three dimensions -social, economic and environmental. Project management is as much as life skill as it is a management science, relevant to business and society., It is therefore fundamental that sustainability is interwoven into project management tools, techniques and practices. Consequently, project management maturity models have to also evaluate how sustainability is included and applied in project management. The article defines a framework to assess sustainable project management in the form of the most important indicators based on the three pillars of sustainability: People, Planet and Profit. This approach could be used for evaluation of sustainability in project management generally or for the evaluation of a specific project management maturity model.

Assessment of Sustainability by Project Management Maturity Models

“…The basis of the research was the primary analysis of secondary sources on the topic of Kostalova and McGrath (2021). Furthermore, the goal of the research was to assess whether these models are known to experts in practice and how widespread they are in practice.…”

“…Sustainability Indicators for PMMMs assessment (Part 2). Own processing based on the GRI standard (2016),Meza-Ruiz et al (2017),Martens and Carvalho (2016),Lin et al (2017),Banishashemi et al (2017) andKostalova and McGrath (2021) …”

Points of intersection between sustainability and project management

“…We determined the areas of impact of sustainability on project management based on the identification of relevant sustainability characteristics that were obvious from research publications [14]. Sustainability appeared to have an impact on project management at various levels.…”

Review of the Peculiarities of Business Logistics Projects Management Leading to Sustainable Development

“…Governmental policy implementation could be a way of achieving that (Stoyanova et al, 2018). Still, it must be completed in an evaluated market presence (Kostalova & McGrath, 2021) while making the whole sustainability processing much easier for businesses of various kinds. Some external factors were related to environmental protection by creating a low carbon economy (Kudratova et al, 2018).…”

“…However, general project management practices should be considered to sustainability measures (Toljaga-Nikolić et al, 2020), and businesses should be agile reacting to constant market changes and adapt to its' patterned behavior (Marnewick, 2017). A suitable practice of supplier environmental assessment can be made to decrease the environmental impact of a business project (Kostalova & McGrath, 2021) while having clearly identified strategies towards sustainable management (Khalifeh et al, 2020). Procurement procedures, such as selective supplier analysis, could be utilized for a sustainable project setting (Larsson & Larsson, 2020) and alterations in the human resources could be amended to intervene in internal research of sustainability optimization (Muntean, 2018).…”