Review of Sustainable Project Management
As summarised by Silvius and Schipper,(2012), project management has moved from the early acknowledgment of project management as discipline in the 1950s, to not only the consideration of sustainability as a core area of development, but further the stretching of the project boundaries as the full life cycle of the outcome of the project is considered, Labuschagne and Brent (2006). Although the full lifecycle model was developed for the manufacturing industry it is equally applicable to the FM industry and often FM contracts run from 5 to 20 years, with some project aspects requiring consideration over long time periods.
This chapter builds on the ‘checklist for integrating sustainability in projects and project management’ Silvius (2010) providing a business case (or project justification) as the next step where aspects for environmental sustainability are identified. While the business case is mentioned briefly by Silvius, Schipper and Van Den Brink (2012), indicating that the principles of sustainability need to be reflected in the project justification, the use of the business case to integrate sustainability across multiple ‘sub’ projects is not addressed. The business case example in this chapter demonstrates this link. Importantly as asserted by Maltzman and Shirley (2011) ‘project management is a microcosm of business’(p23).
Two distinct but related areas are addressed:
The drivers for sustainability establish the business conditions which contribute to the overall potential for success of a particular initiative. The drivers described in this chapter are derived from the specific example being examined, and as surmised by Maltzman and Shirley (2011) when considering project drivers, ‘No matter what the impetus, organisations must respond to them with projects if they are to survive’ (p. 73).
The description ‘drivers’ is used as a broader term than stakeholders, however it should be noted that for this example they are narrowly derived from the information available through audit, business interaction and informal site review by the author, rather than through a full stakeholder analysis as described in Achman (2011).