The chapter reports on the case study project of the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) of a wind park farm in Brazil from the supplier perspective of Siemens Ltd. In the case study, researchers, together with practitioners, further developed project stakeholder analysis by explicitly integrating Sustainable Development (SD) principles. The chapter offers an operative approach and describes the working form systemic board to better handle the increasing dynamics and complexity in contemporary projects and contexts. For project stakeholder management, the consideration of SD principles means in particular: applying a more comprehensive stakeholder management approach with underpinning values that support sustainable development; integrating economic, ecologic, and social interests of project stakeholders into the project objectives to create shared benefit for the project investor and other project stakeholders; broadening the time perspective to consider not only current stakeholders but also future stakeholders of the investment initialized by the project; broadening the spatial perspective to consider local, regional as well as global impacts of the project for stakeholders; using systemic working forms to allow for making the dynamics and complexities of the project and the project contexts better visible to the project manager, the project team, and the project owner; taking consequences in the project organization which lead to more integrative project organization structures to support cooperation on a project and with its stakeholders.
TopIntroduction
This chapter provides insights from a case study project of Siemens Ltd, in which the authors experimented with project stakeholder analysis to explicitly consider Sustainable Development (SD) principles and integrate these into project management. The cases study project is an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) of a Wind Park Farm in a rural area of Brazil. The case study was part of an explorative research study which aimed to rethink project initiation and project management by considering SD principles (Gareis et al. 2013). A more comprehensive description of the research findings can be found in the chapter “Re-thinking project initiation and project management by considering principles of sustainable development” by Roland Gareis.
In this chapter, we concentrate on the case study of the project: EPC of a wind park farm.
In the notion of engaged scholarship (Van De Ven 2007) we took the approach of knowledge co-creation of researchers and practitioners. The case study team consisted of two researchers, the representatives of the case study project, two PMO (Project Management Office) managers and other interested senior project managers of the company, See Figure 1. Some of the practitioners engaged in the case study joined as authors of this chapter. As the project manager of the case study projects said, we contributed to the demystification of Sustainable Development for project management, as we show an operative approach to consider SD in the project stakeholder analysis
The chapter is organized as following. After briefly providing a theoretical background on SD and project stakeholder management, we provide an example how SD principles can be explicitly integrated in project stakeholder management. We introduce the working form systemic board to deal with the complexity of the analysis in the dynamic and complex contemporary project contexts. We then further show the consequences of the findings in the project stakeholder analysis, which may for example result in an integrated project organization. Finally we reflect the case study results, opportunities and limits.
TopSustainable Development On And By Projects
Sustainable Development
The authors share an understanding of SD based on the one hand on an explicit consideration of developing sustainability and on the other hand based on the guiding principles of SD which are values based. SD includes the word “development,” which implies that sustainability is an ultimate goal, which cannot be reached but we may provide a contribution to the development towards sustainability. While SD approaches are often defined topic related, we aimed for a more generic understanding to be applicable in all project types. SD is a development process guided by values to support sustainability. Relevant values include for example transparency, fairness, tractability, participation. Based on guiding principles, we define SD principles such as (Gareis et al. 2013):
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Economic, ecologic and social-orientation
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Short, mid and long term-orientation
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Local, regional and global-orientation
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Values based
These principles are further explained in the following sections.