Integrating sustainability issues into project management

Abstract

Sustainability was adopted by many companies through their mission statement and strategy. However, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability are difficult to incorporate in programs and projects. The purpose of this work is to develop a framework to help ensure that an organization is working on the right projects to attain its business strategy and stakeholders demands. The proposal addresses both the portfolio selection problem and the project tracking phase. The portfolio selection allows selecting the better mix of projects based on the simultaneous analysis of eco-impacts and contribution to organizational goals. Once a portfolio is selected, monitoring aims to control project realization and decide on adjustments arisen from deviations from initial estimations. Both selection and monitoring are modeled as an optimization problem. The authors believe that this conceptual framework has a good potential for integrating sustainability and project management in operational terms.