PROJECT MANAGEMENT OFFICES NEED TO BE ON THE SUSTAINABILITY FRONTLINE

WE’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY FOR DECADES AND THE GLOBAL CONSENSUS IS FINALLY SHIFTING, WITH STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW RESEARCH SHOWING NINE OUT OF TEN CEOS BELIEVE SUSTAINABILITY IS CRITICAL TO FUTURE SUCCESS. YET WHY HAS THERE BEEN SO LITTLE ACTION AND HOW CAN THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT OFFICE HELP CHANGE THAT?

As the strategic and standardisation arm of the business, the Project Management Office (PMO) plays a critical role in the success of sustainability efforts in businesses as they help define, update, and maintain the practices and processes that enable strategic success.

If strategic success is linked to sustainability, the PMOs job is to create the right conditions for sustainability to flourish throughout the entire project life cycle, from project selection all the way down to everyday project processes. Picking the right projects with the right criteria and ensuring they are executed with the right processes was always the task of the PMO. However, what now constitutes as right is no longer purely economically motivated, but social and environmentally motivated too.

The major reason why PMOs have not been at the forefront of the discussion is largely because there is no single silver bullet comprehensive framework or guideline on how to roll out a sustainability strategy feasibly and successfully through the PMO. Though many have explored different models, most of the market has yet to latch onto any specific framework.

There are so many factors that influence a PMOs integration of sustainability, from organisation structure, leadership strategic direction, to current project management processes and organisational cultures. But businesses cannot afford to wait for a miraculous framework to appear and lose out on valuable opportunities to be pioneers and leaders in their market. Rather than waiting on the back burner, there are five critical areas PMOs can make a difference in right now to properly position their businesses for a sustainable future.

5 WAYS PMOS CAN MAKE SUSTAINABILITY PROGRESS

1. Project management methodology, standards, and tools

Selecting and defining a project management methodology is one of the most critical responsibilities of the PMO. Typically, these methodologies are either inspired by or directly reflect industry standards; standards that have often failed to directly address the sustainability agenda. However, international standards are shifting with several project management associations and institutions such as the International Standards Organisation and International Project Management Association introducing new indicators that highlight the need for project governance to reflect an organisation’s commitment to sustainability.

With this change in standards, new sustainability focused project management methodologies have arisen. For example, the PRiSM (Projects Integrating Sustainability Measures) methodology aims to intentionally integrate sustainability considerations into the typical project management process through the introduction of a ‘sustainability impact analysis’ to the project documentation process.

This analysis feeds into a greater sustainability management plan that is managed, reviewed, and adapted in collaboration with an allocated sustainability officer to ensure all necessary compliances are met. Though it may not be perfect, PRiSM provides a scaffold model for PMOs to help adapt and integrate sustainability considerations into their own project management methodologies and standards.

2. Project portfolio management

The core function of project portfolio management is to facilitate the strategic decision-making process through a range of activities such as the prioritisation, selection, and termination of projects. The key role of the PMO is to provide templates and models for project proposal, progress reports, and communication that inform the portfolio decision making process and in turn achieve the strategic goals of the business.

For a sustainable future, PMOs need to actively link all their processes, models and criterias to the business’ overarching sustainability strategy. This ensures that projects are not only selected based on sustainable principles, but they are also executed sustainably and evaluated based on sustainability criterias.

Comprehensive frameworks for sustainable project portfolio selection are also available such as the one crafted by Khalili-Damghani and Tavana. This extensive model covers the entirety of the project portfolio management process and is split into two modules. The first focuses on integrating sustainability into the strategic planning process. The outputs of this module, a set of projects that align with strategic (and sustainable) goals and objectives, are then filtered through a second module, the sustainable project portfolio selection procedure.

This module implements a financial, semi-financial and non-financial analysis that ensures the final projects being implemented are all inherently sustainable economically, environmentally, and socially. More and more in-depth frameworks like these are popping up and will continue to help PMOs easily visualise, implement, and maintain a truly sustainable project management process.

3. Benefits realisation management

PMOs have the responsibility of ensuring benefits are properly identified and assessed within the early business case of a project proposal. If businesses are to be truly sustainable, it must also be reflected in their benefits realisation process. This can be done by expanding the business case to consider the nonfinancial factors and benefits the proposed project can bring.

A key responsibility of the PMO is to ensure that there are proper measurements, criterias and metrics that can help easily quantify, communicate, and monitor sustainability throughout projects and the portfolio as a whole in accordance with the overarching business’ sustainability strategy. Though PMOs may not traditionally see themselves as fully involved in the benefits realisation process, they play a pivotal role in the development of the criterias that will form the backbone of sustainability success.

4. Knowledge management

Some of the PMO key objectives are learning, adapting, and implementing proper processes that can increase the achievement of strategic objectives and goals. Major project management methodologies and standards such as PRINCE2 and PMI’s PMBOK have their own prescribed processes that support organisational learning. Though knowledge management is nothing new to the PMO, ensuring that a sustainability focus is integrated into the holistic knowledge gathering, evaluation and education process across the entirety of the organisation is a new dimension to this responsibility.

However, how do you capture ‘sustainability knowledge’? As a complex problem and concept, knowledge on sustainability is both a matter of general knowledge, from upcoming methodologies to compliance requirements, and largely tacit or implicit knowledge that is gained from experience. Due to this unique combination, applying this knowledge may not be a straightforward process. As a result, effective knowledge transfer for sustainable project management would need more social forms of knowledge exchange than traditional methods.

5. Training, consulting, and project support

If the PMO is making the standards, they are also tasked with training, providing consultation and project support services to ensure procedures are applicable and are being applied. There are a few market offerings for sustainable project management training such as Green Project Management, and the availability of these programs is set to grow.

However, these programs may be generic and should act more as a starting point for organisations to then adapt to their own context. In the long-term, sustainability experts will become a mainstay of sustainable project and portfolio management. It may be beneficial for businesses to start investing in or expanding their teams to include sustainability experts that can add their special expertise to have training programs and support services that are genuinely impactful.

For decades, sustainability has seemed like an impossible trial looming over us with no real way to successfully overcome it. On a grassroots and individual level, people have been making small progressive steps towards a sustainable future. But the time for slow progress is up, and PMOs need to be at the forefront of this challenge to make a truly sustainable future a reality.

Author: Laith Adel is a principal consultant and general manager of pmo365, with 15+ years’ experience in PMO and Project Portfolio Management. Formerly a civil engineer, then a consultant with Microsoft consulting services, Laith specialises in helping businesses globally guarantee visibility and control over all projects with pmo365 as a Gold Microsoft Partner & Preferred Solution Provider.

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