Implementing Sustainable Management with ISO 21500 Standards

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges that companies are facing today is adopting a sustainable project management strategy. Those challenges include the integrations of sustainable practices while securing the satisfaction of stakeholders and simultaneously providing profit. It is becoming increasingly important to incorporate sustainability in projects since stakeholders require ethicality, eco-friendliness, and economic efficiency during the life cycle of a project. Sustainable project management deals with planning, observing, and assessing the project. Evaluating the environmental, social, and economic features of the project's life cycle is an important part for it to achieve sustainability. How successful the sustainability part of the project is depends heavily on how active the project's team and parties are in the project, programs, and portfolios. Integrating sustainability into project management has both strengths and weaknesses. The main advantages of adapting sustainability into project management is the potential of increasing the value of the company, creating opportunities, reducing risk, and increasing profit. While this type of project management is very beneficial for businesses there are some weaknesses. With integrating a sustainability policy into a company comes an additional cost to increase knowledge and skills within the company. The sustainable part of project management demands a lot of time and money. This can be discouraging for project teams since the outcomes of sustainability is a long-term object rather than a short-term. Finally, it can be very costly, especially for smaller companies, to implement sustainability.