Sustainability in projects

Project management success criteria traditionally deal with project specific constraints and objectives as well as with the business objectives.

Former ones are evaluated in the short term, i.e. during project planning and execution and right after the project is finished. Business objectives are often evaluated long after the completion of the project. So called triple bottom line accounting and reporting requires that costs, benefits and effects are measured in all three domains - environmental, social and economical. It requires from the onset a careful consideration of both activities within the project (processes) and results (products and services) that the project produces. GPM consortium refers to this approach as P5 concept, which comes from the triple bottom line related words 'People', 'Planet' and 'Profit' as well as from the short ('Process') and long ('Product') term aspects. Consortium has developed a PRiSM method, which is a process-based project management methodology that highlights areas of sustainability and integrates them into the traditional core project phases. Sustainable project management includes:

• Evaluation and assessment of environmental and social impacts on top of the usual business results. General metrics and indicators such as Human Development Index (HDI), Ecological footprint, Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and Genuine Progress Index (GPI) have been developed for national and global domains. Projects need their own.
• Reporting of activities and their impacts in all three domains. Frameworks such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) help to put this kind of reporting in practise.