RELATING SUSTAINABILITY PRINCIPLES TO MANAGING PROJECTS: RESULTS OF THE “sustPM” RESEARCH PROJECT

Sustainability principles are of relevance in permanent organizations as well as in temporary organizations, i.e. in projects and programmes. Sustainable development can be defined by sustainability principles such as ecologic, social and economic-orientation; short, mid and long term orientation; local, regional and global-orientation. As a normative concept it is value based. To be able to integrate these sustainability principles into management processes of projects, the sustPM Matrix has been developed within the research project sustPM. This project was performed by an international team under the guidance of Project Management Group of Wirtschaftsuniversität (WU) Vienna together with Roland Gareis Consulting and was financed by the Project Management Institute. I was research contributor, part of a team coordinated by Prof. Roland Gareis of the WU Vienna. The research has been conducted in 2011 and the results will be published in 2013. The objectives of this research project were: consideration of sustainability principles in project initiation and project management approaches analysed and hypotheses, models, and methods relating sustainability principles to project assignment as well as project management developed. In this paper I present the sustPM project and reflect on the results of the research overall and I discuss the case studies in which I demonstrate how sustainability principles can be integrated in project management in practice.