Abstract:

Introduction:
The increasing societal and regulatory pressure on organizations to be transparent about their impacts on society and the environment, stimulates these organizations to reduce their negative impacts, while sustaining their positive impacts. Goals related to environmental and social impacts are added to the economic strategies of organizations. However, several studies report that realizing these environmental and social strategies is challenging.
Projects are temporary organizations that play an instrumental role in realizing organizational strategies. This enabling role of projects makes them a key element of the implementation of sustainability strategies. In today’s business paradigm, considering sustainability in projects, is therefore a necessary condition for success. The project management world realizes this. Sustainability has established itself in project management research, thereby positioning the project manager as a central change agent in the development or organizations and society towards sustainability.

Problem area:
The development described above changes the role of a project manager: from a task oriented team coordinator and administrator to a sustainability oriented leader. However, this change is not yet reflected in project management education and trainings. Project management courses and programs are often still oriented on the technical and methodological competences of project management, with limited attention to contextual and leadership competences. Several studies indicate this shortcoming in project management training and education, and indicate how a sustainability leadership role of a project manager affects his or her competences. IPMA’s recent Sustainable Project Management ICB4 Reference Guide sets the standard for this and described the sustainability competences of project managers.

Methodology:
The presentation discusses the sustainability competences that project managers need in order to be successful in their role, based on the implementation of specific ‘Sustainable Project Management’ courses in five graduate level programs across Europe. In this multiple case-study the experiences of the participants, experienced and pre-experienced professionals in project management, were investigated based on their post-module evaluation and reflection reports, using a qualitative approach.

Results:
The study found that ‘Sustainable Project Management’ requires a foundational understanding of the concepts of sustainability and (social) responsibility by project managers. This understanding must than be elaborated upon in the analysis what these concepts mean for the practices of project management. However, this analysis, although insightful, is experienced mainly as an academic exercise, when it is not followed up by a real life case study, in which the insights can be applied. Providing practical tools and instruments for the ‘sustainability impact assessment’ of the case study proved to be most valuable.

Objective:
The study aims to share the experiences of the cases and discuss what the integration of sustainability considerations and leadership implies for (higher) education on project management. The presentation targets education professionals in business administration, engineering and information technology. The take away that these professionals can get from this presentation is a new perspective on project management education and how they can integrate this in their curricula.

Keywords:

Project management, sustainability, education.