Many roles are engaged in reaching sustainability through projects. Foremost, the governance bodies of an organisation need to set the directions. ISO 21505:2017  defines a governing body as “person, group or entity accountable for the governance of an organization, organizations or a part of an organization.” This may be a project steering committee, a body of executive or senior executives, a single executive, or other management oversight bodies, depending on the culture, legal and organisational context. The governance of projects, programmes and portfolios is an integral part of the organization’s overall governance and should thus support the organization’s commitment to sustainability, including but not limited to economic, environmental and social responsibility.

The project sponsor is another role that carries accountabilities for sustainability, defining the project charter and the business case with sustainability in mind as well as supporting the project manager and the team during project execution. In addition, the sponsor should also take care for the outcomes, for the impact and for the strategic benefits from the end of a project or programme until the end of utilizing its deliverables.  Thus, organisations should focus more on the role of project sponsors, otherwise there is a big gap between the strategic intent of an organisation and its operational activities. A project sponsors shall align the strategic ambition of the organisation towards sustainability in clearly defined objectives, guidance and proper decision making for the project, programme or portfolio management and bridge between the temporary parts of the organisation (projects) and the permanent parts (line functions).

The project management office (PMO) or the project management department´s leadership typically defines standards for project, programme and portfolio management. These standards should provide guidance on how to reach sustainability through projects, programmes and portfolios. Training, consulting and coaching could support project managers and other roles in performing their tasks. Internal or external audits could also support the people to follow and continuously improve the standards. An audit could include the suppliers and their deliveries during the execution of a project. In some industries, regulators are performing a part of those audits in order to ensure organisations comply to specific standards (e.g. health and safety audits).

The project manager and the project team define, plan, monitor and control as well as close a project taking sustainability into account. As previously mentioned, their focus is the execution phase of a project, thus they have less influence on the pre- and post-phases of a project. In part 2 of our blogpost series  we described that an “ab initio” view on projects means applying sustainable practices, methods, tools and managing the project itself in a sustainable manner (e.g. saving resources where possible). There are many interactions between the project manager and the various roles involved in a project, e.g. reporting to the Governing Bodies to which extent sustainability has been reached during the project lifecycle, helping to improve the organisation´s overall governance and the management system. The project manager is typically also the main interface to many other stakeholders (e.g. team, suppliers, clients, partners) and thus can support sustainability through cooperation, communication and coordination.