Sustainability and Whole Lifecycle Thinking

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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As project managers, what is the single thing that we focus on the most? For most of us the answer is probably the successful completion of the project--generally defined as the completion of deliverables on time, budget and quality. Some of us may have a degree of accountability for the business goals post deployment, but that’s still not a common project management function.

For stakeholders, and the sponsor in particular, the focus is a little longer term--they will have targets that need to be met around revenue, market adoption and cost savings, but these are still fairly short-term focused (the first quarters and perhaps years of a product’s life in the event of a product development initiative).

As environmental concerns and sustainability become bigger issues across all aspects of society, there is an argument for taking a rather longer-term view of product development--the concept of whole lifecycle thinking, ensuring that the costs of the product are considered from birth to retirement. In this article, I want to look at that--and in particular what project managers can do to help develop and implement the concept.

The lifecycle concept
Essentially, lifecycle-based product development is simply taking a longer-term view than we traditionally take. We may develop a product with an expectation that it will be in the market for a few years …

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