The Urgency for Industrial Project Delivery to Evolve

Karen's career has taken her through various roles within the extractives industry, with a heavy focus on managing and executing projects involving the characterization and mitigation of environmental risks and opportunities. She offers strategic direction, consulting, training and implementation services in the realms of embedding sustainability goals and environmental assessment requirements into business operations, strategic plans, decision making processes, and project plans and execution.

  Organizational Culture   Sustainability  

How often have you been approached by social- or environment-minded folks about integrating sustainability into your projects, designs and systems? Never? Only on particular projects? More and more? Or all the time?

If you were asked to do this, would you know where to start? Would you understand how to educate and gain the most traction with your teams? This article highlights the necessity of making positive changes to our PMO guidance, and to integrating sustainability into our practices.

A Stagnant Playing Field
The industrial world is a fairly heavily regulated environment, starting with a rigorous level of baseline and impact studies required before proposing a development, to specified operational ranges, monitoring and reporting requirements.

In natural resources, there are additional requirements for plans and associated financial bonds to cover the costs of shutdowns, remediation and closure of a site in the longer term. Many people in the public realm are unaware of just how much work goes into assessing and managing risks for these types of developments before they can actually happen.

While this oversight duly protects humans and the environment, it is often the language embedded in regulations that introduces a bit of a, let’s say, barrier to innovation. A lot of risk is placed on the designer when …

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