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Date
I promised to explore some more points from the McKinsey Global Survey[1] results. The on-line survey was available from February 11th, 2014 – February 21st, 2014. According to the article “3,344 executives representing a full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures” responded to the survey. In a previous post I wrote about aligning sustainability to a company’s business goals, missions, and values. Aligning sustainability with corporate vision is critical and represents the “hub” of our Sustainability Wheel™ (a tool our upcoming book Sustainability in Projects, Programs, and Portfolios: Realizing Enterprise Benefits and Goals). Another very important aspect of sustainability is “reputation management.”
The survey results point out that “year over year, large shares of executives cite reputation as a top reason their companies address sustainability.” Of the “core” activities reported in the survey, “reputation has the most potential value for their industries” and “many of this year’s respondents say their companies are not pursuing the reputation-building activities that would maximize that financial value.” Right there is a hint as to what types of projects there may be in the future. Project manager's utilizing softer skills (communication. negotiation, motivation) in an organization could have the impact organizations are looking for to boost the reputation, and boost the bottom-line. The chart[2] below is very telling in that reputation has been one of the top reasons to address sustainability for the last few years.

Once again, it is the hub, or the connection between the organizations mission and the sustainability efforts, that needs to be highlighted and then pursued as part of the overall strategy of the organization. Where the project manager can be of assistance is to include actions within their plans that overtly forward the organization’s sustainability efforts, keeping in mind that each project is unique and may need a unique plan to improve or at least emphasize sustainability reputation. Why do we believe that the project manager can play an important role here?
PMs can play an important role because two of the top three reasons (reported in the survey) that are key to improving sustainability reputation are “communicating company’s sustainability activities to consumers” (stakeholders) and “building and maintaining external-stakeholder relationships.” Doesn’t that sound like something we do and have always done?
One of the major issues we see with all of this is how an organization easily evaluates their sustainability stance and efforts, versus how they are perceived by other companies both within their industry and external, as their standing with all of their stakeholders . New tools available for evaluation are way more complicated that they have to be; too many moving parts and very uninteresting. Since we wrote Green Project Management, we have been researching and developing a simple, exciting solution for organizations to be able to easily evaluate their project, program, and portfolio efforts with regard to sustainability and then easily set sustainability goals and realize the benefits. Unfortunately, it seems to take more time to develop a simple solution that a complex one, but it will be worth the wait. Look for the book sometime the Spring/Summer of 2015.
[1] http://mckinsey.com/insights
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: August 25, 2014 03:36 PM |
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