Sustainable Project Management Practices and Stimuli Factors – Perspective of Young Project Management Professionals

The role of projects in the transition of organizations towards sustainability is addressed in a growing number of studies, and sustainable project management (SPM) is considered one of the most important project management trends today. Organizations have shown a great interest in incorporating sustainability into managerial concepts but there are not many studies investigating the adoption of sustainable project management. Furthermore, an important issue to drive the transition to sustainability is a matter of personal stimuli factors to adopt SPM. As the topic of SPM is most pressing for the younger generation professionals, we explored their experiences with SPM and questioned what stimulates them to implement SPM. Survey was deployed within the network of young project manager (PM) professionals. Results show that sustainability is personally important to them, but they don’t implement it so broadly. There seems to be the lack of knowledge on SPM and their companies do not share the same level of enthusiasm towards the SPM adoption. The most important stimuli factor is ‘future generation can live a normal life’ but there are also some noticeable differences among respondents in stimuli factor rankings. As this is the first survey of this type, verification of the revealed trends on a larger sample would be beneficial as there is a need to understand how young project managers can be trained to become future leaders of sustainable transformation.