Sustainable Project Management in Denmark - Conceptualizations and Recommendations

Abstract

Project managers play a key role in the implementation of change pro-cesses, including the transition to sustainable business practices. De-spite the mandate to integrate sustainability into organizational practic-es in both public and private enterprises, many Danish project manag-ers either do not view sustainability as relevant to their practice, or do not possess the necessary knowledge to implement sustainability in their practice. Scandinavian studies with specific recommendations on how to apply sustainability goals to projects currently do not exist. On the other hand, a fair amount of English-language literature on the sub-ject has been published. To better understand if international research can be applied to Danish project management practice, we conducted a scoping review to answer two research questions: 1. How is sustain-able project management conceptualized in the literature? 2. What themes exist in the literature regarding sustainable project manage-ment practice? Based on the answers to these two questions, we de-veloped a set of recommendations for how Danish project-based or-ganizations can conceptualize and implement sustainable project management. Initially, we collected 188 articles and reports on the subject. The number of materials was then reduced after applying sev-eral quality criteria, and the remaining 84 articles were thematically an-alyzed. We identified five commonly used definitions of sustainable project management and can conclude that although the concept has evolved, we cannot discern a precise and usable definition. We there-fore propose a new definition of sustainable project management in this article. Based on the literature, we identified six organizational ar-eas where sustainable project management is meaningful. On this ba-sis, we present a series of recommendations on how project managers in Denmark and other countries can understand and tackle sustainabil-ity in a practice-oriented and meaningful way, both in relation to steer-ing groups, their own work as project managers, project management methods, and the establishment of measurable sustainability indicators in projects.