Towards a conceptual framework for sustainable project portfolio management

Abstract

Currently, more and more organisations are embedding sustainability into their business strategy, but implementation remains a challenging task. Projects and project portfolios have proven to be 'powerful strategic weapons' in strategy implementation, although the current methods and practices for project portfolio management (PPM) fail to integrate sustainability. Therefore, we have aimed to develop a theoretically founded framework that integrates sustainability considerations into PPM. From a high level literature analysis we have derived four key concepts of sustainability and five concepts of project portfolio management. By mapping these concepts we propose a new objective for sustainable PPM and a conceptual framework. The framework is characterised as an open intra organisational model, linking stakeholders representing economic, environmental and social interests to the strategy planning and PPM-process through a sense making process. The framework embraces the possibility to incorporate emerging sustainability strategies derived from project execution.