Have you thought about if your projects can affect the environment and or if it has planet sustainability attributes?

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) is held in Paris. The objective is for nations of the world to get together and to achieve legally binding agreements on climate. BBC has a live stream of the conference that will run until December 11th.

What does this mean for the rest of us? As we wait for negotiations, agreements, and new policies to go into effect, our planet will continue towards climate change. What if millions of us made small efforts to do something to help today?

The NY Times has a good article for personal contributions that you can do from home.

What about businesses? Most enterprise initiatives are driven by projects. Are we considering sustainability when establishing project methodology and process planning?

I'm compelled to bring up this topic this week since it's in the news, so it's a good time to start discussing how we can focus on sustainability process steps in our projects.

Here are some initial questions to ask:

• Does your organization have sustainability objectives?

• Can you define sustainability objectives for all operational or capital projects?

• Are your team members engaged in discussing sustainability?
  

Organizations Making a Difference Today

At PieMatrix, we have two alliance partners who are already making an impact in sustainability.

Green Project Management (GPM), a PieMatrix customer and partner, is an organization built exclusively to spread the idea of sustainability for projects. They offer certification, learning, and a methodology called PRiSM™. GPM has partnered with PieMatrix by making their PRiSM methodology available as a ready-to-execute PRiSM process in Pie. PRiSM integrates sustainability into core project phases to reduce negative environmental and social impacts. They have a footprint in many countries around the world.

International Institute of Learning (IIL), a PieMatrix customer and partner, is PMI's largest international training partner. They recently hosted International Project Management Day 2015 with Sustainability as its major theme.

Key speakers included Curtis Ravenel, Bloomberg's Global Head of Sustainable Business. His talk was about corporate sustainability. Dr. Harold Kerzner, IIL Sr. Executive Director of Project Management and author of the new book called Project Management 2.0 also address sustainability.

There’s movement in the market.

What's your organization doing to incorporate sustainability as a corporate stewardship? If your business doesn't have such an integrated policy, do what you can to plant some seeds. If it does, ensure your project methodologies have process content that aligns with your sustainability objectives and their easily executable with a process tool, such as Pie.

Maybe in small ways, millions of people can take part in saving our planet for our future generations.

Written by: Paul Dandurand, PieMatrix CEO

Photo by: Jordan Sanchez