The Sustainable Project Life Cycle Management Guide is a tool that can be used by project managers in project planning. It will guide the project manager’s understanding of the environmental and social life cycle of their project. Based on the tailored life cycle that this guide helps the project manager to create, the Sustainable Project Life Cycle Management Guide will suggest tools and methods for the mitigation of the environmental and social impact of the project.
The purpose of this tool is to raise the project manager’s environmental and social
management competence and to develop life cycle thinking skills. This guide is a competence building tool, in that using this guide the project manager will learn how to practice
environmental management and corporate social responsibility in a comprehensive project life cycle perspective, i.e. sustainable project life cycle management. The goal of the guide is for the project manager to internalize the steps in the guide as they develop their life cycle thinking skills so that life cycle management in incorporated in the project management system at Faveo. Once the competence of the project manager is raised and LCM is internalized, the project manager may in the future not need to use the guide.
The guide seeks to not only develop life cycle thinking in the project manager, but also their ability to recognize environmental and social aspects, stakeholders and impact mitigation tools and techniques. The guide is composed of four sections: The Project Life Cycle,
Environmental Life Cycle Management, Social Life Cycle Management and Communication Recommendations.
This guide is set-up so that the project manager will need to answer a series of questions, as well as supply information about the project in each section. In Section 1, the answers to the questions will determine which stages of the life cycle are relevant to the particular project type. In Section 2 and Section 3, there are both questions and worksheets to develop the best strategy for managing the environmental and social aspects of the project.
In developing the tailored project life cycle, Section 1 provides the input for the following sections which are intended to guide the project manager’s decision-making and management in the project. In Section 2, environmental management tools are suggested for the project manager to use in the management of the project. In Section 3, a recommended stakeholder
38 and social responsibility strategy is created for the project. Section 4 is a guide for
environmental and social communication.
The example presented in the guide is the result of the test application in a project at Faveo. Because of time constraints, the guide was applied to a completed project and the project manager filled out the guide as if they were in the planning stage of the project. The results of this application are explained in Chapter 6, and the resulting worksheets from the application are presented in Appendix 3.
Section 1: The Project Life Cycle
The guide begins with explaining what the project life cycle includes. This was previously explained in this thesis in section 4.3. The explanation begins with the general project life cycle and explains the stages in a table, and then it leads to what the asset life cycle is and how they are related to each other. To simplify for the project manager, there is only the general project life cycle and the asset life cycle. The project manager decides how many life cycles to include by answering the questions in this section. The asset of a project can produce another asset, for example. After this brief introduction to what a project life cycle includes, the project manager must begin modeling their own life cycle specific to their project by answering questions and referring them to different life cycle scenarios based on their answers.
The purpose of modeling the life cycle and tailoring it to the specific project is to make the project manager understand how the decisions made in the project will affect other stages of the project life cycle (the term project life cycle includes all asset life cycles.) This exercise makes the project manager aware of the boundaries of their project’s life cycle. The model of the life cycle developed in section 1 is used in the remaining sections in the guide.
Section 2: Environmental Life Cycle Management
Based on the information given in Section 1, the project manager should be able to identify the basic stages of the life cycle that are specific to the project in question. In Section 2, the environmental aspects and mitigation options will be identified. Once these are identified, tools are suggested for input into the project manager’s decision making.
The section begins by explaining the terms environmental aspects and environmental impacts. This leads to the environmental aspect analysis, where the project manager fills in the
applicable environmental aspect in the life cycle stage of the project in which they are found. The model that was created in Section 1 is used as a worksheet for identifying environmental aspects. The generic or specific environmental aspect checklist can be used. In the specific checklist there are mitigation options under various environmental aspects that the project manager can implement in their project. The specific checklist also includes positive environmental aspects (such as environmental awareness education) to inspire the project manager to positively influence the environment wherever possible.
This section ends by explaining how LCA and environmental LCC can provide important input into the project manager’s decision making.
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Section 3: Social Life Cycle Management
This section again uses the life cycle developed in Section 1 in order to identify social
responsibility issues in the life cycle of the specific project. Section 3 begins by explaining the term stakeholder and explains to the project manager how to identify all the stakeholders in the life cycle of their particular project. Once the stakeholders are identified in each life cycle stage, the project manager classifies each stakeholder using the power, urgency and
legitimacy typology developed by Mitchell et al. (1997). Based on the classification of the stakeholder, stakeholder management advice is given based on Mitchell et al. (1997). The next step in Section 3 is to identify the social aspects. With the completion of the stakeholder analysis, there may be social aspects of the project life cycle that are not
addressed. A way to include all social aspects of a project life cycle, it may be necessary to do a social impact assessment (SIA). This is done in a similar way as identifying the
environmental aspects in Section 2. There is a checklist that the project manager uses to fill in the social aspect number in the applicable life cycle stage in the life cycle scenario worksheet. This social aspect checklist also gives the appropriate mitigation techniques for the social impacts that they cause.
Section 4: Communication Recommendations
The section recommends a communication procedure that the project manager can use throughout the life of their involvement in the project life cycle. There is currently no integrated sustainability reporting system at Faveo. While it is recommended that they adopt integrated reporting such as that outlined in the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative,) the
communication recommendations outlined in the Sustainable Project Life Cycle Management Guide explains what the project manager can do on the project level in terms of
communicating and reporting environmental and corporate social responsibility. It is not the goal of this guide to provide a reporting system for the sustainability of projects. This section of the guide only provides guidelines in which the project manager can follow. This has the potential to develop into a standard sustainability reporting format for projects in the future. The first part explains what communication procedures the project manager should take to build relationships with the stakeholders. This is based on the stakeholder analysis that was completed in section 3 of the guide.
The second part guides the project manager to the environmental and social information they should be recording. A checklist of the environmental and social performance indicators from the GRI are given with instructions for the project manager to identify what indicators are applicable with respect to the life cycle of their project and to record or keep track of information regarding those applicable indicators. The recommendations for reporting are given to encourage Faveo and other project management consultancies to adopt the GRI on the corporate level by gathering information concerning the environmental and social performance indicators on the project level.