Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success: The Sustainability Wheel

Business sustainability is the management of environmental, social, and financial demands to ensure responsible, ethical, and ongoing success. Businesses appear to have not only bought into integrating sustainability into their business plans, but have started profiting from it. This book helps project, program, and portfolio managers to integrate sustainability thinking into their projects. It contains tools that enable you to baseline present sustainability efforts and analyze the gaps between the baseline and the strategy.

In Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success: The Sustainability Wheel, the authors present advice on how enterprises can attain higher levels of sustainability and sustained project success. The book introduces a new tool called the Sustainability WheelTM that tells you where you are and what you need to improve.

The Sustainability Wheel identifies six interrelated dimensions of sustainability integration:

• Respect – the sustainability philosophy of the organization
• Reflect – how that philosophy is conveyed internally
• Connect – how external stakeholders view the organization
• Detect – how the organization identifies, analyzes, and responds to sustainability threats
• Reject – how the organization eliminates inefficiency and waste
• Project – how the organization identifies, develops, and measures opportunities and converts them to projects and programs aligned with its central mission

The book contains a set of questions designed to measure your organization’s sustainability in each dimension. Armed with this valuable feedback, you can determine priorities for sustainability improvement, validate that present sustainability efforts are within your organization’s mission/vision, and provide a mechanism to integrate sustainability into everyday operations. This can lead your organization to key benefits such as improved innovation, reduced waste, higher morale, and simply better-executed projects that are more fully in line with the enterprise goals.

Watch a video about the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfPSPvCg6QY

Rich Maltzman, PMP, has been an engineer since 1978 and a project management supervisor since 1988, including a two-year assignment in The Netherlands in which he built a team of project managers overseeing deployments of telecom networks in Europe and the Middle East. His project work has been diverse, including projects such as the successful deployment of the entire video and telecom infrastructure for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, and the 2006 integration of the program management offices (PMOs) of two large merging corporations. As a second, but intertwined career, Rich has also focused on consulting and teaching.

Rich’s educational background includes a BSEE from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MSIE from Purdue University. In addition, Rich has a mini-MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a master’s certificate in international business management granted jointly from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and INSEAD of France. Rich received his PMP in 2000 and was certified by Change Catalysts as a CQ Certified Change Management Professional in 2015.

Dave Shirley, PMP, has been an instructor and consultant, with more than 30 years of experience in management and project management, in the corporate, public, and small-business arenas. He is currently a graduate faculty member of Boston University, teaching courses in project management and developing and teaching Green IT. He developed, directed, and taught a project management certification program at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He previously taught graduate courses in corporate social responsibility for Southern New Hampshire University Online and project management at New England College. Dave has presented papers on project management and sustainability at conferences in Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States.

Dave’s educational background includes a BA in geology from Windham College, Putney, Vermont, and an honors MBA from Monmouth University in Long Branch, New Jersey. He also holds master’s certificates in project management from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, and American University in Washington, DC, and is certified as a project management professional (PMP) by the Project Management Institute (PMI).