Engineering and project management: A long journey towards sustainability

Al Barazi, Rana; Kishk, Mohammed

Abstract

The environmental, social, and financial sustainability around projects is currently one of the most serious alarming concerns. However, the progress made in developing contemporary methods for the evaluation and adoption of sustainable project management is still in early stages [1], [2]. This is because the focus is still on the revenue of projects and the performance of organisations via the successful achievement of strategies by means of portfolios and programs [3]
This combination of Planet, People, and Profit are extensively stressed in the UN Sustainable Development Goals especially that around 2/3 of the global population are expected to live in urban areas by the year 2050 [4]. This is directly related to the field of engineering, among other professions and practices.
To achieve sustainability, in the current era, engineers need to change the way natural resources are used thus have professional, social, and ethical responsibility. The safety and amount of material and energy inputs and outputs must be controlled by designers rather than treating or cleaning up waste. Design objectives should include targeted durability while making design decisions on recycle, reuse, or positive disposition, embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment. Designing solutions that are "one size fits all" or have unnecessary capacity should be viewed as a design mistake. To encourage disassembly and value retention, material diversity in multi-component items should be kept to a minimum. Energy and material inputs should be replenishable rather than finite. The design of goods, activities, and technologies must consider functionality in a business "hereafter," together with synergy and connection with streams of the materials and energy that seem to be accessible.[7]. However, skilled engineers are not able to deliver such successful sustainable projects unless a blend of technical and non-technical -including interpersonal, and conceptual- skills assist them to explore and act correctly [5]. As such, sustainable project management is the future profession for engineers with significant autonomous responsibilities apart from the portfolio manager or the sponsor [6].
In this context, the aim of this paper is to investigate the role of engineers and the typical issues they face in defining and promoting sustainable project management principles and techniques while enabling the businesses to obtain a competitive edge. This entails a focus transition from controlling time, cost, and quality into controlling social, environmental, and economic effects. We will hereby propose changing the project manager perspective from just focusing on achieving the project requirements to taking ownership of the sustainable growth of organisations and society. The results of this study can be used to feed into theory, practice, and policy.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 4th International Conference on Civil Engineering Fundamentals and Applications (ICCEFA'23)
• Start Date: Dec 4, 2023
• End Date: Dec 6, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 15, 2023
• Keywords: Sustainability, Sustainable Project Management, Engineering, Transformation
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10866834
• Related Public URLs: https://iccefa.com/