Sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time. As the role that projects play in sustainable development is still developing, the integration of the concepts of sustainability into project management is an important trend in project management today. However, despite the conceptual understanding of this integration, the literature still provides little practical guidance on how to apply sustainability to project management. This article aims to contribute to the integration of sustainable development and project stakeholder management by developing practical tools and frameworks that enable project managers to identify stakeholders, assess stakeholders, and plan stakeholder engagement activities with a consideration of sustainable development. The study takes a pragmatic design science approach in developing these tools and frameworks. The resulting frameworks build upon the concepts of sustainable development and form an elaboration of the documented practices of project stakeholder management.

Projects and project management (PM) are becoming a way of working, and many changes in society have evolved because of projects. However, will the societal agenda also influence the project management discipline? Societal issues generated by urban population growth and rapid urbanization arise in cities. Making a city “smart” and sustainable is emerging as a strategy to mitigate these issues. How does this development impact project management? In order to answer this question, we performed meaningful learning by mapping the concepts for Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC) and project management and developing prior and post concept maps. We identified four major findings describing the implication of societal issues on project management: quality of life acts as a societal objective for PM; PM governs autonomous projects with new business models; and PM success criteria are related to stakeholders and long-term effects, as well as extensive connection to the digital world with consideration of the privacy and ethics. From this, we were able to redefine the definition of project management as “a collaborative endeavor of all affected stakeholders equivalently participating in exploring and exploiting, via an autonomous temporary organization, fit-for-purpose deliverables with connections to the digital platform, thereby aiming to prepare the entities of the affected stakeholders for the future”. Our study is novel and relevant for PM and SSC practice: societal issues are on the strategy agenda of many governments and companies, and these will drive the projects that are performed in this environment. The project management community should align with this development, since these challenges are part of their environment. As a start, a comprehensive understanding of the impact of societal issues is relevant to build new definitions, competences, and supporting processes.

Sustainable project management is becoming important and the sustainability concepts of people, the planet and profit needs to be incorporated into any type of project. This article focuses on the behavior of the project manager per se and the stimuli patterns that motivate them to adhere to sustainable project management. Three stimuli patterns are used i.e., intrinsically motivated, pragmatic and task driven. To determine which of these patterns influence a project manager, a quantitative pair-wise comparison was used. Twelve statements were used in a pair-wise comparison resulting in a combination of 66 questions. A sample of 101 project managers was analyzed to determine the stimuli patterns. The results indicate that the most prevalent stimulus pattern is the intrinsically motivated pattern with the other two patterns equally important. The results are consistent across gender, age and types of projects as well as industries. It can be concluded that for this study, project managers incorporate sustainability because they feel that it is something they should do. The motivation to consider sustainability is dominated by their behavioral beliefs and the characteristics of the project, or the opinion of others, do not play a large role. This research contributes to the larger body of knowledge with regards to sustainable project management and specifically to the human behavior of project managers. This research addresses the gap that currently exists in current literature where the focus is on the product’s sustainability and sustainable processes.

As projects are evolving from tactical level ‘tasks’ to societally-relevant ‘instruments of change’, the theories, methods, and practices of project management need to evolve, too. Academic programs on project management, logically, should be frontrunners in this development, which calls for societally-relevant and ‘responsible’ project management education. Following the model of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education, some first ideas on what Responsible Project Management Education should entail developed. The study presented in this article uses meta-synthesis to explore the meaning and characteristics of responsible project management education. The study concludes nine characteristics that provide a conceptual starting point for more empirical research on the topic.