Response Donnie

Beyond the Bolt-On: Making Sustainability Core to How We Deliver Project

Good afternoon, my name is Donnie McNicol. I'm Director of Team Animation on A7C Ltd. and I also work with other consultancies in the field of major project delivery.

So, I am going to be talking about a passion around sustainability and carbon. Having written an article on this, crikey, must be 15 years ago for the RICS.

So, we all know leaders and teams make decisions continuously, often without the data and capabilities to interpret the data and clearly make decisions. Now, that I would say is likely the worst case around sustainability. It's a relatively new field, not very well understood, and very specialised.

So, what I'm hoping to do during the talk is to describe how to embed sustainability data and reporting into the project as a norm, particularly using the PMI's GPM P5 standards to make it into normal project delivery.

So, I'm going to apply some principles from the emerging field of human-centric data that myself and Jonathan Norman have been developing over the last few years that should make the standard more accessible, usable and value-adding.

So, I'll show you how to broaden involvement of the project team and stakeholders, avoid reliance on small cadre specialists, look at how the sustainability decisions and data impact or are impacted by the project and vice versa, and also look at things like how this can be tied to ESG and carbon reporting at the same time, which is another field which the project's people don't always overlap into, but may do, and also into other broader human-centric data aspects such as biases, psychological safety and so on.

So, ultimately, it's to try and blend using the PMI standard as the basis into traditional project controls, PMO work and reporting to give decision makers a single comprehensive view of the world to allow them to make better decisions. That's broadly what we're aiming to achieve.