Disruptive impacts of sustainability in project management and emerging sustainable practices in PMBOK 7th edition

Following concerns about climate change sustainable development has become an urgent need that requires institutional and governmental action. It is obvious that our unsustainable present has been built through projects by neglecting wider issues and Grand Challenges. Sustainability in project management has always been easy to understand but hard to implement in practice due to potential difficulties and lack of implicative solutions in PM standards. A structured review of 164 publications by (Silvius and Schipper 2014) indicates that the PM standards fail to seriously address the sustainability agenda. However, previous studies had a brief review on standards, and they were not updated as the PM standards are evolving during the time to adapt with new business needs. This research is the first study to investigate footprints of sustainability in PMBOK 7th edition with a more holistic and a purely theoretical perspective. The study considers sustainability as a crucial but disruptive aspect to be incorporated into the traditional project management functions. It proposes sustainability requires paradigm shifts which evolves current project management practices in a shift from process-based to a principle-based while creating value instead of focusing on deliverables and outputs.