Sustainable project management in Turkey: Current practices and interrelations with performance

In our era of sustainability challenges, the main concern of operations management is defined as preventing the effects of high consumption that is caused by rapidly changing technology and related production increases. Resource efficiency for minimizing global climate change forced all methods of production to evolve and convert themselves into sustainable approaches. Criteria for success has switched from being cost or time focused to being less harmfull for environment and more contributive for eliminating impacts of climate and social conflict crisis. In this context, among other topics of operations management, sustainable project management emerged as a promising field for organizations with a rapid increase in literature on it. Project management is a management process that is mostly carried out by the organization. However implementing the dimensions of sustainability in project management context is a hard task as project management prioritizes business performance with rigit triple constraints of budget, time and scope. In developing economies context where the costs are significantly of higher importance, sustainable project management practices stayed insufficient and related studies and research on sustainable project management in these countries remained weak. To fulfill the gap of knowledge about this topic, the aim of this study is to explore the practicing level of sustainable project management in Turkey, orientation towards sustainable project management and interrelations between sustainable project management and characteristics of companies and project types (industry, experience, scale of projects.) and project management practitioners, as well as understanding linkages between sustainable project management and project or business performance. The analysis is based on the data that reflects the view and perceptions of project managers/ professionals in Turkey. A survey was developed for evaluation impacts of sustainable project management on business and project performance in Turkey by taking into account literature review. Responses from 120 participants are analyzed by statistical methods (descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, factor analysis, difference tests that are t-Test, ANOVA and correlations analysis) where SPSS was utilized. Four Factor items are found by applying factor analysis, and, difference tests have been performed regarding age of company, age of responders, gender, industry, success rate of project budget, time and resources, scale of project, overall project performance and business performance. Findings revealed that sustainability strategies of company based on organizational and project management has a significant impact on experience of company but their current action about sustainable project management. Mature and scaled organizations have higher orientations towards sustainability in their organizational practices and project management practices. Consequently, organizations are still in learning phase bout sustainability and sustainable project management. Keywords: Project Management, Sustainability, Sustainable Project Management