These days sustainability is mainstream, but when I first started managing projects, things were very different. If business leaders then had asked their employees to come up with some ideas for how the organization could become more sustainable, there would have been a whole lot of silence. Then someone would have put their hand up at the back of the room and suggested that the last person to leave each day made sure that the lights were turned off. That’s about it. It’s not that we weren’t doing the right sustainability projects, it’s that we weren’t doing any sustainability projects.
Things got better over the next few years – we moved on to memos asking staff to turn off their monitors before leaving. But it wasn’t exactly sustainability in the way that we think about it today. The issue now isn’t that there aren’t any ideas for how to become more sustainable, it’s that there are too many. And that causes its own challenges.
Doing the right thing
When it comes to sustainability, all ideas are good ideas, but there is no doubt that some are better than others. Asking your employees to engage with sustainability is an excellent approach. Aside from the potential to generate more, and more innovative, ideas, it also involves everyone in the sustainability concept, raising awareness and commitment. It is also a way for you to demonstrate your commitment to environmentally conscious policies and investments, something that both your employees and your customers expect.
However, it is also going to result in a lot of suggestions and proposals, not all of which are going to deliver the benefits that you need, and not all of which are going to align with your sustainability priorities. That means that you need to be able to capture all of those ideas and then evaluate them against objective criteria before deciding which initiatives to pursue. How can you do that effectively?
Leveraging the Sciforma Vantage Platform
That’s where Sciforma’s Vantage platform comes in. It offers a central intake funnel that can capture all ideas from anywhere in your organization. Your business leaders can define objective criteria related to sustainability goals, and then, using built-in and configurable scoring models, they can score every proposal against those criteria.
This helps your team identify those investments that optimally align with your sustainability priorities, and provides a first pass of which initiatives your organization should approve. However, things are a bit more complicated than that. You also have other priorities that you must meet – revenue, profitability, cost management, risk control, and so on. Organizations need to review and prioritize all of these proposals. And then you must combine everything into a single strategic portfolio.
Balancing Priorities in a Strategic Portfolio
Sciforma Vantage can help you do that as well. As well as identifying how individual investment proposals align with one or more of your strategic priorities, it allows you to model different potential portfolio mixes. This helps your decision-makers choose the best-fit portfolio that balances contributions to all goals with the ability to deliver, while ensuring that your business isn’t exposed to unacceptable levels of risk.
Finally, using easily customizable standard templates, Sciforma Vantage enables your team to communicate all of these decisions consistently to all your business areas, eliminating confusion and uncertainty. And with details of not just the decisions, but how decisions were reached, you can provide feedback to everyone who submitted proposals for sustainability initiatives, keeping them engaged and helping them to improve future proposals. That strengthens your sustainability foundation and drives continued success.
Of course, once you have chosen the right investments to pursue and you are doing the right sustainability projects, you then have to deliver. And that’s what we’ll look at in the next blog.
