Sustainability

Photos of the Sustainability Pulse Launch in Luanda, Angola

In this episode, Ricardo reflects on a conversation with a project manager who claimed it wasn’t his responsibility to consider the long-term impact of his project. Ricardo argues that today’s project managers must go beyond delivering on time and within budget. They should evaluate the ethical and societal impacts of their work, ensuring it aligns with the greater good.

In this episode, Ricardo discusses the concept of value in projects, explaining that true value goes beyond profit. He questions whether delivering projects on time and on budget truly adds value if they do not benefit society. Using the example of building a bridge that “connects nothing to nowhere,” he highlights the importance of sustainability and the social impact of projects.

The book offers a thought-provoking yet highly applicable resource for you and your organization to make sense of the future. It brings together a powerful collection of executives, thought leaders, practitioners, and researchers from around the world to map out what achieving truly sustainable innovation means for both individuals and organizations.

Join Ricardo Vargas and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez in a free-flow conversation about their breakthrough Harvard Business Review article "How AI Will Transform Project Management," published one year ago. In the conversation, Antonio and Ricardo will discuss trends, new technologies, and challenges project managers and organizations face to transform our work with technology.

Join Ricardo Vargas and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez in an exclusive webinar about their new Harvard Business Review Article: The Opportunities at the Intersection of AI, Sustainability, and Project Management. There are unprecedented opportunities at the intersection of AI, project management, and sustainability.

In this episode, Ricardo discusses the broader context of AI in sustainability. While environmental sustainability is often the focus, Ricardo emphasizes the importance of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. He draws an analogy with the project management triangle (scope, time, cost) and introduces the "three C's": complexity, cost, and carbon.

Businesses are scrambling to signal compliance with ESG (environmental, social, and governance principles). However, as ESG entrenched itself in the mainstream, it lost much of its original meaning and impact and became more of a marketing tool. Ricardo Vargas writes that the problem may lie in the decoupling of the ‘social’ and ‘governance’ components from ‘environmental’ concerns. He uses the example of a project to rebuild homes in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to show how all three ESG components can work together. 

Informal discussion with SITA about the future of project management and their case study featured on the book PM Next Generation, published by Wiley.

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Project Management in Agribusiness. He explains how we can apply project management in this segment, which is so different for many of us. Ricardo comments that agribusiness is transforming as powerful as the technology area, using digitalization, georeferencing e technology, and project to select crops that will be used in this area.

Infrastructure projects have great potential to impact the sustainability of cities due to typically being large-sized projects and having a high level of intervention. Thus, evaluating the sustainability of these projects through sustainability reports is highly relevant, mainly regarding their impacts on the environment, public health, and the local economy.

Original of the thesis presented to the Graduate Program in Civil Engineering at Universidade Federal Fluminense, as a partial requirement for obtaining the Doctor's Degree. Concentration Area: Management, Production and Environment. The thesis was written in Brazilian Portuguese.

In this episode, Ricardo continues to talk about the "Global Reporting Initiative" and how one can report sustainability aspects in his/her projects and why this is relevant to the organization and to the society.

In this episode, Ricardo talks about the "Global Reporting Initiative", an association that develops standards that help organizations of various sectors to identify and report what they do to build a more sustainable world, which goes beyond the environmental aspect.