Sustainability and Agility in Project Management: Contradictory or Complementary?

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the new perspective within the sustainability in project management considering contemporary project management methodologies, practices, knowledge and skills and future trends in this management discipline. One of the main issues at the begging of the 21st century is how to achieve sustainable development. Sustainability as a concept is present at the society level and at the business level as well, therefore there is an increasing effort among researchers and practitioners to integrate project management and sustainable development. In recent years project management discipline is also facing a growing challenge of how to create value and respond to changing the environment, in order to profit. Facing this challenge requires agility. Agile management is now present not only in software development but in other industries too. Based on the analysis of sustainable project management concept, the main challenges of its application, and the key elements of agile project management, the main conclusions of this paper is that sustainability and agility are complementary concepts that help project managers to deal with environment burden.