Sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time. How can we develop prosperity without compromising the life of future generations? Companies are integrating ideas of sustainability in their marketing, corporate communications, annual reports and in their actions. It is for that reason inevitable that ‘sustainability’ will find its way into project management methodologies and practices in the very near future. Achieving sustainability-related targets in EPC projects is increasingly becoming a key performance driver. Yet sustainability is a complex concept in projects and there are many diverse stakeholders. Some stakeholders are generally recognized as important, i.e., the client and main contractor, yet there are others not always perceived as such and whose absence from the decision-making processes may result in a failure to address sustainability issues. Hence, there is a need for a systematic approach to engage with stakeholders with high salience in relation to sustainability. Moreover, the oil and gas sector has a significant impact on sustainable development, making it important for the sector to implement serious changes in the way it does business. Oil and gas operations involve both upstream activities, and downstream activities. Due to the nature of these activities which cause high risks, companies work continuously to reduce the significance of their adverse impacts on the environment and people.
The paper displays an agile model created by the author for collection and measurement of stakeholder feedback in the context of the social dimension, which is one of the three sustainability pillars, in an EPC company working on oil and gas sector for down-stream projects, by applying relative weight calculation methodology.
Currently, the concept of success in projects is being widely discussed in management literature and has been central to the literature of PM (Diallo & Thuillier 2003). Cooke-Davies (2001) explains that project success is measured against the overall objectives of the project and the standards by which the success or failure of a project will be judged could be called success criteria. Lim and Zain Mohamed (1999) suggest that the criteria for assessing project success consist of a set of principles or standards by which project success is or can be judged. Chan and Tam (2001) conducted a quantitative study on construction projects in Hong Kong which identified three dominant criteria affecting project success and client satisfaction, namely, effective time, cost and quality management. The time budget-quality triangle is the most commonly cited criteria for success (Westerveld 2002). A study carried out in the telecommunications, IT and construction industries in Norway and China also suggested the time - cost - quality triangle as the main success criteria (Andersen, Dyrhang & Jessen 2002). Waterside (1998) conducted a study of successful and failed projects and concluded that the following were the major criteria for measuring the success or failure of projects, namely, whether the project:
Meets user requirements
Is completed on time
Is carried out within budget
Meets the quality requirements