Project management professionals have a critical role in executing sustainability strategies and incorporating sustainable practices in all projects. Nisha Singh MAIPM and Alison Knoblauch give insight into climate action at Telstra and share lessons from a recent environment project.

Telstra’s environment strategy is crucial to achieving its vision of building a connected future where everyone thrives. It also focuses on helping suppliers and customers to reduce their carbon footprints.

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Telstra’s ambitious sustainability targets (source: Telstra)

Achieving such bold targets requires a complex and interwoven strategy, spanning business units from network operations to sales.

  • Product owners are looking at how Telstra’s technology can help customers reduce emissions (such as digitising processes or using Internet of Thing devices to monitor and more effectively use resources).
  • Finance teams have applied a shadow carbon price and established an emissions reduction fund.
  • Engineers are delivering energy efficiency programs to reduce emissions from our network operations and infrastructure, decommissioning legacy equipment, and cleverly designing the network to use less power.
  • Supplier management teams collaborate with suppliers and partners to reduce emissions through the technology, products, and services they provide the business.

How project management helps

With a complex, multi-faceted strategy, strong project management is critical to success. From the outset there needs to be support from decision makers, clear accountability, defined tangible and achievable outcomes, agreed delivery pathways, and coordinated project oversight.

Project management processes (like defining business value and clarifying the benefits and risks involved) help with effective communication across many stakeholders.

During the execution phase strong governance to oversee and guide progress, accurate and transparent tracking, and modelling meaningful and consistent engagement has proved crucial. This is where project management professionals have led the way.

A carbon farm trials new technology to support Telstra’s environment strategy

In 2022 Telstra acquired a farm in Northern NSW as our first carbon farm. The project involves purchasing land, clearing, and managing weeds on the property, planting over 150,000 trees to store carbon from the atmosphere, and using experimental technology to test new and innovative ways of managing land.

A methodical approach to project planning and delivery tracking was central to the project’s success. The project benefited greatly from project management support. It was the first project of its kind for Telstra, so there was no blueprint to draw upon.

Bringing the team together to develop a project charter and business case provided structure across delivery streams and developed a sense of ownership and belonging among team members. Similarly, getting all the great ideas for the project translated into a value delivery model set expectations and enabled more effective ongoing communication.

Project reflections from Nisha Singh, Project Manager

Tailoring the approach

Tailoring the approach, processes, and governance according to the project context was particularly important. The PMBOK guide says, “tailoring aims to maximize value, manage constraints, and improve performance by using ‘just enough’ processes, methods, templates, and artifacts to achieve the desired outcome from the project.”

One of my key learnings on tailoring the approach was in the project planning stage. I was 100% allocated to this project and my goal was to set up project processes, artefacts, and templates that could be easily scalable for similar future larger- scale projects. My ideal scenario ended up requiring too much time and effort from the project team. This did not align with their goals and understanding of the business value of the current project. Considering not only the context of the project but also the resources and team dynamics helped me adapt the approach to get the ‘just enough’ balance right.

Stakeholder management

Equally important is understanding and managing your stakeholders, their ‘stakes’ in the project and their drivers. Different executives have different drivers and hence different approaches to risk. It is imperative to understand and manage these complexities by applying systems thinking and systems interactions analysis. Getting it right can help create advocates and ensure concerns are heard and addressed so they do not negatively impact the project.

 

Collaboration is the key to achieving climate action

Organisations can execute bold, complex strategies to take meaningful climate action by partnering project management expertise with technical experts and business leaders. It has never been more critical to act, and it’s only by bringing together experts from across these domains that change can happen.

This article is taken from the Autumn 2023 edition of Paradigm Shift