Advancing Facilities Management by a Framework of Sustainability Drivers in Project Management

The sustainability concept has boomed significantly, and its importance is noteworthy among organisations worldwide. The increased focus on sustainability has impacted both the project management (PM) and facilities management (FM) activities. This sustainability challenge is a complex and important to deal with. The role of sustainable PM in FM is significant towards achieving sustainable development as projects are the means of implementing sustainability strategies that are targeting the 3 P’s (people, planet, and profit) of sustainability. The novelty of this paper is in its focus, with a combined focus on both the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) and FM industries using PM as a focus while investigating sustainability drivers that can help the industries overcome complex and challenging sustainability barriers. We as part of the paper aim to develop a sustainability drivers’ framework that can guide researchers and practitioners in PM and FM to tackle sustainability challenges. By performing a literature review using the ScienceDirect and Google Scholar databases, 74 articles were finally selected to highlight the key sustainability drivers. Based on the collected literature, a theoretical sustainability drivers’ framework was produced that can help in advancing the FM via the sustainable PM. The resulting sustainability drivers were categorised as (1) organisational aspects, (2) financial factors, (3) promoting awareness, (4) stakeholders’ role, (5) standards and tools, (6) government policies and regulations, and (7) others. In this paper, we focus on two categories in detail from a project governance (PG) perspective, that is, organisational aspects and stakeholders’ role. The main takeaway of our study is the theoretical sustainability drivers’ framework that will guide the practitioners and researchers in AEC/FM industry to deal with the complexity brought by sustainability challenges through the sustainable PM lens, and become a powerful driver of long-term value creation for their organisations by effectively applying sustainability practices.