Value management for sustainable decision making

Industry is now aware of the need for sustainable decision making and is being forced to meet newly imposed targets by legislation. To date, however, there has been no widely accepted methodology that enables stakeholders collectively to balance competing interests. As a proven decision-making framework that can be conducted throughout a project's life cycles, value management holds a strategic position in incorporating sustainability issues into investment decisions. As a process, value management requires key stakeholders to consider all the issues surrounding a project as well as to identify and examine all the engineering options available to them by considering their impact on the triple bottom line plus one, in other words socially, economically, environmentally and politically. However, its potential has not been fully realised by academics and practitioners. Through four case studies this paper demonstrates how value management has been successfully applied to community development projects as a catalyst for embedding a culture of sustainable decision making in both small- and large-scale projects, ranging from physical infrastructure to community capacity building. From the case studies presented it is evident that a value management framework has the potential to be the standard methodology for sustainable decision making.