Mature Enough to Measure? Practitioners’ Accounts of Organizational Maturity and Impact Measurement for Sustainability in Project Management

Abstract

Organizations increasingly measure and report sustainability, yet the impacts they report are produced in projects. This paper proposes a relational reconceptualization of sustainability maturity in project management, as the coupling of measurement means to the project decisions where sustainability ends are produced, and examines it against practitioners’ accounts. Sixty interviews (from an initial corpus of 62) with project management practitioners across six sectors and three organizational scales were analyzed through hybrid qualitative content analysis (27 codes; blind double coding, κ = 0.70). Practitioners rated their organizations readily but on improvised scales that were differentiated internally and narrated as trajectory, including regression; no participant invoked any named maturity model. In this sample, measurement accumulates at the organizational level while the project level frequently goes unmeasured: 26% of the 54 organizations, and 47% of the multinationals among them, maintain corporate measurement with no project-level measurement. This asymmetry is an observable signature consistent with vertical, means–ends decoupling; whether the corporate measurement that exists fails to inform project decisions is an inference the present design cannot test. External requirements dominate the reported drivers and are frequently welcomed as resources for growth; in exploratory sector comparisons, construction shows the highest project-level measurement and IT the lowest. The findings are consistent with the coupling conception, which they were used to develop rather than to test, and point to measurement attachment, rather than instrument availability, as the likely binding constraint in sustainability management systems.