When a company announces a new sustainability initiative or position, the point- person often becomes inundated by ideas on how to improve operations or implement new policies that promote a more sustainable operating model. However, although it’s great that employees and stakeholders are engaged in the process, tracking, evaluating and prioritizing the initiatives can prove overwhelming.
There are a number of ways that prioritizing can be done – however, due to the differences between businesses, these techniques are not universally applicable.
Depicted in the accompanying figure, is the output from a technique I developed working at C12 Solutions. Here, potential projects are plotted against two variables – a Sustainability Index and the Likelihood of Success with the bubbles being sized by potential savings. This method works across different organizations since the definition of ‘Likelihood of Success’ varies from one company to another as does Sustainability Index.
In the next couple of posts, I’ll elaborate on how you go about defining Sustainability Index and Likelihood of Success for your own organization.
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Great post.
At TRIRIGA, we developed a similar model for evaluating the economic and environmental payback of various environmental opportunities. The key idea being a 3 dimensional sensitivity analysis to optimize capital investments in environmental sustainability.
Check out our TREES product at http://www.tririga.com/products/products-trees
John Clark
Director, Climate Change Solutions
http://www.tririga.com