Project Sustainability - What's the problem?

Your projects are not made of deliverables.  They are made of sweat and blood and tears, of tight deadlines, late nights, sleepless nights – no nights – of budget air-travel, unwashed taxi-drivers and bad hotel breakfasts, a pantomime on the European stage, monitored and observed by a critical audience of unqualified critics.

If it’s not for the deliverables, then what is it for?

Think about this.  Think about how much of your working life you waste working on projects with no lasting results.  How many hours have you spent slogging away on project deliverables that are never going to reach their target audience once that final cheque has cashed?  How many minutes each day could be better spent making a real difference in your sector, that you are dwindling away appeasing European bureaucrats?

This is not the land of efficient goal-focused project-management, this is a cyclical race track of time and money, a rabid dog chasing its tail all the way to Brussels, leaving a carbon footprint in its tracks.

Sustainability.  The great word.  

Yes, we need to write something here.  We need to have a plan.  Maybe they like the sound of this.  Then we can look proudly over our ceremonially-stamped intellectual property-rights agreements, feeling smug as we bang the last nail into the cash register.

This, I believe is not what you want to have in mind when you cast your mind back over your professional career.  All those great things you left unaccomplished.  All those lives you never changed.  All the dust you gathered on the fruits of your labour, those fruits that so very easily could have been something else, something spectacular, something almost meaningful.

We believe in sustainability.  

We believe in long-term impacts.  We believe in value for the European tax payer.  Not just value for today, but for tomorrow and the days that follow.  We want to help you to discover sustainability and find ways to make the impact of your work go further and last longer.

Be part of the sustainability revolution 

– these are the fruits of your labour – let’s make them count.

You want to talk more about the sustainability of your projects then conctact Paul Talbot from die Berater® p.talbot@dieberater.com 

Open Registration for Conference on Youth Unemployment in London, September 11th

Registration is now open for the conference 'Bridging the Culture Clash between Employers, Youth People and Local Cultures' on the 11th September at the Osmani Centre in Whitechapel, London, which is free and open to anyone (subject to numbers) with an interest in this area.

The conference is the final event of 'Big Bang', an international project funded by the European Union's Lifelong Learning programme, which has been exploring the extent to which mismatches between the 'culture clash' of work, school and 'local or street' culture is one factor amongst many that are contributing to long-term youth unemployment across Europe.
To register click here.

The conference will start with an informal lunch and networking, and will hear from examples of relevant work in the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and Iceland. Presentations will include those from:
- Illias El Hadioui of Erasmus University, whose work was one of the original inspirations behind the project, is a published author from the Netherlands . He has written and spoken extensively on the relationship - and the mismatch - between the 'street culture' of young people and the norms of school and college culture. He will present a theoretical framework that he has developed  to describe this manifestation and highlight the experience of urban youth in large multi-ethnic urban conurbations in the Netherlands.

- Steve Rawlings of Building Lives Training Academies in East London has developed a number of successful apprenticeships in the construction industry, which have been featured in the Evening Standard. He will present a number of case studies and talk about working to bring young people and employers together.



Young people from Big Bang partner 15billion at one of their recent employability workshops.

The conference will consider the challenges of a 'lost generation' which has emerged since the Financial Crisis of 2008 in that whilst unemployment in general has increased internationally, these increases have been disproportionately high amongst young people.  This is a global phenomenon and has been the subject of much discussion as to the causes and solutions - such as that in a recent commentary published by Demos.