to join PMWJ’s new Sustainability
and Regeneration Editorial Panel
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
1 September 2026
Dear David and PMWJ Readers,
When David Pells and Miles Shepherd asked me onto PM World Journal’s new Sustainability and Regeneration Editorial Panel, I said yes before I’d finished hearing the question. I want to explain why.
I’ve spent the best part of two decades arguing that benefits management exists to put a number on things that organisations would rather leave unquantified. Not because everything reduces neatly to a spreadsheet, but because a project that can’t say what it’s for, and what it’s worth, is a project that will lose that argument to whoever can. For most of my career that argument has been about efficiency, service quality, or return on investment. Increasingly, it’s about something larger.
This summer, as in recent summers, we’ve watched wildfires reach further north than anyone expected, heard of rivers running low enough to threaten power generation, and read grid operators warning about resilience under conditions their systems weren’t built for. None of this is abstract. It’s the operating environment our projects now sit in, whether or not our business cases acknowledge it.
That’s why I think the price of inaction belongs in the same conversation as the price of delivery. Benefits management gives us the discipline to ask what a project is really worth — including the costs we’ve historically left off the ledger. Applied to sustainability and regeneration, that discipline stops being a compliance exercise and becomes something closer to what the profession is actually for: making sure the things we build leave the world able to carry on.
I’ve chaired APM’s Benefits and Value Interest Network and its Sustainability Interest Network, sat on BSI’s Benefits Management working group, and spent a fair amount of the last two years writing PMWJ’s “Leading Sustainability and Regeneration in Projects” series — not because I had all the answers, but because I kept finding that project management, done properly, is one of the few disciplines with both the reach and the rigour to make regeneration practical rather than aspirational.
A Panel like this won’t write policy or move budgets on its own. What it can do is give PMWJ a standing, credible focus for the researchers, practitioners, and policymakers already doing this work — and make it easier for the next generation of project professionals, including the students now studying this field, to find each other. That feels worth a few meetings a year.
I’m genuinely glad to be one of the first two people asked, alongside Karen Thompson, to help get this started. I don’t think sustainability needs a fresher word. I think it needs recognition — and a place at PMWJ’s table is a good way to give it one.
United Kingdom
How to cite this work: Minney, H. (2026). Why I’m honoured to join PMWJ’s new Sustainability and Regeneration Editorial Panel, Letter to the Editor, PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/pmwj168-Sep2026-Minney-PMWJs-new-Sustainability-Panel-topic-Letter-to-Editor.pdf
