5. July 2022
Julia Kriegel
VAST FORWARD is a digital service provider and remote structured network agency. Through our successful efforts since our founding in 2008, we are now managing over 800 digital projects per year for more than 60 clients in the communications and digital industries. Our close circle of the VAST FORWARD team is made up of a female-led project management team.
We are a fully remote team and also see our responsibility in the sustainable development of our organization. In the realm of sustainable business, we also want to drive change in the digital industry with our VAST GREEN initiative – for our measurable, long-term oriented contribution, towards a more sustainable future.
VAST GREEN is based on our sustainability strategy, which we developed in 2021 together with Alyssa Jade McDonald-Bärtl. Our core team is now implementing the strategy in sprints using a specially developed process, our “framework”.
We focused on analyzing our own supply chain in the first stage from 2021, because almost all other steps in our implementation process are built upon it.
Thus, in the first sprint, we conducted an actual state analysis as well as a materiality analysis. In our “Supply Chain Working Group” we reviewed our status quo as well as our internal processes and derived sustainability criteria based on our findings.
Today, these results form the backbone of our sustainability reporting.
Following our agile working process, we then identified the relevant sustainability topics for VAST FORWARD and defined relevant, controllable criteria – revealing a wide variety of topics, ranging from “Green IT” to “Plants in the Office”.
The list of key criteria are relevant for the sustainable future of VAST FORWARD – and they are also the basis for review and coordination with our extended team, our stakeholders; our network of customers, partners, suppliers and experts. They all form an integral part of the VAST FORWARD supply chain and thus have an impact on our day-to-day business and on our corporate sustainability.
For the stakeholder and partner approach, we are supported by Andrea, who has been working in the field of IT and communication for many years. In close cooperation with the management and the supply chain working group, Andrea developed the basis and the procedure for the partner approach.
The result of the preparation with Andrea was a basis for discussion for the project management team, and a guideline for direct communication at eye level.
From our list of criteria, we prioritized 10 focus areas for the creation of a questionnaire. Andrea formulated a set of questions from these 10 areas, which were then tested internally before the survey. We then posed our network of specialists the questions about the criteria in short 1:1 interviews. The questions ranged from the general questions such as “Do you deal with sustainability in your company?” to the concrete application of “Green Coding”.
We learned a lot in the process and collected super exciting and, above all, insightful results, which we have published in summary form in our Impact Report.
We are excited about the next round of the survey and hope that we could inspire our network to think with us about sustainability in their personal and professional lives.
In any case, it brings us a lot of joy and a constant sense of achievement!
We Do Not Just Compensate!