Green PM and the BP Gulf Oil Spill

  Decision Making   Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Green Project Management looks at projects through an environmental lens. That doesn’t mean decisions are always made “in favor” of the environment, but that the environment is considered in the planning and decision-making processes, including the conservation of project resources, which should be part of every project manager’s mission anyway. Here’s how it works, and how it might have made a difference in the Gulf of Mexico.

There are many examples of projects undertaken to produce some deliverable with environmental implications. In fact, one may assert that any project, since it uses resources, has environmental implications. This varies tremendously, based on scale and the direct impact on the environment. One project that clearly has environmental implications is the Deepwater Horizon drilling project and what is often called “the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.”

Important note: We do not purport to say that any specific single action or philosophy that we enumerate below would have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster or led to its instant cleanup. What we do assert, however, is that taken collectively and holistically, an intense focus on green thinking would have had a tremendously positive impact on the disaster.

Many companies are incorporating environmental considerations into their thinking about the …

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