Technology Is Green

 

A quick quiz as ProjectManagement.com kicks off its Sustainability/Green PM theme for April:Who is more responsible for saving the whales?

A.    Dorothy and Irving Stowe, (among many) co-founders of Greenpeace,

B.     Maris Sidenstecker, founder of Save the Whales

C.     John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil

Who has saved more acreage of forests?

A.    Dorothy and Irving Stowe, (among many) co-founders of Greenpeace,

B.     Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!

C.     Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan, inventors of the flash drive

Which power generating facility has killed fewer birds?

A.    The Pantex Wind Farm, near Amarillo, Texas,

B.     Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, in California

C.     The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, also in California

If you answered each question with “C,” go to the head of the class.

In the mid-19^th Century, whale oil was the best, most economical way of providing light to city streets and homes. However, when Standard Oil began to make kerosene – a cleaner, brighter fuel for lamps – cheaper and more easily available than whale oil, the demand for the latter plummeted.  According to Warren Meyer in Forbes magazine, by 1890 the American whaling fleet had dropped from a peak of 790 vessels to fewer than 200, and was still dropping.[i]

A 16 GB flash drive will hold 3,080,000 pages of documents. One tree will make about 8,333 sheets of paper, meaning that each and every 16GB flash drive holds the equivalent of 369 trees worth of printed documents. It is no exaggeration to say that flash drives, and similar electronic data repository devices, have reduced the demand for paper to the point that the term “paperless office,” once an utterly absurd futuristic concept, is now fairly common.

Ivanpah is killing around one bird every two minutes, and wind farms in general kill around 300,000 birds per year. Palo Verde? The only claimants I could find that asserted that nuclear power kills birds at all had only the most tenuous of causation claims (interspersed with some rather vile name-calling). The answer could easily be zero.

What does each of these examples have in common? The advancement of technology, seeking only to provide goods or services better, faster, cheaper in a free-market environment (pun intended), almost automatically renders its consumers’ surroundings cleaner.

Okay, so what does this have to do with project management? Well, in the management sciences, project management was a significant breakthrough. Previously, the widely-accepted hypotheses in the management sciences came almost exclusively from the asset managers, the purveyors of the general ledger. When some intrepid souls started to look at the best technical approach to delivering specific pieces of scope, on-time and on-budget to an external consumer, a significant leap forward in the overall management sciences was realized. Just as previous methods of collecting, processing, and delivering energy to consumers was revolutionized by technology, so, too, did the most effective way of providing unique projects become the standard. And, like technological advances in the document storage and energy collection industries lead to a cleaner overall environment, so, too, do advances in project management lead to quicker, better, and cheaper project delivery, whether it be on behalf of power generation plants, or information technology efforts.

Want a cleaner planet? Do project management better. (Along those lines, keeping current with ProjectManagement.com blogs certainly can’t hurt.)