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Date
The intersection of project management and sustainability that we began exploring several years ago is sometimes subtle. There are times when we have to delicately sift through - if you will excuse the expression - fifty shades of gray - to find and demonstrate how intimately the filaments of these two topics (sustainabiilty and PM) are gracefully intertwined.
And then there are the times that it smacks us in the face.
Like today.
As this is being written, some 50,000 visitors from 190 countries are visiting Brazil for the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.
As visitors arrive here, according to this story from the Associated Press:
"the problems visitors will see in Rio alone are daunting. Take the bay. Twenty years ago, when the last UN Earth Summit was held here, promises were made to clean it up. Since then, seven waste treatment stations have been built, but due to poor planning and corruption, only three of them work, and at a fraction of capacity.
Even on Governor's Island, which houses both the international airport and the federal university of Rio de Janeiro, waste water pours unfiltered into the environment. The treatment plant there doesn't work either".
Step back and think about that for a moment.
Seven waste treatment plants. Three of them work. The four failures are attributed to "poor planning and corruption".
In this photo taken on Friday, June 15, 2012, a pig eats from a trash-ridden creek that runs towards the conference center where the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, takes place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The throngs streaming into Rio for the Earth summit may be dreaming of white-sand beaches and clear, blue waters, but what they are first likely to notice as they leave the airport is not the salty tang of ocean in the breeze, but the stench of raw sewage. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)
Not quite the image of Rio you expected, right?
Let's see. Which discipline is it that creates a unique deliverable with a specified start and finsh time, applies a code of ethics and professional responsiblitiy, and gets things done? Like, for example, say, turning over a waste treatment plant that runs properly?
I'm pretty sure you'll come up with the same answer that we did: project management.
And what is the purpose of the seven waste treatment plant projects? To provide a more sustainable aquifer and water supply for Brazil's people.
50,000 attendees from 190 countries are seeing the results of failed projects. Four out of seven waste treatment plants not working. Project management - or the lack of it - right in their face.
So here is an in-your-face example of how the two concepts are sometimes quite directly related.
And 50,000 ecology-minded individuals are seeing firsthand what happens when the project management discipline isn't successful (although to be fair, we're sure that there are other disciplines who have 'helped' in these failures).
These examples of Green By Definition1 Projects quite strikingly demonstrate the intersection of PM and sustainability. We hope it will increase the awareness in the PM community to look for the sustainability aspects of their proejcts which likely do not have the direct environmental impact of a waste treatment plant. And we hope also that it will reiterate the importance of providing whatever deliverable(s) your own project was meant to deliver.
1 Green Project Management, Maltzman and Shirley 2011
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: June 21, 2012 09:18 AM |
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