Revenge Moment

 

Okay, I admit. The title of this article ‘Revenge Moment’ is an anagram of ‘Green Movement’. Perhaps, nature is sending us a subtle warning message about its sweet revenge moment if we do not take green movement seriously. Sounds spooky.

There are already a lot of write-ups and propagandas out there flooding the streets, intoxicating the feeble minds with praises of green initiatives and sustainability. In fact, some would even consider it overhyped – good from far, but far from good. This does not come as a surprise with the long, and increasing, list of failed green innovations that includes some of the craziest ideas that look good on the paper, but bad in practical application. However, nothing is perfect. We should not imprudently abandon the entire basket full of apples just because a few rotten ones were found. Sustainability does have its value and purposes and is something that worth our effort to explore further particularly in the domain of project management.

The word ‘sustainability’ has various definitions affixed to it. What do we actually mean when we mention ‘sustainability’ especially from the perspective of project management? Wikipedia provides some interesting definitions of ‘sustainability’ that includes,

“For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms.”

In addition, Alan Atkisson gives a more specific definition by saying “Sustainability is the ability of a system to continue working (and evolving) over the long term within certain boundaries and under certain conditions.” From this, if we take project as the system and triple constraints as the conditions, we may then interpret sustainability for project management as the ability to keep the project going, without prematurely exhausting all its resources, until it has achieved all its predefined objectives. As Janine Benyus, co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8 and author of “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, aptly advises, “You cannot use more energy than you need. You've got to sip energy and you've got to share every material use that you possibly can, because it's expensive to procure that material.” The same thing should apply to managing projects. We have to be prudent with our scarce resources as we work within the boundaries of the triple constraints. So what can we learn from the environmentalists? Perhaps, we may borrow some ideas from the three R’s concepts – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle – which are at the core of sustainability and green movement. These are separate, yet interconnected, concepts that share the same goal of reducing waste.

Let’s start with Reduce. We all know that a typical project produces piles of documentations that hardly read by anyone besides the project manager. Do we really need them or are we just producing tons of digital trash following a rigid process blindly? Similarly, we are also producing a lot of reports and project management deliverables that may help in the project execution, but do not necessary constitute to the final product that the project has to deliver. A good example is the periodical reports that we send out to the stakeholders. Do we need to do it daily, weekly or monthly? I am not saying that reporting, which is a crucial part of communication, is not important. What we do seriously need to consider is how much is too much so that we do not overproduce what we genuinely need. Reduce is all about the effort of reducing the amount of waste produced by a person, a group, or a society, and in so doing to minimize resource and energy use. One way we may reduce waste in projects is to streamline the project management process and make it more flexible. Instead of having a fixed process for all types of projects, we may introduce several simpler and leaner processes specifically designed for smaller projects. In these processes, we may skim off the less critical project management deliverables so as to avoid producing something that no one really needs.

Reuse is a concept where an item is used again, without reprocessing, for the same or different function to help save time, money, energy, and resources. Most of us should not be unfamiliar with it since we are naturally inclined to do things in the cheapest and fastest way. The basic idea is to avoid reinventing the wheel. If you have used some project management deliverable templates like those offered by gantthead.com to manage your projects then you have already practiced the concept of Reuse. In fact, methodologies, processes, guidelines and standard practices are all different manifestations of Reuse. This concept is also applicable to project deliverables. Programmers around the world have been practicing code reuse for decades to improve software quality and to cut down turnaround time. Among all these, I am particularly interested in the various possible ways we could reuse the knowledge from the lessons we have learned from our failures. How many of you out there actually begin your project kick-off meeting with a review on previous lessons learned? Do you even use the lessons learned records as a reference when you conduct risk identification?

The Recycle concept differs slightly from Reuse in that it involves breaking down an item or its components into raw materials, reprocessing and reassembling them into something new. For example, plastic bottles can be collected, recycled and made into pathways and benches. A major challenge for the Recycle concept is the extra resources required to collect, transport, sort, and reprocess the recyclable materials, which may potentially outweigh the net resources saved in the process. What are the materials and artifacts that we may recycle in a project? In order to answer this question, we should first examine the individual components that make up the project and this is where the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) comes in handy. We may even include a session in the project postmortem to analyze the WBS so as to identify deliverables that are recyclable. Or perhaps, we should install a couple of project recycle bins labeled with “Tangible” and “Intangible” in the company to see what trash people will start dumping in.

Alright, enough of greenwashing for now before I start calling my project managers the ‘Green Lanterns’ and forcing them to recite “In brightest day, in blackest night, No evil shall escape my sight…”