Project Management

Moving to “Sustainable Project Management”

From the People, Planet, Profits & Projects Blog
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It’s not that we are changing our perspective, considering the title of our book is Green Project Management, but as you will find in our book, as well as in our webinars, courses, and real life, that it is really about sustainability.  We just don’t want to limit your thinking about the process.  Beside, just thinking in terms of “green” makes it sound like project managers should only be concerned with the environment.  The natural environment is of concern to the project manager, of course, but sustainable project management goes way beyond that.   And, we will certainly continue to focus of the environment (green) as an important part of sustainability.  The title of this blog is People, Planet, Profits & Projects and could be subtitled Sustainable Project Management. 

Not as an apology, but as a way to put things in perspective, we would have preferred our book title to be reflect sustainable project management, but our publisher thought it best to title the book the way it is as a catalyst to further discussion.  We are grateful that they did make that suggestion because it did start the discussion.  Further, we were given a choice of covers, and we chose the one with the “money tree,” because that is what being a sustainable project manager means.  It means saving precious resources when you can, thus saving the enterprise money. 

And with all of the buzz created around the intersection of green business and project management, we wanted to be clear about where we stand.  First let me say that we are grateful for all the buzz.  When we first started talking about the intersection, it was a blinking yellow light, although at one point we thought that it might change to a blinking red light, first stop, then you can proceed.  So we carefully approached the intersection using a combination of brakes and accelerator.  Now that we’ve gotten safely through the intersection and are continuing down the road, we are still cautious of the traffic.  We sometimes get caught up in our analogy, so please bear with us.

We like heavy traffic when it comes to sustainable project management, we can only hope that the drivers speeding along the highway are good drivers, paying attention to the other drivers and thereby creating a good environment so that all can deliver their products safely (to keep within the analogy).  However, what we’ve seen is that like anything, when a market becomes popular, more and more “trucks” enter the highway carrying products to that market.

So, not to mince words any more, although you can tell by our blogs that we love analogy and puns, make sure that the training you signed up for is the training you receive.  If you want to know about green/sustainable project management, there is a right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it.  In the world of PM, there are many, many initials and credentials you can get;  PMP, PMI-ACP, Prince2® Certification, Masters Certificates in Project Management from various colleges and universities, etc.  The key message here is that these certificates and credentials are “sanctioned” by careful consideration of course content.  In the case of PMP, for example, a rigorous course of study and document experience is evaluated by the Project Management Institute, a not-for-profit organization chartered for the purpose of forwarding the discipline of project management. 

Right now, there is no such organization for sustainable/green project management.  Although ISIS-PM, still in its infancy, it is intended to do just that.  And, it takes a long time to put something like this together with the integrity, rigor and discipline that it deserves. Stay tuned for more information on ISIS-PM in the coming months.  In the meantime, we echo the words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, from the television show Hill Street Blues, “Let’s be careful out there.”


Posted by Dave Shirley on: October 21, 2012 02:47 PM | Permalink

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Anonymous
Hooray, yet another PM certificate to be promoted as "required" as soon as possible. Isn't the "certificate" field crowed enough now?

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