Project Management

Sustainability and Software?

From the People, Planet, Profits & Projects Blog
by ,

About this Blog

RSS

View Posts By:

Richard Maltzman
Dave Shirley

Recent Posts

Saving the Sahel (Part 1)

You Can't Get They-ah From Hee-yah

Floating an idea into reality: the other side of the AI Project Paradox

The Environment of the Built Environment: an AI Paradox

Is plastic on your mind?

Categories

6th, 6th Edfition, 6th Edition PMBOK, 7th Edition, 7th Edition PMBOK, 8th Edition PMBOK, 8th Edition PMBOK Guide, Activism, actuarial, actuary, adapt, addition by subtraction, Africa, africa, agriculture, airforce, ajaita, Alaska, amazon, analogous, analytics, ancient, and more power, antarctica, anti-science, apple, apps, architecture, arctic, arrakis, Artificial Intelligence, asch paradigm, Assistant, asthma, astronomy, automobile, automotive, autonomous cars, b, bankhar, Banksy Crypto, basalt, baseball, bats, batter, beauty products, benefit, benefits, Benefits Realization, beyond epica, biases, bicycle, big data, big dfata, big dig, bike, biodiversity, biomedicine, birdhouse, blockchain, blood, blue blood, blue trees, bluefin, bluefin tuna, book review, boston, boston university, Boyce, Brazil, brazil, Breakdown Structures, BS, building, buildings, built environment, built environment, bumblebee, cake, capacitor, car, Carbon, carbon, carbon capture, carbon negative, carbon neutral, carbon pool, carbon sequestration, carbonate, careers, CEO, ChatGPT, chatGPT, chatgpt, chatgpt, chess, China, china, chopsticks, citrus, cli-fi, climate, climate change, climate resilience, climeworks, Clumsy, CO2, co2, CO2 Utilization, coalition, cobalt, coffee pods, cognition, cognitive, Collabortion, colombia, concrete, Conflict, construction 5.0, cool projects xyloscope, cooling, coral, corn, cost of good quality, cost of poor quality, cost of quality, crazy, criticism of project management, cryptocurrency, CSR, csr, data, data analytics, data privacy, datacenter, dataset, death spiral, Decision Making, decomposition, Defense and Climate, definition of a project, deforestation, dependencies, dependency, desert, DIKW, dikw, dimopoulos, disposal, dna, DOD, dogs, dolphins, dream, drilling, drink, dune, dune, dutch, early start, earth, eatlocal, eco-tourism, ecological, economic, economics, EKC, electric grid, electricity, electronics, elysis, embodied carbon, emerging technologies, empower, Energy, energy efficiency, environmental degradation, escalate, escalation, ESG, extreme weather, fallacy, FARC, farming, finance, fish, fish brains, fishing, fix, fixing the earth, flint water, Flint Water Supply, flood, flooding, Food supply chain, food waste, forest, forest for the trees, forestation, forrestgump, frank herbert, Fruitcake, fungus, fusion, Galvao, garage, gas, gasoline, geese, gender equality, gender partnerships, generational differences, Generative AI, gladwell, gold, Goodness, google, Government, GPT, great pacific garbage patch, green, green building, green buildings, green energy, green iguana, green project, green project management, greening, guest post, gyre, harkonnen, Harvesting Benefits, hawasina, hedgehogs, heursitics, historical data, hlb, holitsic, holland, horseshoe crab, human-caused climate change, hydrogen, hydrology, ice, iceland, ignition, iguana, imagery, impact, india, inequality, information, initiatives, injection, insurance, intelligence, interacting risk, internal combustion engine, invasive species, investment, isomer, issue escalation, issues, ITER, jobs, Jupiter, justification, kids, kill point, knowledge, koch brothers, Kuznets, laboratory, LAL, landscape mode, lapampa, launch, LCA, Leadership, Leadership, life cycle analyses, life cycle analysis, lifecycle, Linkedin, liquid, lizard, local, long term, long-term, long-term thinking, look up, loud, maintenance, maker, makermovement, malcolm gladwell, management, marathon, marine biology, market, mars, Martin Luther King, mean, megawatt, MeHg, melting, mercury, metal, Microgrid, microplastics, migration, military, millennial, mindset, minerals, mission, mitigate, MLK, mongolia, museum, museum of london, nature, nematodes, net gain, Net Project Success Score, net zero, netherlands, network, New book, New Jersey, New Practitioners, new york, NFT, nitrogen, noise, noreaster, norway, nova, NPSS, NREL, ocean, ocean cleanup, ocean life, oil rig, oil rigs, oklahoma, oman, only murders in the building, opportunity, overall risk, oxygen, packaging, pareto, PBS, permafrost, persistence, peru, Pharmaceutical, planet, planet.com, planning, plant, plasma, plastic, playground, pm, pm education, pmbok, pmbok guide, pmnetwork, PMXPO-2018, podcast, pollutants, pollution, poop, poor, portfolio, power, power skills, privacy, privacy concerns, professors, program, Program Management, project, project leader, project leadership, project management, project management 3.0, project on fire, project progress, Project Success, project success, projecticity, projectleadership, projectmanagement, projects, psychology, pulse of the profession, purple bacteria, purpose, quiet, rainforest, rationale, reef, refugees, renewable, renewables, Repair, repair, repeatable process, repeatable processes, repurpose, research, resource breakdown strucuture, Resource Management, reversing climate change, revisionist history, rich, rigs2reefs, ripe, risk, risk avoidance, Risk Management, risk mitigation, risk response, risk responses, river, robots, rocks, rules of thumb, rural, rural India, russia, Sarcasm/Irony, satellite, saudi, schedule, sci-fi, Science, science, science-fiction, scientific american, screaming monkeys, sea, sea life, Sea-Level Rise, sea-level rise, seagreens, seawall, seawater, seawater temperature, seaweed. beat;es. farming, secondary risk, selena gomez, sequestration, shipping, skyscraper, SLR, smart cities, smart city, smelting, social, social pressure, soil, solar, solar panels, solar perovkites, solar saheli, sonic, sponge cities, SRI, stage-gate, stagegate, stakeholder, stakeholder management, steward, stewardship, storage, strategy, stupid, success, suffer, sulphur, sunk cost, supercapacitor, supply chain, survey, Sustainability, sustainability, Sustainable Investing, Sustainable Tourism, sybiosis, symbiosis, system 03, TBL, temperature, terraform, terraforming, test, threat, threats, totem, touchscreen, tour, tower, Trains, transparency, transportation, trash, tree, tree species, trees, trillion, triple bottom line, triple constraint, truth to power, UMass, us army corps of engineers, USDA, vacuum, value, venus, vision, voice, voltage optimization, vw scandal, washing machine, waste, wastewater, water, we mean business, whales, Whirlpool, wind, wisdom, women, Women in Project Management, wood wide web, woonerf, Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), world breakdown structure, worms, xian, xylotron, Yale

Date

linkedin twitter facebook Request to reuse this  


Whether it is feedback from our website or feedback after a presentation, we’ve often heard “I’m a code writer or a software developer, how could my project be 'green general*.' There are no aspects of sustainability that I can affect with my code.” Our answer is - you’d be surprised how much you, as a programmer, can affect sustainability or greenality (the degree to which an organization has considered environmental (green) factors that affect its projects during the entire life cycle and beyond). 

For instance, and I am sure that the software geeks out there know this, but the way you write software can influence the power used by the computer's processor.  If you can reduce the “energy” required to execute your instructions, you can reduce the overall energy required to run a data center, therefore saving precious resources.  So how does one do that?

I have written and am teaching a graduate course at Boston University called “Green IT”.  I am using a new book this semester called Harnessing Green IT: Principles and Practices, edited by San Murugesan and G.R. Gangadharan, @ 2012 John Wiley and Sons Ltd.  In Chapter 2, Bob Steigerwald and Abhishek Agarwal from Intel talk about some energy saving software techniques.  As an example, for DVD playback applications, “you could implement read-ahead buffering methodology and allow the optical drive to take breaks rather than continuously spinning. “  They also talk about; computational efficiency - using more efficient algorithms and multi-threading, data efficiency – effectively using cache memories, and idle efficiency and evaluating a monitoring software impact to platform power - using the PowerCfg utility in Windows7 to determine whether an application has increased the platform timing resolution, thus decreasing the amount of idle time used to reduce power consumption.

Just when you thought that what you do doesn’t have any effect on greenality, you find out that using some software methodologies, designs and development tools, you can have a positive effect on reducing the energy required to process data.  That is a positive effect on the environment and it reduces costs, all the while people are “doing the right thing”, plant, people, profits.

* In our book, we have cover the “spectrum of green” from Green by Definition – building a wind farm, Green by Project Impact – Boston’s Big Dig, Green by Product Impact – Keurig’s K-Cups and Green General – a new software release.

I just love this picture, and I realize the caption is a little small so I will explain the jist.  This a a mock up of what the RAND Corporation thought the home computer might look like in 2004.  Looks like this was published in the 1950's.


Posted by Dave Shirley on: January 30, 2013 12:21 PM | Permalink

Comments (0)

Please login or join to subscribe to this item


Please Login/Register to leave a comment.

ADVERTISEMENTS

"A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

- Robert Frost

ADVERTISEMENT

Sponsors