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Date
Sustainability in project management it is not about how to manage projects, but how to be. This has been and always will be our message. We never wanted to see a separate PMBOK® Knowledge Area called Project Sustainability Management. Sustainability must be interwoven, intertwined with project management in a way that it cannot be separated out, a piece to be negotiated or used as a tradeoff. The only way to do that, to make sustainability real in projects, is for the project manager to be. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandhi
It is a leap of faith. It requires discipline, but discipline is the project manager’s middle name, after all. We use the discipline of project management to do our jobs every day, don’t we? We don’t fly by the seat of our pants. We don’t trust luck and intuition to bring project in on budget, on time, and within stakeholder’s expectation.
So how do you be when we’re so busy now? And, how do you be unless you know? “Why should I care about sustainability? I’m a project manager and my job, which is hard enough, is to deliver the project on time, on budget and meet my stakeholder’s expectation. I don’t think they care about sustainability, why should I?” Oh, have we heard this before. It is interesting. Among project managers there are pockets of resistance to sustainability. It just may be a case of not knowing. I’m not saying that it is pervasive, but more localized. For instance, we have had over 100 people attend one of our webinars. I can’t say that kind of attendance happens regularly, but we always have good attendance, whether it is a webinar, seminar or course. It may be that we’ve target the audience that already buys into the intersection of PM and sustainability (EarthPM) because we don’t receive a lot of pushback. So for those who may not have bought into it yet, in the words of Sergeant Joe Friday, “All we want are the facts.” Let’s not just be, let’s be the leader and the change agent for sustainability, the connection between sustainability and project management. Why, because it is the right thing to do and it is substantiated by the facts.
Whoa, facts? Yes, facts. Surprisingly enough, the answer to “If my stakeholders don’t care about sustainability, why should I?” has its foundation in fact. You may have made the assumption that your stakeholder is only interested in having the project delivered on-time, on budget and within the specifications agreed to in the beginning of the project. Sounds about right, so what am I missing? What you are missing is the fact that sustainability may be very important to this stakeholder and even though the project is delivered on-time, in budget and in spec, the stakeholder is not satisfied. We all know that specs aren’t perfect. And there is a difference between a customer who reluctantly agrees to the end product and one whose expectations have been met or even exceeded. Wouldn’t you rather have the latter than the former?
So where are these facts? A little investigation can go a long way. Let’s say you are managing a project and the stakeholder is Rockline Industries. What does Rockline Industries do? They manufacture a lot of the products that we buy from retailers, like baby wipes, antibacterial wipes and household cleaning items, sold under the retailers own brand. You might assume that they are not interested in or don’t necessarily care about sustainability. Did you check? (Have you checked in on your stakeholders?) That’s where the facts come in. Looking at Rockline Industries’ website, the first clue to their caring about sustainability is that one of the tabs is “Environmental Sustainability.” If you click on that tab, under the logo you see “Changing Our Environmental Footprint™” There is further information on “Sustainability Aspirations”, a sustainability report for 2012, and their “Rockline-Zero Landfill” effort. The sustainability report for 2012 is particularly impressive. These are the facts, so before you say “If my stakeholders don’t care about sustainability, why should I?” I challenge you to check the facts in your organization or customer. Make sure you connect your project’s sustainability with the organization’s (customer’s) sustainability efforts. It is a way to be.
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: June 17, 2013 09:48 AM |
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