The Gold At The End of the Rainbow
From the People, Planet, Profits & Projects Blog
by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Dave Shirley
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Date
Chapter 4 of our book, Green Project Management, is titled, “A Rainbow of Green”. In that chapter, we make what we think is one of the most important points of the entire ‘sustainability in PM’ thought process: all projects need to have sustainability thinking integrated. But we acknowledge that there is a spectrum of projects, some of which don’t have an intuitive sustainability element (perhaps the project of upgrading an accounting software package) and some which have a noticeable sustainability component (perhaps the project of building a new highway segment). Still others are “green by definition” – that is, they are projects dedicated to reducing contaminants, saving species, creating better working conditions, or producing renewable energy.
The cover story of UMASS magazine, the magazine for alumni and friends of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has a cover that caught our attention. Their Summer 2013 issue features a major story on “Climate Change: Searching for Solutions, Local and Global.
If you’re interested in science, technology, engineering, and/or management, you’ll enjoy the story. As individuals involved in all of the above – plus being on staff at the University level in teaching PM, International Business, Qualitative and Quantitative Decision Making, and of course Sustainability courses, it’s even more intensely interesting to us.
We won’t duplicate the story, but we do encourage you to read it. What we would like to do is to underline the connection between projects and sustainability in this story, but before we do we want to warn you that this is at one end of that ‘rainbow’ we talk about in our book. Do not – repeat – do not forget that the aspects of sustainability so obvious in these projects still deserve attention if your project does not (on face value) have any sustainability elements in it. So we recommend you see these intersections as inspirational but NOT as an excuse that your project is exempt.
First of all, the word “project” is prolific in the article. The simple fact that the word comes up repeatedly is a reminder of the fact that as PMs we contribute greatly in the efforts at the University level to research, discover, and act on climate problems.
To illustrate this, we zoom in on Rick Palmer, Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass and Director of the Northeast Climate Science Center, of which UMass is a part. We adapt this text from the article:
Since coming to UMass five years ago, the head of Civil and Environmental Engineering has gotten involved in several new projects.
1. With the Nature Conservancy, he’s studying the effects of climate change on the Connecticut River.
2. With faculty in Environmental Conservation, he’s helping to design better fish passageways.
3. With researchers at Columbia and Drexel University, he is studying the impact of climate change on urban areas.
4. Recently spearheaded the successful effort to have UMass lead and host the Northeast Climate Science Center (NECSC).
5. His engineering career began with a project calculating the number of drinking water reservoirs needed by Washington, DC to meet its future needs.
6. The CSRC (Climate System Research Center) faculty is working on a project to examine the impact of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
7. Another CSRC project is to analyze sediments on the Japanese coast to descover the record of fierce Kamikaze Winds which twice destroyed the Mongol fleet when it attempted to invade Japan 1,000 years ago.
Project, project, project, project, project, climate change, project, sustainability, climate, project, sustainability. All are incredibly intertwined here.
“Our primary goal is to help people come to grips with the changes from global warming, plan accordingly, and make good decisions,” Palmer says.
Think about that one powerful paragraph for a moment. Think about the connection to our discipline no matter what type of PM you happen to be. The elements are striking:
· Collaboration between diverse organizations
· Collaboration even between competitive universities
· “Coming to grips with changes”
· Aiding managers and policymakers in making good decisions
Sound familiar? Isn’t this what you already do on your projects? If not, you may be in the wrong career.
But remember – this is a spectrum, a rainbow. As the projects move towards the ‘Green in General’ side, the effort to find the linkages, the integration, the interworking with longer-term thinking needs to increase significantly. And we assert that it’s you – the change-agent project manager that can bring that integration, the gold at one end of the rainbow, to the other side.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: July 11, 2013 08:07 PM |
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