A Clean Start for the 2022 Project Leader, Part 2 of 2
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by Richard Maltzman,
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Date
In part 1 of this blog post, “A Clean Start for the 2022 Project Leader”, I make a point – or rather I try to make a point – in the very title of the post. Project Leader is a term I am beginning to favor greatly over Project Manager. I won’t go through my full rant here, but think about it: what do you do as a project manager? Do you oversee daily arrival time of employees? Do you assess their performance for raises? Do you see if they are following company policies day-to-day? No, no, and no. You aren’t generally performing supervisory/management functions. Do you need to inspire your team, to serve them? Do you get roadblocks out of the way, and often work with diverse teams from different groups that don’t directly report to you? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. That’s leadership. Congratulations. You’re a Project Leader.
OK, good. We covered the title. Now back to the topic. In that blog post, I refer to a podcast episode by Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History. In that episode, he visits the Procter and Gamble HQ and talks with Todd Cline, Director of R&D, North America Fabric Care.
Cline walks Gladwell through a lab where testing is taking place on detergents that can work in cool or even cold water. It’s not a trivial thing – in the US, we do 300 loads of laundry a year and each load uses 41 gallons of water. Do the math. And that is just household laundry. Commercial clothes washing adds a bigger chunk of impact. The carbon impact of a washing machine or detergent has very little to do with manufacturing or shipping it, or even disposing of it (although these should also be considered).
Environmental impact is almost all in the “use” phase of the life of a washing machine. This is because most of the carbon footprint comes from the energy to heat the water. A 70% reduction in carbon footprint is achieved simply by using cold water. And to bring it closer to home, use of cold water would also make your clothes last longer. So, the “holy grail” of laundry is washing clothes in cold water.
This whole idea of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and in particular, the LCA of a washing machine, was actually covered in our 2010 book, Green Project Management, with the intent to wake up project leaders (yep, it’s that term again) to the idea that their project’s product goes on (sustains) well beyond the project’s existence. We refer to this paper (see reference below) and use the figure below to make the point that Gladwell is hearing about at P&G headquarters, 9 years later.
This is also covered nicely in a National Geographic piece called Lightening the Load. And it’s also covered by P&G laundry detergent Ariel in this piece. P&G is of course, pushing their product, but they are indeed tackling an important problem and the article does have good information – and it provided us with a really cool (pun intended) lead-off picture..
PMI® has been talking about life cycle thinking for a while, but it has never been as relevant and PMI has never been as holistic and expansive in its standards and PMBOK® Guides as it now has been in the PMBOK® Guide, 7th Edition. Now, PMI is saying things like: “It is becoming more common…to consider social and environmental impacts in addition to the financial impacts…this may take the form of a product life cycle assessment which evaluates the potential environmental impacts of a product, process, or system…” (PMBOK® Guide 7th Edition, section 2.4.1, Planning Overview).
So, here’s the thought for our clean new (well, somewhat new) year. Think clean through the end of your project. Plan in considerations for how the product of your project (which could be a chunk of hardware like a washing machine or a piece of software, or a highway surface, or a house-cleaning service) impacts social and environmental AND financial long-term outcomes. Imagine the product of your project in action, 3 years from now. What does it use? What does it produce? Who does it impact? Now expand that to 10, 30, 100 years. I know. This is hard for us. We are get’R’done folk. On to the next project. But we are doing a disservice to our stakeholders (some of whom are our grandchildren) when we don’t take the bigger picture into account when we plan.
Reference: Koroneos, Christopher & Achillas, Ch & Nanaki, Evanthia. (2013). Life Cycle Thinking in the Use of Natural Resources. Open Environmental Sciences. 7. 1-6. 10.2174/1876325101307010001.
Posted
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Richard Maltzman
on: January 26, 2022 11:34 PM |
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Thanks for posting your article Richard. I enjoyed reading it. You sold me on the idea of referring to myself as a Project Leader from now on! All the best to you and yours in 2022!
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