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Date
As project managers, we are necessarily focused on the term of our projects. Most projects - even the "long" ones that take years to complete - have numbers that are tiny when you compare the numbers in those plans comparison to the types of numbers associated with our planet.
But we do need to think about the long-term effects of the product of our project. Our projects fit in with programs. Our programs and projects are part of an overall portfolio, and that portfolio is your organization’s way of getting their overall objectives accomplished. Further, at the portfolio and program level, it’s very likely that there are mission and vision statements that have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) targets that are financially and ethically tied to the company’s shareholders, stakeholders, owners, and customers.
So regardless of your views on climate change, the connection you make from your project’s product to the longer-term view is a strategically and tactically important connection.
And that brings us to the beautiful picture you see at the top of today’s post. It comes from a striking exhibit at Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA, entitled “Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic”. You can read about the exhibit in this article, and you can visit the exhibit’s home page here. It’s on until May of this year, so … for a “long time” in project terms.
Here is the description of the exhibit:
Seeing Glacial Time examines how eight contemporary artists employ the "real time" of photography to visualize the largely imperceptible, gradual changes in "glacial time" from the bellwether Arctic region. Most of these artists have gone to extreme lengths—and distances—to capture and create their imagery. Some utilize scientific and appropriated photography as source material, while others depart from documentary traditions to create expressive images suggestive of a melancholic Sublime. This timely exhibition of paintings, photographs and a video installation introduces Boston audiences to artists who either have not been seen before in the area or have created new work for this occasion.
Featured artists are:
Subhankar Banerjee
Olaf Otto Becker
Resa Blatman
Diane Burko
Caleb Cain Marcus
Gilles Mingasson
Joan Perlman
Camille Seaman
But our point comes back around to us as project managers. Perhaps as you wander around the museum exhibit – either in person, or virtually – take some time (there’s that word again) to consider some of your Gantt chart “bars” and whether or not they shouldn’t at least have a ‘dotted-line-dependency” with the impact of its product in the longer term, seen in the context of the planet.
Examples: What consumables does this product generate in the long-term? Does the outcome improve, or at least keep stable, the working and living conditions for the local population where it will be used? A new book on which we are working, one to follow up Green Project Management, will ask – and by way of real examples and measurements – will help answer these questions.
In the meantime…
Get the context, and ask yourself these questions. It couldn’t hurt.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: February 10, 2014 11:51 AM |
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