People, Planet, Profits & Projects

In this somewhat toungue-in-cheek, somewhat serious post, we address the sustainability role of the project manager by illustrating this with a football statdium.

In particular, we want to draw your attention to the Dallas Cowboys.  After all, this is Thanksgiving season in the US, a holiday celebrated here with a family meal, acknowledging what we're thankful for, and watching lots of football.  In particular, this Thanksgiving, the Dallas Cowboys played the Miami Dolphins (the Cowboys won by one point). In fact, Dallas plays every Thanksgiving in their beautiful new stadium, a finalist in the 2010 PMI Project of the Year Award.

The stadium deserved its Finalist position - the project team did a great job and this post is not meant to be any sort of direct attack on that project.  However we will take a couple of good-natured pokes at it based on some news stories.

First: some context.  It's our assertion that project managers are responsible not only for the execution of the project and its end deliverable, but the handoff of that project to the steady-state.  And we think project managers should have more of a role in assuring that the steady-state, or the "sustained" operation, is successful for the ongoing users of the project's product.

In the case of this stadium, two flaws have shown themselves in terms of steady-state operation.

1. The gigantic TV monitor has actually interfered with play.  See this story. See this story.

2. Premium seating for high-paying patrons has ended up in obstructed views. See this story.

So what could the project manager and team have done?  Did they fully take into account the steady-state operation of the stadium?  Is it really their responsibility?

We're just asking the questions.  We're just raising awareness about this.  Perhaps this is example is extreme, but we want this conversation to take place.  We want this post to be a way to point out that sustainability often has nothing to do with ecology but rather with the general "steady-state".

Not literally, but we were recently reading an article on build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT).  It sounds a lot like life cycle assessment (LCA) if you ask us.  So the premise of BOOT, to put it in a project management context, is to initiate, plan and execute a project (build), turn it over to internal operations (own/operate) for a specified amount of time and then reassign (transfer) the project’s operational responsibilities to a third-party.  That reassignment may be a permanent solution, via a sale, or it may be a lease arrangement.  As an example, let’s look at the Memorial Bridge in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

The truss/lift bridge took about three years to construct, between 1920 and 1923.  The build was a joint venture with Maine, New Hampshire and the federal government.  The own/operate was the responsibility of the States of Maine and New Hampshire.  After 88 years of operations, and numerous attempts at trying to procure funding for refurbishing the bridge, it was decided in July of 2011 to permanently close the bridge to vehicular traffic.  With the decision made to replace the bridge, the process of transfer has begun.  The thought is to offer the bridge for a nominal fee if the company winning the bid agrees to remove it at their own cost and have a plan approved to reuse the bridge, thus completing the BOOT process.

Because we are in the business of sustainability, we are going to define LCA in the context of the environmental standard, ISO 14040.   First, however, we’d like to share a little about the fundamentals of LCA.  It is a technique for assessing the aspects and potential impacts associated with a product.  The steps are as follows: compile an inventory of relevant inputs and outputs of the product, evaluate potential environmental impacts associated with those inputs and outputs, interpret the results of the inventory and potential impacts throughout the product’s life cycle (i.e. cradle to grave) from build (raw material acquisition, construction) through own/operate (use), to transfer (disposal).  To put further perspective on it, categories of environmental impact include; resource usage, human health and ecological considerations.

ISO 14040:2006 are the guiding principles and framework for LCA.  It includes the following phases:

• Goal definition and Scope
• Inventory Analysis
• Impact Assessment
• Interpretation
• Reporting and Critical Review

For a detailed look see http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/lcaccess/ or Chapter 9 of our book Green Project Management.

We believe that there is a direct correlation between BOOT and LCA.  The BOOT process, in the project management context, looks at the project over its lifecycle from the design/build/operate stage to the transfer stage.  LCA looks at a project from the charter/planning/execution phase through the closure stage and on to the disposal stage.  Although to some it may seem a stretch, it seems to us that both of these applications, when applied to the project management environment, are almost identical.  We know that some may feel that the BOOT process is only applied very narrowly and it doesn’t relate to project management.  It is important for the project manager to reach outside their box and use whatever tools and techniques are available.  BOOT and LCA, are just those types of techniques that get us thinking about what happens to our projects after we the traditional project management functions are complete.  It is our thinking that these techniques provide us with the unique opportunity to expand our role and that’s where we think the future of project management should go.

Recently we've done a lot of thinking about how sustainbility is a driver of innovation.  Inspired by the words of Marvin Odom, President of Shell Oil, who has just come right out and said that sustainability "may now be the number one driver of innovation projects at Shell", we've been seeing this sentiment shared by leaders of enterprises around the world, and echoed by PMO leaders as well.

This thinking was reinforced in an odd way via two stories - one of which crossed our desk just this morning.

In this Boston Globe story, and again in this story from Mass High Tech, we learn about the Endicott House, a 1934 mansion in suburban Boston which has been converted into a guest house and conference center.

At the Endicott House, MIT has started to use two forms of electrolyzed water (hypocholorous acid and sodium hydroxide) instead of Windex, Ajax, and Spic 'n Span.  These cleaners are considered harmful in large doses and are obviously less sustainabile than what is basically ... water.

From a project standpoint, this means that the facility installs a system which is capable of separating salt water into the electrolyzed products and store it in two 55-gallan tanks, from which employees refil their spray bottles.

And they can do this withut fear of spills or burns.

A company based in Massachusetts calle Lynfield Green Technologies (LGT) has already sold 10 such systems, installing them in schools and companies that use these solutions to clean cafeterias and even semi-trailers.

So its about projects.

It's about economic sustainability.

It's about lowering toxicity and ecological sustainability.

It's about safer working conditions (social sustainability).

It's about cost of greenality.

Listen to Patrick Lucci, the co-founder of LGT: "The operating costs for using chemical cleaners or disinfectants is 20 to 25 cents per room per day, but you can virtually eliminate those costs by purchasing a $15,000 device and your carbon footprint gets smaller".

You can do the math, there is a finite payback period here.  In the case of the Endicott Center, they belive it will be only a year or two.  That's without taking into account the other "Cost of poor greenality" aspects which can be figured in as well in terms of health and well-being of employees, disposal costs for chemicals and packaging.  You can also mix in the attributes of "good corporate citizen", "greening up your enterprise", and "higher employee morale".

Check out the stories - if you're into chemistry you may find the science interesting.

No matter what - we insist that sustainability is not only a source of innovation, it's a source of PROJECTS, and thus, worth learning about.

And - coming back around to our opening - it's more evidence that sustainability is more and more an "instigator" for innovation.

Sustainability.  It’s a term that’s being used a lot these days.  It’s being used so much, in fact, that we’re afraid it’s losing its meaning.

One of the definitions that we’ve heard (and we like!) comes from a book called Getting Green Done.  In it, author Auden Schendler says that sustainability can be explained best by working as if you will be “staying in business forever”.

This is very difficult concept for us project managers because we are trained to understand (as we should) that a project has a definitive beginning and end.

So when a story like this one from NPR comes out, describing the decades-old problem of poisoned places – locales ruined for the very long term by industrial toxins - we can empathize, perhaps, but from a PM perspective we would tend to glaze over, since we are “only project managers” and are not focused on the steady-state operation of facilities or the long-term impacts of processes.

But maybe we should be.

And yes, of course we should be focused on the long term for the altruistic reasons that appeal to our sense of ethics, and if we have a lick of sense, because the planet is indeed our home and we must realize that we shouldn’t fill our own home with guck and goo and poison. 

But it goes beyond that.  And it goes beyond politics, and it goes beyond wherever you stand on climate change.

We, as a discipline, have to recognize that focusing on the steady-state can also greatly improve how our projects fit into the enterprise and meet enterprise goals.  More and more companies have very strong environmental statements in their mission and value statements.  Ray Anderson built Interface/FLOR into a tremendously successful example of this marriage of long-term thinking and mind-blowing profitability.

Marvin Odom. President of Shell, talks about sustainability being the top driver for innovation at his company.

And if you read this series of stories from NPR about Poisoned Places you will see what we learn about in the PMBOK® Guide (and rooted in Philip Crosby’s original writings) as “the cost of poor quality”, in the form of lawsuits, closed factories, ill-will, and mounting losses.  In this case, we would call it the “cost of poor greenality”.

As project managers we stand at the intersection of strategy and operations.  This means we have to be connected to both the lofty goals of our leaders - which are increasingly focused on sustainability - and the ongoing goals of our cousins in operations, who are "trying to be in business forever".  Why then should we end up being the ones who break the chain?  We should be a vital connection point, right?  Not a roadblock.

Can you do anything about this?

Funny you should ask.  Yes you can.  We’ve started a petition to drive more attention to the issue of sustainability thinking in project management.  It simply asks the PMI to consider already-submitted proposals about integrating sustainability thinking into the PMBOK® 5^th edition and the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Sign our petition by clicking HERE right now.

Thanks.

At EarthPM, we generally stay away from politics.  So – you may ask - why then is this blog post talking about votes? 

The reason is that there was a quote in a recent radio interview which was so striking and poignant that we couldn’t help taking it as a title.  It also makes the overall point of this post which is this: projects are about meeting objectives.  Project success – and enterprise success – needs to be defined on value, not (only) on traditional cost, scope, and schedule attributes.  This is reflected in the 4^th Edition PMBOK® Guide (see page 6).

The message of providing value came to us in a strange way as we listened to a radio program called Science Friday.

Science Friday is a tremendous radio show on the US National Public Radio (NPR) network.  Recently, Ira Flatow, the host of the show, brought in Rear Admiral David Titley of the US Navy, and director of the Navy’s Task force on Climate Change.  You can hear the entire broadcast of the referenced show here.

We think of the value of a Navy as defending the seas.  So why in the world would they be interested in global warming?  It has to do with the net value that they bring.  Whatever the cause, whatever the science, whatever one believes about climate change, if the geography of the arctic is changing,to allow open naval traffic where it wasn’t possible before – that’s something the Navy needs to know about.  So indeed, the Navy’s value is enhanced by understanding how the geography and coastlines affect their ability to defend.

Take a look at this exchange from the broadcast:

FLATOW: I'm interested in reading your biography and notes about you that you confess to at one time being a global warming skeptic.

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Yes.

FLATOW: What changed your mind?

Rear Adm. TITLEY: What really changed my mind was when you go and look at all the evidence, I think to - at least to me - I think it really showed that the climate was changing.

I was, as you might know, I was trained as a meteorologist, and you see, of course, the day-to-day and sometimes even hour-by-hour changes and variations. I watched the computer models in the '70s and the '80s, and, you know, as we all do - you know, how many times have all shoveled six inches of partly cloudy off of our driveway?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Rear Adm. TITLEY: So how, you know, if that was the accuracy, how well could we really say what was going on? But as I learned more about the topic, you see that really the climate is controlled not so much by what the day-to-day weather started as but by what are the larger things doing - what is the ocean doing? What is the sun doing? And what's our atmosphere doing?

So that really was able to show me. And the other part that maybe even is more important was just taking a look at all the different changes. One of my first jobs in the Navy, I was a navigator, and this is well before we had the global positioning system. So I may be one of the few guys who actually still know how to use a sextant and all that sort of thing.

And we are able to - when you navigate a ship, you don't just use one source of information. You use everything you can. And I kind of look at the climate the same way. So we look at the changes in the Arctic. We look at the melting of the glaciers.

We look at what's going on with the ice fields, especially in Greenland but also West Antarctica, look at the changes of the temperature in the ocean, the changes of the ocean acidity, and all of that observations, all of that evidence, if you will, together, along with my now better understanding of what is driving the climate, has sort of taken me from the, hey, I'm not sure there's really anything here, to there really is, there really is some changes going on. And to make sure that our Navy is ready in the 21st century, we have to look at these changes just as we look at changes in the political spheres and the economic spheres and the demographic concepts.

Facts.  Seek facts first.  This should be the mantra of the project manager. 

Rear Admiral Titley, now aware that there are changes in the Arctic ice, and unfettered by any other bias, is more clearly able to do his job.  This is reinforced as he takes a question from a caller, “Andy”.  Check this out:

ANDY (Caller): Hi, how are you doing today?

FLATOW: Hi there.

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Great.

ANDY: Great. Thanks for taking my call. Here in Oklahoma, we have a U.S. senator, Jim Inhofe, who seems to think that there's a lot of demagoguery and that global climate change is a hoax.

What - and if this isn't rehashing too much, but two questions. One is: What are the maybe top three or top five pieces of evidence that converted you as a meteorologist? And secondly: Do you in the Navy attribute any of the global climate change to human behavior, or are you all kind of staying out of that fray?

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Okay, well, thanks very much for the question. First, the types of evidence that at least I've looked at, and I've talked with our senior Navy leadership, is really the Arctic, is I think sort of a harbinger of the of some of the largest examples of climate change.

We have seen not only the extent of the ice in the summertime, or September, come down dramatically, but even more so the total amount of ice or how much thick ice and thin ice is up in the Arctic.

And we're seeing, really before our eyes, a very different system now in which - just 10 or 15 years ago, there was what people or scientists call multiyear ice, really thick ice last for years and years. It's probably five, 10, 15 or more feet thick. Almost all of that ice is now gone, maybe only 15, 20 percent - at the most - of the Arctic has that kind of very thick ice.

And now, the predominant kind of ice in the Arctic is single-year ice. So it melts in the summer, comes back in the winter, melts in the summer again. That's a very, very different regime.

And I kind of like watching ice because, I mean, ice doesn't vote. Ice doesn't contribute to any political party. It doesn't caucus. It just melts. And the ice kind of tells a story. So there's just one piece of evidence, but as I mentioned before, I look at many pieces.

As to the causes of climate change, again, when you look at the physics, you know, about the only things you can really change is you can change the sun and how much energy's coming in. NASA's done a pretty good job of measuring that, and it shows that pretty much within a couple of tenths of 1 percent the energy from the sun over the last 50 years has been pretty constant. Or you can change the amount of greenhouse gases. You can change the aerosols.

So when you put all this together, it looks like the greenhouse gases have a significant impact. The details, of course, get very, very complicated. It's not for the Navy to say what the policies are going to be or what they should be. But, again, I'm interested in making sure our Navy and our chief of naval operations wants to keep our Navy ready for this coming century. So we need to understand these changes to the best we can and adapt to them.

Titley’s attitude is exemplary.   Granted, he’s not a PM but he is setting a great precedent for all of us. Notice his laser-focus on objectives.  “Keep our Navy ready for this coming century”.  Not assess the validity of climate change, nor take to the table any views that may blind or disperse that focus.

Now we are quite aware that this post has quite a bit of information for you about the science of climate change, and that there is value in that (after all, even a blog post needs to produce value!).  However, we hope that you also take away the main messages: work with facts, and keep a laser focus on project objectives.  That’s the real intended value of this blog post, and we hope you enjoyed it.

If you found Rear Admiral Titley’s topic to be interesting, or just want to learn more about climate change from his perspective, we suggest this video (below) as a follow up.

Rear Admiral David Titley - Climate Change Adaptation Congress Opening Address from 3PillarsNetwork on Vimeo.