People, Planet, Profits & Projects

In 1986, when Jay Westervelt, a New York environmentalist, coined the word “greenwashing”, it was in an essay assailing the hotel industry for its attempt to use an environmental cause to reduce its costs, rather than an effort to reduce energy usage.  Today, the term applies to any company who uses the consideration of the environment as an advertising tool rather than a concerted effort to reduce their environmental footprint.

During a recent holiday, my wife and I decided instead of driving a long distance, or flying to a location to be with family, that we would have a “stay-cation” and use our lowest emission, fuel efficient vehicle to drive the 40 miles to Boston and spend a few days in the city.  We were able to park our car and then use “pedi-power” for our stay.  Boston is a foot-friendly city and even though we stayed across the river in Cambridge, we were able to walk everywhere we wanted to go. 

Some small businesses choose to take on sustainability projects.  We had made reservations at a small restaurant in Beacon Hill for the holiday dinner.  At the time we made the reservations I had no idea how “green” the restaurant is.  At our table was a card printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper, FSC Certified.   The front of the card read “Green Thursdays, Come and celebrate our planet with your friends and neighbors.”  They offered “organic martinis, specials from renewable and sustainable foods, and recycling tips.” 

But the back of the card were the most poignant messages.  It had two boxes, “Did you know…?” which is the commitment the restaurant makes, and “How can you help?” which is self-explanatory.  The “Did you know” box contained things like; recycling of just about everything, including catalogs, cardboard, computer printouts, cell phones, metals.  It also included composting of food wastes, environmentally friendly cleaning products, energy efficient equipment (programmable timers and thermostats, motion sensing lights, low energy lighting, recycling waste oils, seasonal herb garden, two-way totes for delivery of merchandise, educating staff and the public on sustainable practices, and more.

The “How can I help?” box included advice to install low-flow shower heads to reduce  water use by as much as 50%,  and by turning off the water when you brush your teeth could save as much as 9 gallons of water each time.  It also included some facts like 40% of the energy used in your home is for heat, 1 ton of non-recycled newsprint uses 12 trees, Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year – enough to build a twelve-foot high wall of paper from NY to California, and glass never wears out-it can be recycled forever. What isn’t said here is important as well.  How much does this effort make “cents”?  Let’s just look at lighting.  Here’s a little table I took from one of my student team presentations:

That is a very short pay-back period and significant savings!  75 Chestnut, Beacon Hill, is an example of a small company doing what they can to execute sustainable projects.  That is certainly not “greenwashing.”  Besides that, the atmosphere and food were excellent. 

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.