Viewing Posts by Richard Maltzman
The Glory of Repair
|
This post is about innovation and entrepreneurship. In a way. It’s about how maybe, just maybe, we put so much emphasis on innovation, that we have left some important values behind – like the value of keeping things running and doing a good job of maintenance to avoid throwing things away. I actually started my career in what was called, at the time, “repair engineering”. Our group supported the 23 national service centers for telecom equipment. Electronic units (they happened to be pulse-code modulation regenerators, for those who care) from underground and telephone pole equipment locations were shipped to these service centers where they were repaired, tested, and returned to a ‘new’ condition. These days, those same units would be thrown away. There could be a separate blog post (or two, or three) on the highly negative ecological and social effects of disposing of electronic components, so there is merit in repairing, especially if the non-economic costs of disposal are considered. I’ll keep the focus here, however, on the value of maintenance in and of itself. Aside from my own praise of maintenance, there was recently a “Festival of Maintenance” at the Museum of London. Its mission: The Festival of Maintenance is a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, exploring and recognising the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter. To get a flavor for this, I found this interesting content at Makerassembly.org. Note: The “maker culture” is “a contemporary culture or subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture that intersects with hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware” (Wikipedia). A lot of maker culture is about making new things, and in many Western contexts, that’s making gadgets and gizmos that are fun for a while but generally then gather dust until eventually thrown away. Making and fixing useful things happens, but often in less visible places — farmers repairing and modifying their equipment, making and fixing in rural areas, and around the world local manufacturing and hacking and reuse where it’s the only option to save and sustain life. (We used to do more of that here, making do and mending, but of late that’s declined as consumer goods became more affordable, and often cheaper to replace than to repair — or even complex items designed to be thrown away.) We felt that making and local manufacturing of essential items would be valuable, even here in the UK, whilst imagining both dystopian and utopian possible futures. Measures of economic success are geared around innovation as well. Ever wonder why the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is called Gross and not Net? The reason is that it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. You can find out more about the economics of repair versus replace in a very insightful article (Patch-up Job) in an October 2018 issue of The Economist. In this article you will also find an interesting discussion of the “right to repair” laws in the US and some similar proposed legislation in the EU. So: how does project management fit into this? As PMs we may want to work on the creation of something new, innovative, creative. Maintenance seems so … bland … compared to this. Indeed, maintenance is often dismissed as drudgery. But wait…maybe there are innovative ways to keep things up and running! Perhaps it would not be so bad to work on a project that breathes new life into an older building, network, or piece of software. Going back to my own 'ancient history', as a repair engineer, we ended up doing many innovative projects in the area of repair, including my favorite proejct: introducing a touch-screen based automated test system for these regenerators, back in 1982. Yes, you read that correctly - we were deploying touch-screen interfaces decades before smartphones. The outcome of this project - the test system - facilitated the repair, saved many difficult-to-troubleshoot units from the trash bin, reduced the repair cost and sped up the turn-around time. You can have your innovative cake and maintain it, too! Let me hear from you: What ideas or experience do you have in managing ‘maintenance’ projects and making that (important) work attractive, compelling, and interesting? |
Mean Business
|
Nope. Not that kind of mean. Mean as in "we mean business". My last blog post (“Think Globally, Launch Locally?) was about Planet Labs and their partnership with the state of California, to launch microsatellites to track the earth’s climate. I left off in that post discussing the general trend towards businesses and states or provinces taking action when government fails to do so. The organization mentioned at the end of the post was the “We Mean Business” Coalition. This is the statement regarding “what we do” on their site: We Mean Business is a global nonprofit coalition working with the world’s most influential businesses to take action on climate change. Together we catalyze business leadership to drive policy ambition and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. “Coalition” sounds a bit too small. The numbers give away its size: 822 companies with almost $17 Trillion (with a T) in market cap are participants. What’s motivating them to join and take action? Of course altruism – doing the right thing – is one of the motivational factors. However, on their web site, they say that they “recognize the transition to a low-carbon economy is the only way to secure sustainable economic growth and prosperity for all”. Note the stress on economic growth. These companies are basically – on a large scale – investing in the “Cost of Good Quality”, something we as project managers know about. If you need a refresher, this is the concept from quality guru Philip Crosby that says money and effort invested up front in things like training, incoming inspection, better planning, thoughtfulness is worth it because the “Cost of Poor Quality” – in this case, a failing planet, is so much higher. Here’s Jesper Brodin of IKEA discussing how climate change is affecting his company right now and why IKEA is in the We Mean Business Coalition. That’s just a brief sample of what you will find at the Coalition’s website. How about something more significant? Here’s a case study from Google regarding their move to full 100% renewable energy: https://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/blog/google-carbon-neutrality-100-renewable-energy-beyond/
If you are studying sustainability in project management, what a rich source of research you have on this site. Case study after case study are available showing the economic justification for investing in climate action. Click here and research away! Just in the past few months, case studies have been posted from Danone, Tesco, Google, and Coca-Cola. The organization also sponsors conferences, both face-to-face, and webinars, for example this one: https://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/event/practice-guide-develop-green-energy-procurement-plan/ See if your company is one of the participants by clicking here. https://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/companies/ If not, perhaps you can be a change agent and get them to join, by clicking here. Don't be mean! Mean business instead. And it turns out that planning for a better future for earth is good business. |
Think Globally, Launch Locally?
|
A recent story in the Economist starts this way: SUPPOSE Britain’s prime minister ordered civil servants to make the world’s fifth-biggest economy fully carbon-neutral by 2045, and thereafter to extract more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it emits. In a sense that is what happened on September 10th, when Governor Jerry Brown of California—whose economy last year overtook Britain’s—inked an executive order mandating state agencies to begin such preparations. The article goes on to discuss several initiatives in which local government is taking global climate change on with its own local – and not so local – projects. It seems that cities are taking the lead when national governments fail to do so. In August of this year, 19 cities, including London, Montreal, Johannesburg, Paris, and Tokyo, vowed to make all new buildings carbon neutral starting in 2030, and also to retrofit older buildings to meet that standard by 2050. See that press release here: https://www.c40.org/press_releases/global-cities-commit-to-make-new-buildings-net-zero-carbon-by-2030 But let’s get back to Governor Jerry Brown for a moment. He’s not happy with the way the US Federal government views climate change, which basically is that government should back off of regulations and that the US must drop out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Brown's view is that climate science's findings - agreed to by 97%+ of climate scientists - is very real, and the facts are compelling that action must be taken to curtail the use of fossil fuels, to work towards renewable sources of energy, and to at least better understand the facts around the issue. Agree or not, what he thinks – matters, and it matters to project managers and here’s why. At the Climate Action Summit, a California-based event which took place this month (https://www.globalclimateactionsummit.org/), Governor Brown announced that California will launch its own satellites to research climactic conditions worldwide. California will partner with Planet Labs for this project. Yes, it most certainly is a project - or perhaps a program. Either way it will employ project managers. Here is the press release: https://www.planet.com/pulse/state-of-california-and-planet-announce-groundbreaking-initiative-to-support-action-on-climate-change/ Here’s a very interesting video from Planet.com that talks about the benefit of these mini-satellites and how they can help baseline and report on variance (sound familiar, project managers) the earth to provide valuable information for agriculture and climate science. For project managers, look at the feeling of “team” you see in this video: The sense of purpose seems to really motivate the individuals to coalesce into a team, doesn’t it? And this movement to ignore and/or leapfrog over national government's hesitancy to take action on climate change is not at all limited to city and state governments – it’s industry as well - big time. An organization representing 800 firms, worth over $17T (yep, that’s a T for Trillion) have joined the “We Mean Business” coalition. In fact, since it's so big...that will be the topic of our next blog post.
|
Ocean Cleanup Launch
| This is a short update on my previous posts about the Ocean Cleanup Project, which I had mentioned would launch in San Francisco in September. Indeed, it did launch successfully on September 8, and you can find this video about the launch, its background, and the expectations from the project:
I'll do my best to keep you updated on the progress of what promises to be a huge (and important) initiative to clean up 90% of the plastic waste in the ocean in the next 12 years.
|
BRIng It On
|
As PMs we use different words to describe groups, or collections, bunches, flocks, herds, or gaggles of projects. Usually, a “Program” means a collection of projects for which we gain benefits by managing them together – for example, shared components and/or resources, such as a common wiring harness, batter, and software for an introduction of three new electric vehicles. We use “Portfolio” to describe a higher-level (higher in terms of closer to the mission/vision/values of the organization) collection of projects and programs, and even operations. The word “Initiative” is used in various ways, but often it is used to describe something highly strategic, important, global, and perhaps, but not always, bigger and more far-reaching than a Portfolio. In this post, and likely in some follow-up posts, I’d like to make you aware of an initiative which is said to affect 60% of the world’s population and to spend somewhere between 1 and 8 trillion US dollars. Yes, I said trillion, with a T. What is this monster initiative? The picture at the top now comes into play. It’s called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It’s a Chinese government initiative, and as you can tell from those striking statistics, it’s huuuuuuuuuuuge. It’s so significant that it is written into the Chinese constitution. As this is written, there are 40 officials from countries around the world are attending a special 11-month program devoted to the initiative at Huaqiao Univeristy, which in turn has been dubbed the Think Tank for the BRI initiative. How many initiatives do you know that have their own dedicated University think tank? This one does. In this post, I won’t go into the politics and controversy involved, of which there is no shortage. For that, I suggest that you read the cover story of The Economist’s 3-August issue.
From the perspective of this post, one point I’m keen to make is the motivators driving this project that stem from climate change. The Asian Development Bank…estimates that the continent requires $US26T (there’s that “T” again!) in infrastructure through 2030 to maintain to maintain today’s growth rates and adapt to climate change. Now that we know the rationale, let’s look at some of the basics of the BRI. It’s actually a little confusing – the “Road” is referring to the maritime (ocean) portion of the initiative, and the “Belt” refers to the land-based transport, oil/gas pipelines, telecom, railway projects. There’s a full report from PriceWaterhouse can be had here: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/growth-markets-center/assets/pdf/china-new-silk-route.pdf . This summary comes from that document.
The official information currently available, mostly provided by China’s state news agency ‘Xinhua’, suggests that (BRI) comprises two physical routes, with numerous side-branches along the way. These two different routes ultimately connect China with Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. This impression is further enhanced by a map published by the news agency, depicting both a land route running from inner China to Southern Europe (via the Netherlands) and a sea route connecting the port of Shanghai ultimately with the end point of the land-based route in Venice, via India and Africa. However, it seems that this is more a symbolic portrayal than a factual interpretation. In reality, (BRI) is more of a large ‘umbrella’ type of initiative. It seems to be a potentially huge collective of current, planned and future infrastructure projects, accompanied by a host of bilateral and regional trade agreements. Ongoing and planned projects will focus on the development of a wide array of assets, including ports, roads, railways, airports, power plants, oil and gas pipelines and refineries, and Free Trade Zones, etc., as well as a supporting IT, telecom and financial infrastructure. To date, PwC has tracked the equivalent of c. US$250 billion in projects that have either been built already, recently started construction or have been agreed-on and signed (as part of BRI). The initiative is beginning to promote itself worldwide. You can see that in this video produced by the Chinese government – and an interesting way to end the post, although I also provide you with a set of links to do more research should you choose to do so. Video:
Links https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-belt-and-road-hostage-1534717019 http://english.gov.cn/beltAndRoad/ https://www.vox.com/2018/4/6/17206230/china-trade-belt-road-economy Excellent Podcast Episode on BRI: https://soundcloud.com/ebrd_pocketeconomics/chinas-ambitious-belt-and-road-initiative |
