People, Planet, Profits & Projects

I’m smack in the middle of the center of gravity of our discipline of project management.  At this moment, although Boston is, of course,The Hub of the Universe, the center of the project management profession is right here in downtown Atlanta, Georgia in the US, thanks to the PMI Global Summit 2023.

 The theme – and the very atmosphere – at the PMI Global Summit is AI.  It’s in the Exhibit Hall, it’s in the sessions, it’s in gigantic letters and imagery on the signage. 

It is LITERALLY a hot-button. Conventioneers are wearing buttons that say “PMI x AI”.

So I thought I would look at the intersection of AI, PM, and Sustainability by running a little experiment.

I asked ChatGPT, which, like all Generative AI systems, I call a “clumsy assistant ™”, to help me as the director of a GPMO, how can I shift the mindset of my PM population to a more holistic, long-term project perspective.

And now, I let the experiment unfold before your very “A Eyes”.

Rich (the human) enters:

I am a director in a global project management office for a large company with over 3000 project managers. I am trying to shift the mindset of our project managers from only thinking of scope, time, and cost, to thinking past the end of their project - thinking about the project's outcome in the steady state. What do you suggest?

CHATGPT SAYS:

Shifting the mindset of project managers from a narrow focus on scope, time, and cost to a more holistic perspective that considers the project's outcomes in the steady state is a crucial step for ensuring long-term success and value delivery. Here are some strategies you can employ to help your project managers make this shift:

1. Communicate the Importance of Long-Term Outcomes: Start by communicating the significance of thinking beyond project completion. Emphasize how the project's success is ultimately measured by its impact on the organization's long-term goals, customer satisfaction, and sustainability.
2. Provide Training and Education: Offer training and educational resources to help project managers understand the broader context of their projects. This can include courses on change management, business strategy, and post-project evaluation.
3. Set Clear Expectations: Ensure that your organization's expectations for project managers include a focus on post-project outcomes and benefits realization. Make it clear that successful project delivery goes beyond meeting time, scope, and cost constraints.
4. Incorporate Benefits Realization Management (BRM): Implement a Benefits Realization Management framework within your project management processes. This framework helps project managers track and ensure the achievement of desired business outcomes.
5. Align Projects with Strategic Goals: Help project managers understand how their projects fit into the organization's strategic objectives. When project managers see the connection between their projects and the bigger picture, they are more likely to consider long-term outcomes.
6. Measure and Reward Benefits Realization: Implement a system for measuring the success of projects not just at completion but also in the steady state. Tie performance evaluations and incentives to benefits realized, not just project completion metrics.
7. Encourage Collaboration and Cross-Functional Teams: Foster collaboration between project managers and other departments, especially those responsible for maintaining and operating the project's deliverables in the steady state. Cross-functional teams can help identify potential issues and opportunities beyond project completion.
8. Regularly Review and Update Project Charters: Project charters should explicitly state the long-term goals and expected outcomes of the project. Regularly review and update these documents to ensure alignment with the organization's evolving strategies.
9. Provide Tools and Resources: Equip project managers with tools and resources that enable them to track and assess outcomes in the steady state. This might include post-implementation reviews, benefits tracking software, or impact assessment methodologies.
10. Share Success Stories: Highlight and share success stories of projects that have led to significant, positive changes in the organization's steady state. This can serve as inspiration for project managers to adopt a more outcome-focused mindset.
11. Encourage a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Foster a culture that values learning from both successes and failures. Encourage project managers to evaluate the long-term impacts of their projects and apply lessons learned to future initiatives.
12. Lead by Example: As a director, lead by example and demonstrate the importance of thinking about outcomes in the steady state. Show that you prioritize benefits realization and support project managers in this shift.

By implementing these strategies, you can help project managers develop a more comprehensive view of their projects and drive a mindset shift towards achieving and sustaining positive outcomes in the steady state.

Then, I told ChatGPT that a “self-proclaimed expert” had given me some advice, and gave ChatGPT its own advice back, asking it to validate it and give its opinion as to how good an answer the self-proclaimed expert (i.e. ChatGPT!) gave me.  Here is what I got back:

CHATGPT SAYS

The advice provided by the self-proclaimed expert is well-rounded and aligns with best practices for shifting project managers' mindsets towards considering long-term outcomes in the steady state. It emphasizes a holistic perspective and offers a comprehensive set of strategies to achieve this shift.

Overall, the strategies provided in the expert's response align with best practices for making this important mindset shift within your organization. It's a comprehensive approach that addresses various aspects of the transformation, from communication and education to measurement and culture development. Implementing these strategies should contribute to your goal of ensuring long-term success and value delivery in your projects.

It did make some slight tweaks, but mostly cosmetic and of little impact.  But it did make some adjustments.

In  Part 2, I will share another conversation where we can see that ChatGPT is helpful, but clumsy.  This is why I think the best way to work with it is to imagine a brilliant intern helping you in the lab.  They think of chemical reactions you would NEVER imagine.  They are creative and seem to have tons of chemistry knowledge at their fingertips.  However, sometimes they knock over a whole rack of test tubes, and inadvertently create explosive reactions that release toxic fumes (see the blog's main photo above). 

What is AI?  It's a Clumsy Assistant™. 

In Part 2, I'll continue with a theme that is emerging here at the conference.  To stay relevant as AI becomes more 'atmospheric', you, (yes, you, the very person reading this), must be more human.

In Part 1, I opened the topic of this $1B tree-planting scheme and focused on the terminology surrounding this effort – whether it was a project, a program, an initiative or some other term.  Here I jump back to the topic itself.

Referring back to the announcement from the US Forest Service, the breadth of the Program (I’ve decided it is a Program) is amazing.  Communities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several U.S. Territories and Tribal Nations are receiving funding – and the funding is expanded greatly from 2022 – by 27 times, in fact.

For  those interested in the specifics, I found this tremendous resource from SmartCitiesDive.

This resource has an interactive map in which you can click on your own state to find how much funding it received for the Program.  It also states that “The grant awardees announced Thursday, which include municipal governments and community-based organizations, were selected from a pool of 842 applicants requesting a total of $6.4 billion”.

So you can see a project selection process going on in this program.  Although large, it could not fund all 842 projects – it settled on 385 of that total.  And speaking of project selection, in researching this Program, I found this US Government resource - a tool for project selection called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening tool, loaded with data that shows which communities in which states are underserved.  The mapping tool identifies disadvantaged communities that face burdens in the categories of climate, energy, health, housing including nature deprivation, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, workforce development, and other socioeconomic thresholds.  The idea is to make sure that the Program’s benefits flow to the communities with the greatest need.

So – what are the projects?  This graphic from the US Forest Service shows the way the projects in the program break down amongst the major project types:

• Tree Planting and Maintenance
• Restoration and Resilience
• Workforce Development
• Extreme Heat
• Community Engagement in Urban Forestry Planning

I invite you to explore this Program – maybe to see if it opens up opportunities in your part of the US.  I also invite those outside the US to compare and comment what your government is doing along these lines.

Author’s Note: That’s not a typo, it’s a Dad Joke.  Wood, not would, because this is about trees, and a very lofty sum of over one BILLION dollars.

A recent article in The Guardian got my attention for two reasons.

Reason 1 – and this may seem trivial, but maybe it is kind of important – was the terminology we use in project management.

Reason 2 – this is an example of what we called in our book, Green Project Management a 'Green by Nature' project, one in which the objectives of the project are laser-focused on an improved sustainability outcome.

In this post I will talk a bit about the terminology and will follow up with more details on some of the individual projects under the umbrella of a program, in a follow-up post.

Let’s start with PMI’s definition of a project.

From the PMI 7^th Edition PMBOK® Guide, a project is: “A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result”.  A program is “Related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities that are managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually.”

Yet, the announcement, and the coverage in the press, is sloppy with the use of these terms, and throws a bunch of other terms, like initiative, effort, endeavor, in the mix.  It’s not just the press.  In my experience as a practitioner and a consultant and lecturer, I have come across major confusion and mishegoss (look it up) with respect to (or perhaps because of lack of respect for) project management titles and job descriptions. 

Again, words are important.  When it comes to organizations, sometimes the way project managers are titled is a “tell” regarding the maturity level of the organization.  Those which respect the discipline of project management (or even project leadership!) follow through with appropriate titles for the people and the names of the initiatives on which they are working.  Note: I use the word “initiative” – a positive word – as the overarching term for projects, programs, and portfolios.

If you follow this blog,  you know that I’m not happy with the title Project Manager, because I assert that we are project LEADERS.  That’s covered as a theme in many posts, so I won’t repeat it here, but words do matter.

So, what about the words thrown around, like endeavor, project, initiative, effort, work, scheme, gambit, stratagem…?

I think this one is clearly a program and should be called such. 

Here are some snippets form the US Department of Agriculture’s announcement:

“The Urban and Community Forestry Program is the only program in the federal government dedicated to enhancing and expanding the nation's urban forest resources. This is the largest single USDA Inflation Reduction Act investment to date in urban and community forests.”

“Studies show that trees in communities are associated with improved physical and mental health, lower average temperatures during extreme heat, and increased food security, and create new economic opportunities. This historic funding will help the Forest Service support projects that increase tree cover in disadvantaged communities, provide equitable access to the benefits of nature, and deliver tangible economic and ecological benefits to urban and Tribal communities across the country.”

To their credit, the USDA did use “Program” for the most part when referring to this initiative.

To (excuse the pun) plant a seed for the next blog post, have a look at this video which talks about the rationale for launching the program.

In the follow-up post (Part 2), I will talk much more about this Program, and leave the terminology behind.  See what I did there…?

In Part 1 of this post, I introduced you to (probably re-introduced you) to Dr. Emmett Brown, that slightly wacky scientist of Back To The Future fame.  I referenced several articles, and in this one I’ll continue with those and others, like this one from Clean Technica, which opens like this:

"Researchers at MIT, led by professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, have discovered that mixing cement, carbon black, and water in certain proportions results in concrete that doubles as a supercapacitor that is able to store electrical energy.  I like how Professor Masic wraps it up.

“You have these at least two millennia old materials (carbon black and cement) that, when you combine them in a specific manner, you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting.”, he says."

So, great.  We have our ‘conductive nano composite’ – our own ‘flux capacitor’.  Now what?

Well, the best place to start is to remember that we’re literally talking about something foundational.  The foundation of a home, the foundation of a wind turbine, the foundation of a highway.  If all of these things which were formerly structural are now sources of energy storage, well, that changes things.

Charging your car just by driving on the road

Doc Brown may have famously said, “Roads, where we going we don’t need roads”.  But we still do, and we need electric cars to be easily charged.  How about if that was done by … just driving?  This has been attempted in the past (see this article about Sweden’s first swipe at it), but these required installing electrical rails in the road.  Forget that – with supercapacitors, the job can be much easier.

From an article in New Zealand’s DrivenCar Guide magazine:

The researchers propose an intriguing concept: integrating this technology within a concrete road could potentially facilitate on-the-go charging for electric vehicles, akin to the principles employed in wireless phone chargers. With this application, the road surface would become a battery while solar panels or windmills provide continuous power.

Don’t get too excited yet, though.  There is more project work (development projects!) needed to get this to scale.  The scientists have only produced a button-sized version of the material.  Can’t drive too far on a button.

Also adding more carbon black does increase the power storage capacity of the material, it also decreases concrete strength. There will be research needed to find the ‘sweet spot’ – probably between 3 and 10 percent carbon black that retains enough of  the strength of the material while providing the supercapacitor properties.  No good having your car charged but falling through a carbon black hole.

Same deal for home foundations. It’s great if your home can store energy down there, but not so good if it falls over.

There are skeptics (and that’s always a good thing especially when it comes to safety).  Witness this article from Eric Worrall, in Waats Up With That:

Eric says:

My concern is the application.

When capacitors fail they go with a bang. Old style televisions were notorious for this kind of failure, the loud bang which preceded the magic smoke was usually caused by capacitors suffering catastrophic dielectric failure, and releasing all their stored energy in a fraction of a second.

What concerns me is, if a TV capacitor explodes, abruptly releasing a few joules of energy, you spill your beer and curse a bit. But if a 10KWh household super capacitor goes, that’s 36 million joules of energy – equivalent to 8.6Kg of TNT, enough to turn your house into a sizeable crater.

10KW (10,000 watt hours) x 3600 seconds in an hour = 36,000,000 joules of energy
36,000,000 joules / 4,184 joules / gram = 8,604g = 8.6Kg of TNT

Even more interesting, brittle materials like concrete are vulnerable to mechanical shock. So that 8.6Kg of TNT equivalent, enough to utterly destroy a normal house, could trigger a chain reaction of adjacent dielectric failures, resulting in thousands or even millions of houses abruptly releasing their stored energy. And that’s not even considering the energy storage requirements of even greater concentrations of energy, like high-rise apartments and office buildings.

The failure of 115 adjacent household storage super capacitors holding 10KWh could release a kiloton of force – think the Beirut explosion in 2020.       Worse, each additional household energy storage system recruited into the chain reaction and  explosion would increase the risk to the next house.

               I’m thinking, that would not be a good day to visit town.

Of course, all this risk could be mitigated by using expensive spring or rubber loaded mounts and shock resistant supports, to minimise the risk of the house foundation capacitor detonating because of an adjacent explosion. I’m sure no building contractor would be tempted to cut corners and use cheap, substandard shock protection components, right?

See an example of a capacitor blowing up in slow motion here (and imagine this scaled up by Doc Brown levels of magnitude).

This type of advocacy for ‘what could go wrong’ is so needed, and it’s best to consider this NOW, not after the first 10,000 kM of roadway and 300,000 homes are built.

So: more  project work to do, but this is quite certainly a breakthrough that will lead us Back to a green Future.

Most of you are probably familiar with Dr. Emmett Brown.  That’s a photo of him at the top of this post. He is not a famous psychologist from the University of Chicago, nor is he the leading cardiologist at the Boston Medical Center.  He doesn’t even have a PMP(R) credential, and he’s not even a real doctor.  Well, he is a real doctor character, the ‘mad scientist’ in Back To the Future, played eloquently by Christopher Lloyd.

And he uses an interesting device to power his Delorean electric vehicle: a flux capacitor.

See the sign below.  Watch out!

Of course, there is no such thing.

Or… is there?

I have encountered two recent articles which, while not using the term “flux capacitor” are using the term “supercapacitor”.  The articles are not from science fiction magazines, either, they are from IEEE Spectrum and from New Scientist.

To me, the irony of the story is very sweet, because this is about using two ancient materials - concrete and carbon – to create capacitors which can be built into the environment to power houses and potentially vehicles.

Here’s the paragraph that got my attention – in an article from New Scientist magazine, August 2023:

A mixture of cement and charcoal powder could enable houses to store a full day’s worth of energy in their concrete foundations. This new way of creating a supercapacitor – an alternative to batteries that can discharge energy much faster – could be incorporated into the foundations of both buildings and wind turbines. When paired with renewable energy sources, it could also someday let concrete road foundations wirelessly recharge electric vehicles as they drive along.

This is striking in several ways, not the least of which is the idea that the power source for homes, businesses and vehicles could be built into the environment, which smacks of the whole concept of The Built Environment, for which PMI now is offering a credential (the PMI-CP™).  Indeed, I am working with industry professionals and academics to work this into our curriculum at Boston University.

The Supercapacitor

But let’s get back to this supercapacitor – the project that led to its development and the projects it will undoubtedly launch – projects that would make Dr. Emmett Brown quite proud.

Here’s an image of the supercapacitor in the lab (courtesy of IEEE Spectrum):

Let’s start with the ingredients.  This is another irony.  To power the modern world in an environmentally-responsible manner, requires the generation and storage of electricity without the need for fossil fuels, without hazardous or rare-earth chemicals (like those used in batteries).  You would think that some brand-new whiz-kid material would be invented to do that.  Not so.  One of the main ingredients in this supercapacitor is carbon black.  To give you an idea of how new this material is – it was used to write the Dead Sea scrolls.  So: not new.  The other material is concrete, also ancient.

The trick is in the surface area.

To make the material for their supercapacitor, the team at MIT (see story here) stirred up a paste made of cement and water, and then introduced carbon black, a fine, charcoal-like form of carbon which is highly conductive, into the paste.

As this cement mixture cured, the water was absorbed, and when evaporated, left behind a veinous network of tunnels when ended up being filled by the carbon black.

The resulting material is now a latticework ... with a large surface area of conductive, winding, branching tunnels, without expanding the overall volume of the material, which can now serve as an electrode for the capacitor.

The Capacitor

I suppose I should digress here for a moment and tell those who don’t have an electrical engineering background about capacitors.

There is controversy over who developed the first capacitor, and there’s even controversy over the invention of the predecessor of the capacitor, the Leiden (or Leyden) jar. This was invented nearly simultaneously by German cleric E. Georg von Kleist, but was followed up with more research and intent by  by Pieter van Musschenbroek at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in approximately 1745.  In effect, they layers of foil separated by an insulator (called a dielectric).  You can see them in action in this video:

 they are classically represented by this symbol, a quite logical one, two plates separated by a gap (air, glass, plastic, or other dielectric).

As current (excuse the pun) electronic components, they often look like one of these:

However, now, the concept of this small electronic component , with this innovation, is expanded into the very construction material itself.

In part 2, I will continue with the possible implementation ideas for this technology.

References:

MIT article

New Scientist article

IEEE Spectrum article