The Project Management institute runs its PMXPO session each year, and I make it a point to attend, to take in the presentations, network with hundreds of active practitioners, build my network with quality contacts, and get the latest ‘buzz’ of our profession.
PMXPO is always a great learning and networking opportunity!
For PMXPO 2023, I was very happy to see that one session was entirely dedicated to sustainability in project management.
Session 207 (details below) was called “What Does Project Management Have to do With Sustainability?”, and included a conversation amongst PMI leaders:
Sierra Hampton-Simmons, Vice President, Products
Tahirou Assane, Director, Brightline
Olivier Lazar, Vice President, Youth and Social Impact
David Urias, Director, Youth and Social Impact
For a little over 30 minutes, these PMI leaders raised awareness and helped to answer the title question. It turns out (as many have been saying for decades!) that sustainability has quite a lot to do with project management, or as I refer to it, project leadership. In fact, I make that the distinction between project management and project leadership. A project LEADER knows not only how to do the project, how to balance time, scope, cost, quality, and risk, but importantly, why the project was chartered in the first place and how the project’s outcome will provide benefits in the long term, how it will generate value, and is aware of the project’s broader impacts on a broader set of stakeholders, including society and the environment.
This is what these folks covered eloquently in their time.
Bottom line: what do project management and sustainability have to do with each other?Just like the image that kicks off this blog post: everything. They are intertwined and inseparable, whether we want to recognize that or not. Our projects’ products (outcomes) go on and on after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. They provide benefits (and sometimes not-so-beneficial impacts) for days, weeks, years, decades, centuries. The benefits (or disbenefits) are felt not just by one stakeholder, but by a wide swath of stakeholders. If we recognize this, we advance from project managers to project leaders.
I would like to see much, much more of this at PMXPO, and ideally, it’s a conversation that PMXpands to include practitioners and perhaps government leaders as well.
Please take a half-hour and watch and listen to this important conversation.
Catch up on Session 207: What Does Project Management Have to Do with Sustainability? from PMI’s recent Virtual Experience Series 2023: PMXPO that was broadcasted in March. This session along with the rest of the program is available on demand through 31 January 2024.
This blog post will let you share (and participate, in a fashion) in a tour I just took today of a landmark new building in Boston – the Data Sciences Building at 665 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, on the campus of Boston University.
Some numbers:
It’s 19 stories (or 305 ft tall), 345,000 square feet in total, and cost $305 million.
It will house the school’s mathematics, statistics + computer science program when it officially opens to students later this year.
The building is 100% free of fossil fuels, in alignment with BU’s Climate Action Plan. It’s poised to be the largest carbon-neutral building in Boston.
I will share some photos here and link you to a full album of pictures and a couple of short videos.
One takeaway for project managers is that we, as agents of change, can push for innovative, sustainability-minded solutions based on benefits that show themselves in non-traditional ways and/or only after time has elapsed – and therefore are not measured very easily.
Here’s one example from my tour. When the team decided early on to use geothermal heating and cooling for the building, one non-apparent (but HUGE) benefit was the amount of real-estate this made available in the building for use by students, faculty, and staff, that would have been otherwise taken up by gigantic heating and cooling units. 90% of these needs are taken care of by the geothermal system. Sure, the geothermal system involved pushing thirty-one 6-inch specialty tubes (see photo below of a model) into silt and bedrock, but the payoff is huge in the long-run.
Professor Carlberg showing a model of one of the 31 pipes used for the geothermal system. The real ones are 6 inches in diameter and go into the ground twice as long as the John Hancock Tower is high.
And sure, it took extra effort to place green roofs all around in the space made available by the Jenga-like construction, but again, this makes the building more attractive and livable and assists greatly with the handling of rainwater.
Aside from the tremendous (and also measurable) benefits which this yields in terms of meeting BU’s Climate Action Plan, the fact that valuable Boston real estate is being more effectively used is a big deal and was considered in the project’s cost benefit analysis.
Are these sorts of benefits – and is this sort of thinking considered in your projects’ cost-benefit equations?
The tour was amazing – the building is amazing – as you can see from the photos and videos.
I highly recommend that you take the tour yourself, and you can do it RIGHT NOW from the very device on which you are reading this blog post (unless that device is a piece of paper).
This will take you to a highly-interactive tour of the building and provide technical insight into how this became such a successful project. You will basically get a chance to see on your screen what I saw demonstrated on a gigantic touch-screen by Professor Carlberg (see photo below).
This is in the lobby of the building - the "Sustainability Wall" - a giant touchscreen. Experience it yourself RIGHT NOW by clicking here.
I suggest you visit at least the following (each only runs for a few seconds to a minute or so).
3. Embodied Carbon
4. Geothermal System
6. Fresh Air
7. Terraces
8. Light and Views
15. Why Net Zero?
As project managers – or rather, project leaders, we have the chance to push for projects like this, or at a minimum to push the product owner, sponsor, and/or Senior Management to put in place thinking such as that which went into this amazing building.
See an album of the pictures (see screen capture below) from my tour by clicking here.
You will get to see details and videos from the tour.
Come visit! I hope you have a chance to visit the actual building at the campus of Boston University!
Here's a guest post from an aspiring young project manager, Stephen Robin, pictured below, who describes himself this way:
I am an inquisitive youth with an open mind, spontaneous brain, and an inexhaustible number of interests career and non-career related. My willingness to learn and a love of researching has formed me into an extremely curious individual that asks a lot of questions and has sparked the flame in me to discover new knowledge, experiences, places, and the like. As a lifelong learner, my interests will likely broaden in the future. Due to that, I have a huge appreciation for total person development(Holistic) and I have no intentions of slowing down. Currently, I am in my fourth year of college in which I am pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Project Management. From my perspective, this degree is simply a running start in my career which aligns with my goal of reaching the highest level in the professional domain. With this in mind, the plan of action is to have a heavy devotion to, education, experience, and exposure where I can become an agent of change through Project Management.”
Project Management in the Animal Kingdom: Key Lessons – and Questions
We think of projects as a uniquely human thing - conceptualized (only) out of the human mind. Before it was discussed, before it came to paper, before it became a reality, any project was simply a thought. An idea. A concept. Project management, which brings those ideas to reality, is widely recognized as a practice unique to human beings, to us Homo Sapiens. Before the formation of recognized bodies or any project management intuition, before the rise of the project manager, its practice even early in human history, (whether or not it was called project management) provided lasting results we can see today The Great Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and many others revealed that project management has been practiced since ancient times. Project management is intrinsically part of our being due to the need to create, deliver, and drive change according to our circumstances, needs, and wants.
Now, for this next part, I want you to keep an open mind. What if I told you that project management isn’t uniquely our domain and we aren’t the only practitioners in existence? Something that has been around since the beginning of mankind, is the reality of Mother Nature. Nature is home to its unique form of project managers. What I can only describe as “natural project managers” that do not follow a preset methodology, tool, or technique -non-sapient beings that were not trained, coached or enrolled in a program to acquire knowledge and gain experience. The non-sapient beings of the animal kingdom have their own form of project management; the art and science of “Instinct Project Management” or “Instinctual Project Management”. The practice of project management does not require a highly developed brain, extremely complex thought, or certifications of any kind.
Moreover, concepts that many project managers deem essential in any project are absent in the animal kingdom. For example:
A project charter
Work Breakdown Structure
Project Scope Statement
Product Scope Statement
..any sort of project documentation
Therefore you may ask, out of the many examples you may come up with in your head of projects done by the millions of species out there, which are the most mind-blowing? The projects – or at least project outcomes – below, belong to nature’s Project Management Hall of Fame:
Puffer Fish Circle- To create the patterns, the males swim along the seafloor and flap their fins. Such movements lead to the creation of beautiful circular patterns. Although the fish are only about five inches long, the formations they make measure about 7-feet in diameter. Once the patterns are made, females come to inspect them. If they are fond of the creations, they reproduce with the male that created the pattern. It is yet to be discovered what exactly the females look for in patterns or what traits they find desirable in the formation.
Below is a clip from BBC Earth that shows the project execution and outcome.
Gossamer Trees- In 2010 in Pakistan, unprecedented monsoons brought down massive rainfall. The rainfall was slow to recede and it created vast pools of stagnant water across the countryside. This led to a mass migration of spiders and insects to climb on trees forrefuge and cover them inthe cocoon of their webs. Although the cocoons led to the death of many trees, blocking sunlight from reaching the leaves, they also seemed to help trap more mosquitoes in the region, thereby reducing the risk of malaria.
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by Richard Maltzman
on: March 04, 2023 11:41 AM
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There has been much talk lately about ChatGPT and other generative AI systems, most of it centered on its ability to let students generate essays, to take journalism jobs away, to help or hurt almost every industry.
But little has been said about the net effect of these systems in terms of their impact on climate, via the increased computing power that’s needed to power such systems.
My attention to this was drawn by an article – theoretically written by a human – on Wired.com. The article is called “The Generative AI Search Race Has a Dirty Secret”. That page also provides an audio snippet of about 6 minutes, well worth a listen.
”unbound by the restrictions of common sense, readily accessible models today build on semantic relationships derived from large bodies of text, or relationships between large corpuses of text and images. The next generation of models already being built will include video and 3D modeling. Soon, we may hope to design houses by starting with phrases like “single-story mid-century modern, south facing on a forested hillside, three bedrooms”.
The article goes on to consider what happens when we (should) add elements of recycled materials, or design for lower energy use into the description of the desired building. There’s other research that indicates a positive effect for AI in terms of carbon reduction, such as this one from the World Economic Forum.
That article has the same quandary as I did when I started the “dirty secret” blog post, saying:
· By 2030, the tech could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 4%, according to a recent study by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for Microsoft.
· But there are energy consumption concerns around AI, algorithms and the processing of large amounts of data.
So… who could I ask about this? What sort of wise system could provide an answer about the net effect of generative AI systems?
Oh, I know: a generative AI system!
So I asked Chat GPT this question:
Overall, since generative AI will cause an increase in carbon footprint, yet has the potential to lower carbon footprints due to innovative design and other AI applications that reduce the carbon footprint, what do you predict will be the net effect of generative AI with respect to carbon footprint?
Here is the answer given by ChatGPT:
It's difficult to make a definitive prediction on the net effect of generative AI on carbon footprint, as it will depend on a variety of factors, including how the technology is developed and used, and the extent to which it is adopted.
On the one hand, the energy consumption required to train large-scale generative AI models can be significant, and this could contribute to an increase in carbon footprint. Additionally, if the applications of generative AI are focused on industries that are particularly carbon-intensive, such as transportation or manufacturing, then the net effect could be an increase in carbon footprint.
On the other hand, there are a number of potential applications of generative AI that could have a positive impact on carbon footprint, such as improving the efficiency of energy systems, optimizing the use of renewable energy, and helping to reduce waste and emissions. If generative AI is used in these ways, it could help to reduce carbon footprint and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Overall, it's likely that the net effect of generative AI on carbon footprint will depend on the balance between these different factors, and how the technology is developed and adopted in the coming years. It will be important for developers and policymakers to prioritize environmentally responsible applications of generative AI, and to ensure that the energy consumption associated with the technology is sustainable and powered by renewable sources.
When I asked the System specifically about the “dirty” and “clean” aspects, I got more detail:
Will generative AI increase the carbon footprint of computing?
Generative AI has the potential to increase the carbon footprint of computing, depending on how it is implemented and used.
Training a generative AI model requires significant amounts of computing power, and this can contribute to increased energy consumption and carbon emissions. In particular, large-scale models like GPT-3 require massive amounts of computational resources, including high-end hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), which can consume a lot of energy.
Additionally, the use of generative AI in applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated content generation can also contribute to increased energy consumption if these applications are widely used and require a lot of processing power.
However, there are also efforts underway to make generative AI more energy-efficient, such as developing more efficient hardware and software algorithms. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in using renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to power data centers where AI models are trained and hosted.
Overall, while generative AI does have the potential to increase the carbon footprint of computing, there are also measures that can be taken to mitigate its impact on the environment.
Will generative AI increase the carbon footprint of computing?
Generative AI has the potential to increase the carbon footprint of computing, depending on how it is implemented and used.
Training a generative AI model requires significant amounts of computing power, and this can contribute to increased energy consumption and carbon emissions. In particular, large-scale models like GPT-3 require massive amounts of computational resources, including high-end hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), which can consume a lot of energy.
Additionally, the use of generative AI in applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated content generation can also contribute to increased energy consumption if these applications are widely used and require a lot of processing power.
However, there are also efforts underway to make generative AI more energy-efficient, such as developing more efficient hardware and software algorithms. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in using renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to power data centers where AI models are trained and hosted.
Overall, while generative AI does have the potential to increase the carbon footprint of computing, there are also measures that can be taken to mitigate its impact on the environment.
Do generative AI systems have the potential to help solve the climate crisis?
Yes, generative AI systems have the potential to help solve the climate crisis in a variety of ways. Here are some examples:
Climate Modeling: Climate models are used to make predictions about the future of our planet, such as changes in temperature and precipitation patterns. Generative AI can help improve the accuracy of climate models by processing large amounts of data and identifying patterns that might be difficult for humans to detect. This can help researchers make more accurate climate predictions and identify potential solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Energy Optimization: Generative AI can be used to optimize energy usage in buildings and industrial processes, reducing energy waste and greenhouse gas emissions. By analyzing data from sensors and other sources, generative AI systems can identify areas where energy use can be optimized, such as by adjusting temperature and lighting settings or identifying equipment that is consuming too much energy.
Renewable Energy: Generative AI can help optimize the deployment and management of renewable energy resources, such as solar and wind power. For example, AI systems can predict energy production from solar panels based on weather patterns, helping to better integrate solar power into the grid and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
Carbon Capture: Carbon capture technology involves capturing carbon dioxide emissions from industrial processes and storing them underground. Generative AI can help optimize the design of carbon capture systems, making them more efficient and cost-effective.
Overall, generative AI systems have the potential to help solve the climate crisis by providing more accurate climate modeling, optimizing energy usage, facilitating the deployment and management of renewable energy resources, and improving the efficiency of carbon capture technology. However, it's important to ensure that the development and use of AI systems are done in a way that is environmentally responsible and sustainable.
What do you (humans) think? What role do project managers play? What role do project LEADERS play? Personally, I think it’s a big, important role, and it all starts (as did this post) with asking the right questions. Please comment, if possible, without using ChatGPT, but if you do, say how you used it!
Three project management professors, Ros Lishman, Nigel Williams and Rich Maltzman, have a non-profit video podcast called PM WorldSavers. We've had a few episodes so far in which we interview leaders of programs and projects that are determined to make a difference - a positive difference in our lives and on the environment.
Last week, and in line with my last post, we had - and recorded - a casual conversation on how ChatGPT can be viewed, used, feared, or not feared, from the perspective of educators of project leaders. It's a pseudo-episode of PM Worldsavers.
I'm sharing it here since there is so much 'buzz' on ChatGPT and other AI systems. This is an interesting angle in and of itself and you can, from this conversation, gain some insight as to how we are considering it.
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