Viewing Posts by Dave Shirley
Greenwashing....Not
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Sustainability
Categories: Sustainability
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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 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.Give the BOOT to LCA
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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:
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. |
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. “Down by the Banks of the River Charles”
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I teach graduate level project management at Boston University. During the nicer weather, I like to eat my dinner on the banks of the Charles River. So you can imagine my surprise when I read this op/ed piece from a recent edition of the Boston Globe (10/10/2011) by Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson. I never even thought about the river in a negative way, although I am old enough to remember the 1966 hit by the Standells that had the lines “Down by the banks of the river Charles” and “Well I love that dirty water. Oh, Boston, you're my home.” I guess this is what that song was referring to. According to the Globe piece; “It was unthinkable 20 years ago that the Charles River would ever be clean enough to win the world’s leading environmental prize for river restoration. Back then, human feces lapped at the Museum of Science. It was a river with “belly-up fish and algal blooms making dogs sick,’’ recalled Arleen O’Donnell, former state department of environmental protection acting commissioner.” Further, Jackson states in his piece, “Today, the Charles is one of the nation’s cleanest urban rivers, and recently claimed the International River Foundation’s top award for river management, beating out more than 20 other countries. The award went to the Charles River Watershed Association, which was formed in 1965 to protect the river.” It is clear what this has to do with sustainability, but what does it have to do with project management? In our book, Green Project Management, we talk about “stakeholder demand” as one of the drivers of the Green Wave, and how project managers should add green (sustainable) project management to their skill sets to take advantage of the Green Wave. This is a prime example of that. “The award provides a great moment to see what can happen when degradation spurs people to action. Former Governor Michael Dukakis remembered last week the collective shrug of the shoulder when Havey Beach in West Roxbury was closed to swimming in the 1950s. “There were no protests, no nothing,’’ Dukakis said. “The city itself was deteriorating. State government was corrupt. It was an angry place. The river was so polluted; it kind of symbolized the time. One by one, people started believing, and we hit that tipping point where people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.’’” Stakeholder demand in action. So what was done to stop the degradation and improve the water quality of the Charles River? Well I’ll tell you. Project management, that’s what happened. ““The state’s environmental secretary at the time, John DeVillars, took reclassification to another level when he became regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. He launched a 10-year mission (project) to make the Charles swimmable by 2005 and began issuing annual report cards on its water quality. “There was something about establishing a goal, timetable, and a measure of accountability that helped turned the tide (our emphasis),’’ DeVillars said.”” Sound familiar? He established a green by definition/green by project impact - project! Yes, there can be some overlap across the green spectrum. “Towns whose sewage outflows emptied into the river as well as offending corporations were held accountable for violations, most notably the fines levied against Conrail in 1995. Pollution from its Allston rail yard resulted in $2.5 million in criminal penalties, including a record $1.5 million under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. In a move to restore public relations, Conrail also gave $250,000 to CRWA to build a water testing lab. How the CRWA came to be the recipient was a story by itself.” Project funding, and of course you’d need a budget for this project, can come from unusual places. We know as project managers to be careful of discounting any potential resource. “Bob Zimmerman, executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association says “A snaggle-toothed guy with bad breath came to my office. I listened to him talk about the river for half an hour. I didn’t think anything about it, but then came the Conrail headline and the money for us. It turned out that the snaggle-toothed guy was the fly-fishing writer from Sports Illustrated and he went fly fishing with senior officials of Conrail on the Rappahannock River [in Virginia]. I guess Conrail was trying to figure out what to do and they mentioned this to him and he said, ‘No question you should give the money to these guys.’ ’’” Again, stakeholder demand asserted itself. ““When we started, the attitude was, ‘So what, even if we fix our pipes, what about the next town?’ Walsh-Rogalski (Bill Walsh-Rogalski, a longtime attorney in the EPA’s New England office) said. “But one by one, people started believing, and we hit that tipping point where people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.’’” We know that a project is not a project without a way to measure its success or failure, and this project is no exception. It needed a metric. “Another visible tipping point of the Charles is the wildlife. The river now hosts otters, beavers, fishers, herons, hawks, herring, and migrating loons. Maury Eldridge, one of the river’s most dedicated kayaking photographers, says it has become more a “national park or wildlife sanctuary than an urban/suburban river.’’” And as further prove of the effectiveness of project management discipline; “Still, major challenges remain, such as phosphorus runoffs from car exhaust, fertilizers, and animal waste, which can cause toxic algal blooms. But the lessons (learned) of the Charles have inspired and informed river cleanups in the state and throughout the nation. Frymire (recreational kayaker Roger Frymire) is today most frequently at work on the Mystic River, where he says he has seen at least 50 source problems.” “So long a pauper among rivers, the Charles is now one of the greatest American civic accomplishments of the last 50 years. That in itself is a crowning achievement.” We believe that this is a good example of green (sustainable) project management at work. The effort could not have been accomplished without the acknowledgement of the green wave’s driver of stakeholder demand, and the intersection of the disciplined approach of project management. |
Sustainability - Virtualizing Computers
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To us, Information Technology organizations have always been on the leading edge of project management. It could be that IT is more disciplined than other departments within an organization. We don’t mean in a bad way that others are not disciplined; they are in their own way. But like the healthcare industry, IT lives on technology, procedures and processes, which makes it easier to adopt the more formal process and procedures of structured project management. Couple that with the fact that IT uses a lot of organizational resources; costs of power, heating and cooling, as well as its effects on human resources, has a huge influence on the ability of people to be efficient with their work, and you find that IT projects greatly affect sustainability. One of the major projects undertaken by IT departments is computer virtualization. Because most of today’s computers are designed to run a single operating system and a single application, most computers are underutilized. Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single hardware platform. In other words, a single hardware platform can run different operating systems and different applications. For simplicity, and it is anything but, a single hardware system could run a PC environment with all of its applications, as well as a MAC environment with all of its applications. So how does it work? There is software available from various manufacturers that allow a single computer hardware system to be virtualized so that each virtual machine can run its own operating system, as described above, and look like its running on its own hardware system. Each virtual machine is a “stand-alone” so that there are no conflicts between systems. VMware, one of the more popular virtualization software, “works by inserting a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor” that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently. Multiple operating systems run concurrently on a single physical computer and share hardware resources with each other. By encapsulating an entire machine, including CPU, memory, operating system, and network devices, a virtual machine is completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications, and device drivers. You can safely run several operating systems and applications at the same time on a single computer, with each having access to the resources it needs when it needs them.” So what does that have to do with sustainability, or Green IT? It probably seems obvious to you, and you’re right, it will allow you to get rid of multiple hardware platforms that use power, heating and cooling, saving all those resources, without affecting the way people work. We’ll talk about server virtualization another time. |
Codes of Ethics
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And, it got us thinking about ethics and sustainability. To us, behaving ethically and sustainability (protecting scarce resources including environmental resources) cannot be separated. So, we looked at the Project Management Institute’s (PMI®) Code of Ethics and Personal Conduct. It currently contains two references to the environment: “3.1 Respect is our duty to show a high regard for ourselves, others, and the resources entrusted to us. Resources entrusted to us may include people, money, reputation, the safety of others, and natural or environmental resources. 2.2.1 We make decisions and take actions based on the best interests of society, public safety, and the environment.” We think that there should be more. Therefore, we are proposing some changes to the next edition of the PMBOK as well as changes to the Code of Ethics and Personal Conduct. Those changes to include the folowing:
As you probably note, this wording comes from The Natural Step, an organization that we feel is a leader in sustainability. We welcome your comments on this addition to the Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibility, as well as the other changes we are proposing to the next edition of the PMBOK. Please join the conversation at EarthPM.
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As a member of the 
