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Viewing Posts by Richard Maltzman
You Gantt Always See the Long-Term
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As project managers, we are necessarily focused on the term of our projects. Most projects - even the "long" ones that take years to complete - have numbers that are tiny when you compare the numbers in those plans comparison to the types of numbers associated with our planet. But we do need to think about the long-term effects of the product of our project. Our projects fit in with programs. Our programs and projects are part of an overall portfolio, and that portfolio is your organization’s way of getting their overall objectives accomplished. Further, at the portfolio and program level, it’s very likely that there are mission and vision statements that have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) targets that are financially and ethically tied to the company’s shareholders, stakeholders, owners, and customers. So regardless of your views on climate change, the connection you make from your project’s product to the longer-term view is a strategically and tactically important connection. And that brings us to the beautiful picture you see at the top of today’s post. It comes from a striking exhibit at Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA, entitled “Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic”. You can read about the exhibit in this article, and you can visit the exhibit’s home page here. It’s on until May of this year, so … for a “long time” in project terms. Here is the description of the exhibit: Seeing Glacial Time examines how eight contemporary artists employ the "real time" of photography to visualize the largely imperceptible, gradual changes in "glacial time" from the bellwether Arctic region. Most of these artists have gone to extreme lengths—and distances—to capture and create their imagery. Some utilize scientific and appropriated photography as source material, while others depart from documentary traditions to create expressive images suggestive of a melancholic Sublime. This timely exhibition of paintings, photographs and a video installation introduces Boston audiences to artists who either have not been seen before in the area or have created new work for this occasion. Featured artists are:
Subhankar Banerjee But our point comes back around to us as project managers. Perhaps as you wander around the museum exhibit – either in person, or virtually – take some time (there’s that word again) to consider some of your Gantt chart “bars” and whether or not they shouldn’t at least have a ‘dotted-line-dependency” with the impact of its product in the longer term, seen in the context of the planet. Examples: What consumables does this product generate in the long-term? Does the outcome improve, or at least keep stable, the working and living conditions for the local population where it will be used? A new book on which we are working, one to follow up Green Project Management, will ask – and by way of real examples and measurements – will help answer these questions. In the meantime… Get the context, and ask yourself these questions. It couldn’t hurt. |
The containment of sustainment. Woof.
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Image from http://londonleprechaun.com/ As we've looked at project management maturity and the intersection of sustainability and project management, we've come to realize that while it's critical to get the message of sustainability to project managers, perhaps we were (and we love dogs, so the analogy is okay) "barking up the wrong tree". Ironically, our book, Green Project Management, which won the Cleland Award for Literature in 2011, pictures a tree. All that's missing is a picture of us barking at it!
Perhaps, we've recently thought, the right audience is Program and perhaps even Portfolio Managers. Indeed, we used this philosophy in successfully submitting a presentation for the PMO Symposium in San Diego last fall and that went very well and got a great reception. But it's not enough. Not nearly. Adding to the consternation, and perhaps a cause for more barking, is the fact that the Third Edition of the Standard for Program Management mentions - even features - "sustainment". This is a great sign.
For example, in section 4.5, Benefits Sustainment, the text says: "Although responsibility for benefits sustainment falls outside the traditional project life cycle, this responsibility may remain within the program life cycle. While these ongoing product, service, or capability support activities may fall within the scope of the program, they are typically operational in nature and are not run as a program or project". It then goes on to list 13 bullets (example: 'monitoring the performance of the product, service capability, or results from a reliability and availability-for-use perspective...'). But not a single one of these bullets really, truly cover the ideas of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), or Triple Bottom Line (3BL) thinking. They almost seem to be consciously avoiding the topic! This unfortunate limitation (or containment) of sustainment, and we would assert, containment of sustainability, is something we're going to key in on in 2014 and beyond. We plan to continue to work with project managers to bring sustainability thinking into projects, but we think we'll be more effective at the Program level. What are your thoughts on the idea of Benefits Sustainment? Is this indeed related to the ideas of sustainability? Should the 13 bullets be expanded or reworded to include environmental and social impact explicitly? Should "sustainment" itself be broadened in its definition in the Standard? Or, are we still barking up the wrong tree? Please - throw us a bone!
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What's the Muda with your project?
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We'd like to congratulate Leslie Ekas and Scott Will on an excellent blog post here at Projects At Work and take the liberty of connecting this - perhaps unexpectedly - to sustainability in PM. In their post, found right here (see, we source locally), the authors do two important things in our opinion:
Regarding the first bullet, we really encourage you to read this article whether or not you are involved in software projects because what they have to say is important in general for any project. We do tend to get used to waste. We get comortable with it. As they say, "teams have grown accustomed to living with it. And if a team can justify allowing it in the first place, then it can often justify living with it “a little longer.” Regarding the second one, the connection to sustainability is right in this quote: "If not remedied, these shortcuts can hinder the long-term viability of any product". This has been one of our themes since the release of the book, Green Project Management, which asserts that project success is really only true success if the product of the project is viable in the long term. And yet, that beig said, the connection to our book is much, much stronger. We dedicate an entire chapter "Lean Thinking, Muda, and the Four Ls" to the idea of removing waste from the project itself. Our 4L principle - Lean, Learn, Linked, and Lasting, provides an approach to applyiing the ideas raised in this article to any type of project as well as the product of that project. Below is a summary of that chapter taken directly from the book.
Figure courtesy CRC Press, Green Project Management, (C) 2010 CRC Press
So we suggest combining the ideas in the article from Ekas and Will1 with the ideas from our book, Green Project Management, to make your project - and its product - greener and more sustainable, as well as one that can earn your company more green.
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Moo-ving towards beefed-up sustainability guidelines
Categories:
Leadership
Categories: Leadership
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McDonalds - purveyors of millions and millions and millions of hamburgers, has been making some sustainabiilty moos (er... news) lately. It drew our attention and we thought we'd share it with you because as project managers we love - or at least need - guidelines. Sustainable beef. Many would simply call that an oxymoron. We're not going to get into that argument now, nor the argument over meat or vegetarian or vegan diets. We realize that beef is a carbon-intense food. However... this blog post is about guidelines for sustainabilty - and their connection to projects. So when McDonalds says that they will begin buying 'verified sustainable beef' in 2016, they need to be able to say what that means. And for that to happen, there need to be guidelines covering sustainable beef. Well, sure enough, a guideline now exists. Principles for Sustainable Beef Farming, linked here for your convenience and reading pleasure, organizes 39 principles into four categories:
Although a farm is clearly an operation, we point out thatmaking a farm more sustainable is a project, and that there is still learning that can and should take place from these operational principles. These are the sorts of questions that you can be asking your project team - preferably near the initiation - to integrate long-term thinking...sustainability thinking into your project. We'll be discussing this much more during 2014.
Additional references: |
Sustainability: The Gift That Keeps on Giving (or Taking...)
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One of the ironies of the BP/Macondo well failure (also commonlly known as 'The Deepwater Horizon Spill" or "The Gulf Spill" or the "BP Spill") is that when it comes to sustainability, the spill itself gained a lot of attention but after just a few years, it seems to have fallen off the news radar. Perhaps it's because of other major, important incidents, such as the Duck Dynasty controversy or Miley Cyrus' twerking capabilities. But regardless of the attention the spill (and its effects) gains or doesn't gain, the effects do continue to impact the Gulf, its peoplle, and its ecosystem. The irony, we suppose, is the sustainability (lastingness, in this case) of the oil and - on the good side - the continuing teachable moment we have in terms of integrating sustainability thinking in projects. Just today, in fact, the US National Public Radio network posted this story about the continuing effects of the disaster. In part, it says: This year, crews have collected 4.6 million pounds of oily material from the Gulf Coast shoreline. Coastal residents are asking how long they'll be living with the effects of BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "A lot of people don't realize that the Deepwater Horizon response is still going on," says Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Anderson with the Gulf Coast Incident Management Team. "It's been a marathon, not a sprint." And here is another interesting piece: Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network documents the ongoing impacts of the BP oil spill. On Elmer's Island, he's armed with a specimen jar and blue latex gloves — and picking through tar balls in the tide line. "You can look in this line, you can see (tarballs are) everywhere. So there's literally thousands and thousands and thousands of them," he says. He filled his jar in about three minutes with tar balls ranging from the size of a dime to a silver dollar. "You crack them open and you can see they're kind of brownish and sandy on the outside, but open, they're black in the middle. You can smell it right away once you crack it open, the fumes start coming out of them," Henderson says. Henderson also does regular flyovers of the Gulf's oil production platforms, looking for evidence of leaks that might not make the headlines that BP did. "Any time could turn into something bigger. Clearly one of the dangers of deepwater drilling like this is once you have a blowout the damage is really going to be done and it's going to stick with you for a long time," he says. It's easy, we know, to be a "Monday morning quarterback"* and second-guess what BP did - and didnt't do - in their planning for the Macondo project. But way back when the reports first started coming out, EarthPM focused on a scarcely-paid-attention-to Appendix from the Federal US Government report. Our blogs from back in late 2011 prove this. And now we'd like to re-focus your attention on this because as the oil continues to be discovered, and the 'sustainability' of the spill (in terms of its ongoing effects) still sometimes make the news, it's worth continuing to learn from this. Appendix J of the report from the then BOEMRE department of the US Government is the actual Macondo well risk register. It has real people's names and real dates and real entries, just like the risk registers you use on your project. And it has risk categories and a risk rating guide from the Risk Management Plan just like you have on your projects (you DO have them, right?). The thing is, although BP's corporate ID guidelines allowed for Safety and Environmental risks to be captured (and coded in a light green color), you can see by scanning through the risk register that the only ones identiified (and thus the only ones with a chance of being treated) are blue and purple - Cost, Schedule, Production, Reserves, and NPV. Zero - yes, that's right - zero risks related to Safety and/or Environment were identified. Zero! We pointed out then, and we think it's important to point out again now, that THIS is one of the key ways you can take just a little time now to integrate sustainability into your projects. It's a gift that keeps on giving. It's a thought, a wisp of a plan, that can save you gigantic, perhaps even life-saving problems later on. Simply including these risks (identifying them!) would have helped immeasurably. Decisions would have been taken differently. We cannot - nobody can ever - know for sure whether it would have made the difference and saved 11 lives at Macondo. But we can take the lesson to heart - and give the gift that keeps on giving: Sustainability Thinking. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from EarthPM!
*See a definition of this admittedly US-centric term here. |