Viewing Posts by Richard Maltzman
Blah blah blah --> Action --> Projects --> You
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Activism
Categories: Activism
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Photo from http://design-milk.com You may have missed this story, but here in the US, Democrats 'took to the Senate floor Monday night to talk about global warming and planned not to let up until morning. By midnight, lawmakers had been talking for nearly six hours'. We suggest that you read one of the stories about this talk-a-thon here. (This story was published on March 11 by NPR). We're not political. We're project managers. We're focused on sustainability - but that doesn't put us anywhere in particular on the political spectrum. We are advocates for learning and action in this area, and we believe that project managers are change agents, and some of the people in the world with the most power to DO something about making their projects, their programs, and their portfolios more sustainable. And yes, that does involve the earth, but as our blog title says (look up there right now, folks, look at what it says!) we are looking at and acting on sustaining the social aspects of projects (People issues), ecological connections to projects (Planet issues), and financial longevity of organizations (Profit issues). Still, it's frustrating to see an important body like the US Senate spend so much time talking and failing to act. To quote the referenced article, "Democratic leaders have no plans to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor this year, so the speeches were about little more than theatrics. House Democrats pushed through a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming in 2009, then lost their majority the following election. A climate bill led by then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry collapsed in 2010 without a vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate. So the Democrats have failed to act. And many of the Republicans have failed to understand. From the article: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the talkathon amounted to "30 hours of excuses" from senators who think it's OK that "families are losing work because of government attacks on the coal industry." "Well it's not OK, it's cruel," McConnell said, speaking on the Senate floor before the talkathon began. "It's cruel to tell struggling coal families that they can't have a job because some billionaire from San Francisco disagrees with their line of work." And so it goes. But here's the secret, and the good news. Although we recognize that it would make sense to have some sweeping changes in laws, there are things we can do as project managers to integrate sustaianbiltiy thinking in our projects. One of the biggest is simply to make the connection from the mission/vision/value statements of your organization to your project's charters. In an informal poll of 50 project managers in our classes, we found that only 5-8 of them even knew what the mission/vision statements were, and only 2 had seen the commitments made by their leaders to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives. We project managers - who are so focused on action, milestones, and deliverables - we are not prone to staying in a chamber and talking (while doing nothing) or boycotting that session altogether because we don't even have the sense to recognize the problem (that's our view of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, right now). So - take some action RIGHT NOW. Go to your company/organization's home page. Click on the "About Us" section (or whatever it is called) and look for your leadership's statements on CSR. You may be very surprised. And you may be very empowered. But either way, you will be able to take action which is tied to your leaders' ideas. And that's more than the US Senate can say. Or rather, it's more meaningful than anything they can say. |
Steroidal Silo-busting
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One of the reasons I've stuck with project management as a career choice for 150 years (well, okay it's a little less than that) is the challenge and fun of working across disciplines. As PMs we have to make the engineers and marketeers play nicely together. And, as I said above... this can be challenging and... "fun". So we are indeed "silo busters". This is a metaphor based on the idea of vertical organizations (Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales, Engineering) as silos (you know, those big tall cylinders you can see on farms to store grain; see above photo) and us as project managers providing the necessary ‘horizontal’ or cross-silo communication and collaboration one needs to have a project succeed. This same scenario can – and must – take place at the corporate level as well if sustainability is to become part of the fabric of modern business. Thankfully, it is happening. From this week’s ‘edie’ report: There is a growing awareness of how cross-sector partnerships are providing environmental benefits to business, particularly in the automotive industry, says Toyota's Steve Hope, general manager of environmental affairs and corporate citizenship, told edie that industries are starting to break away from a linear way of thinking and companies leading in sustainability are looking wider than their "own doorstep".
We’ve seen this ourselves. As a proud contributor to ECOCAR2, we’ve seenoutstanding, sustainability-oriented, creative, productive collaboration between Government, the auto industry, the IT industry, and 15 great North American universities in their effort to take ‘leap-and-bound’ innovation in the development of a hybrid automobile. Learn more about ECOCAR2 here. We also see collaboration between customers and even competitors in the IT industry under the guidance of GreenTouch, where the goal is to to” deliver the architecture, specifications and roadmap to increase network energy efficiency by a factor of 1000 compared to 2010 levels”. Read more about GreenTouch here. The point? The point is that once again, we as project managers are poised to be leaders in the area of breaking silo walls. We, more than any other discipline, have the ‘muscle memory’ of getting people who don’t normally work together well – to play in perfect harmony for our project purposes. We just have to bring our game to the next level and get our leaders, even our industries, to participate in collaborative efforts in which sustainability is brought to the forefront. How do you do that? Learn more about sustainability, about CSR, and in particular, learn about your own company’s current commitment to these areas. Stay tuned right here at People, Planet, Profits & Projects, where we post regularly on this topic and give examples of how companies are collaborating and gaining a competitive advantage by incorporating sustainability thinking throughout their company – and especially – especially – at the project and program levels. You can also follow EarthPM’s blog where we’ve recently been talking about CVS/Caremark and their efforts to bring their mission/vision to reality with CSR projects – very interesting and important work. So – strengthen those silo-busting muscles, work out regularly, get the vertical organizations in your enterprise to work together and….get stuff done! It’s what we do. |
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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