Viewing Posts by Dave Shirley
High Power - High Interest
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According to one of our local newspapers, Statoil, a Norwegian energy company, has decided to pull out of a pilot offshore wind project using floating wind turbines. Rather than investing in Maine, its next project will probably be in Scotland, although the company is still interested in a US based operation, just not in Maine. So how did stakeholder influence affect the overall project? This past January, Maine’s Public Utilities Commission granted initial approval for Statoil to moor 4 floating turbines off the coast of Maine. However, the governor was not happy about the proposal. In essence, Statoil’s proposal included a subsidy from Maine electric rate payers which totaled approximately $200 million over the next 20 years. That subsidy did not sit well with Governor LePage. He did not want Maine taxpayers to help pay for a private company’s venture into technology. Analyzing the risk, another important part of what we do as project managers, the governor decided that it was too one-sided. In effect, Statoil transfer a lot of the economic risk to the people of the State of Maine. It was an ideal situation for Statoil. An alternative LePage proposed was to reopen the bidding process to include an effort by the University of Maine with their business partners. The proposal from UMaine would include a smaller subsidy and greater economic return to the State. That reopening of the bidding process was apparently enough for Statoil to withdraw their proposal and the funds that go with it. So, I’d like to think that part of the risk analysis for this project included a contingency in case Statoil pulled out of the project. That contingency includes the application by UMaine for federal monies to offset the cost of the proposed pilot. Whether the project happens or not, or for that matter, whether this type of wind farm becomes a reality is still up in the air (excuse the pun). What I do know is that it makes a great case study for sustainable projects and projects in general. There are stakeholder expectations, risk assessment, make-buy decisions (should we go with a company that has done this thing before or should be take it on ourselves), and the 3-Ps, as well as all the other factors that need to be managed. But always remember the power of the stakeholder! |
Project managers know the importance of stakeholder expectations and requirements. The Project Management Institute increased their emphasis by adding the 10th knowledge area to PMBOK®, Project Stakeholder Management. Here in my home state of Maine, as in other states, the governor (as a stakeholder) wields a lot of power. What interested me the most, however, was that the project in question, is a “project with green intent” or as we define it in Back to School
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For instance, a year ago, BU announced a “competition” between the various dormitories challenging the students to reduce their energy usage over the same period the previous year. According to sustainability@BU, “The challenge, in which the dorm with the largest reduction from previous years wins a pizza party, provided a fun way to foster awareness among the student body and to educate them on the simple ways to make a huge impact on our We have always said that stakeholders are becoming more aware of sustainability issues and it is echoed by Danielsen’s RHA Vice President, Monica Martin, “I believe our students were very mindful about their electricity consumption and remembered that turning off the lights when they were out is one very simple way to save energy and not waste power. Opening the blinds on a sunny day instead of turning on the light is also a very simple way students have saved power,” she said. Further, sustainability@BU reports that she also believes that the residents have continued these behaviors even though the competition is over. Changing behavior so that sustainability becomes second nature is what we are all about with our People, Planet, Profits and Projects blog. One of the resident students, David Meyer, had a great quote “Energy costs money. Just because I don’t have to pay for it doesn’t mean I should waste it.” The energy savings were achieved by doing simple things: unplugging fully charged laptops, using energy efficient light bulbs, and turning down the heat when leaving for class. Another sizeable undertaking by BU was over intercession this year. At the track and tennis center all of the halide lights were replaced with new LED fixtures. The light output is much greater, but the energy needed has been greatly reduced to the tune of about a 40% reduction, enough to power 70 homes in the US for a year. One of the more interesting aspects of the project was that because the new fixtures are so efficient, “they are linked on a wireless network that allows the fixtures to communicate. The building is divided into seven unique zones that can be controlled remotely. Each of the tennis courts, the track, throwing cage, and the stands all have separate lighting controls which allow for only certain areas of the facility to be lit as needed, greatly reducing energy use.” “We can control each fixture in terms of lighting output,” says Director of Building Automation Services, Elijah Ercolino, adding that “[the system] is infinitely flexible.” The system saves energy (profits and planet) and provides better lighting (people). While your enterprise may not be able to undertake a project like a track and tennis center, it should be able to apply the more simple energy saving methods like unplugging laptops when fully charged and turning down the heat when finished for the day, adding to the triple bottom line. |
It seems like most, if not all, colleges and universities these days are undertaking some pretty interesting projects to help the triple bottom line of their respective schools. Boston University, the one I work for part-time, is no exception. I relate these projects to you not only as something BU is doing, but also as potential projects that you can undertake with your enterprise. After all, it is our contention that project managers are business leaders and it follows then that as business leaders, sustainability (the triple bottom line) is almost a given as one of our jobs.
campus-wide carbon footprint.” The chart at left shows the campus-wide impact of the competition. Danielsen Hall certainly had the greatest improvement, but there were significant reductions at most of the competing dorms. Natural Capitali$m and the Project Manager
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So what is natural capitalism and how does it affect what we do? The first part of the question is easier to answer than the second part. Natural capitalism is defined by various sources as considering the environment in profit calculations. In other words, taking into consideration either income from natural substances or losses due to damages to the environment, during the course of doing business. There is an important assumption that there is a monetary value to the environment (profit or loss). For the purpose of this blog post, I ask that you embrace that assumption. I know, to a PM an assumption is a risk, so I am asking you tio take a little risk. It is happening according to Sukhdev. “Exchanges worldwide are working on ways to include carbon emissions in the basic information that publicly traded companies must provide shareholders, he said. Common standards for world companies are likely to be ready in three to five years with implementation coming within about seven years. Such accounting wouldn’t just add to losses," he said. “You could get 10, 20, 30 percent extra to your GDP because you’d be finally measuring the services of nature,” Sukhdev said. “But you’d also get losses because you’d have to account for the natural capital that is lost.” The interesting thing is that if we start measuring these things, if follows that we’ll be able to manage these things. If we can manage these things, then we may be able to make a difference in how the resources are used and therefore can be used more efficiently and effectively. The more we know about something like the use of natural resources, the more we will be able to protect those scarce resources. I’m backing into this a little by saying that if we can protect the scarce natural resources, it only follow that we can better protect the other scarce resources on a project, time, cost and human resources. This is one of the connections between natural capitalism and project management.
Another connection between natural capitalism and project management is in fact stakeholders are becoming more and more interested in how companies are addresing their positive and negative affects on the environment. Stakeholder's envrionmental interests have always been a major emphasis for us at EarthPM. Stakeholder management is so important that PMI® added it as a new knowledge area to the 5th edition of the PMBOK®. It is critical that as part of the Identify Stakeholder process, stakeholders who care about companies that consider the revenue and loss of environmental capital be considered. It may not be a direct connection, but I believe it is part of the growth process for the PM, that is self-enlightenment. With more and more stakeholders, including consumers, team members, and company executives, becoming aware of the effect of natural capitalism; it only holds that in order to continue to be relevant, the PM should also become more aware of that effect. |
A recent e-article on 
Project Christmas
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I’ve been doing this for a lot of years. Some people think that this is just an ongoing operation and that it’s the same old thing, year after year. Tell that to my reindeers. Do you think that weather conditions are the same every year? How about request for presents, quantity, quality, costs, weight, size? Sure we use templates and start our timeline for next year the day after Christmas. But it is never the exact same timeline, for instance; some years there is a Leap Year, while the day stays the same, the day of the week changes. Take this year, for instance, since Thanksgiving was later in the month of November, we had less time between it and Christmas. It seemed that people waited a little longer to get those lists to us, making it a more hectic than usual. Budgets change from year to year depending on economic conditions and what is going on in the world. During World War Two, my budget was very small because of the resources going into the war effort. No, Christmas is definitely a project. We also decided to shake it up a little this Christmas and make Christmas “greener”, more sustainable. My elves have made up a list for me to check off as I slip into people’s houses to make the deliveries. I’ve included the list below to prevent any “coal” deliveries for those who are wasting precious resources. One thing I do want to mention, though, while I appreciate the beacons of light when people light their houses for the holiday, it makes it easier to locate some neighborhoods, but some of the lighting is downright blinding. Let’s be reasonable out there. Between Christmas Lights and the Tacky Light Tour, while there is money being made by the networks, there are a lot of resources being utilized. I’m just saying. Here is the results of the list project managed by “Papa Elf”." He used many resources to help compile it. From Green Energy Ohio:
o Trees don’t have to be pine. You can create your own out of evergreen clippings, dried flowers, and reeds. If you do get a tree, make sure it comes from a sustainable Christmas tree farm. Most are because they are in business to provide trees year after year. Don’t just go out into someone’s yard or woods and cut a tree without permission. That is a “coal” reward.
o Use LED lighting. We’ve changed to LEDs for all of our lighting here at the North Pole as well as lighting on our sleigh.
o Create your own gift wrapping. Newspaper, particularly the comic section, makes great wrapping paper. Cloth gift bags can be used year after year.
o Gifts don’t have to be objects, they can be efforts like 1 days labor for cleaning up an attic or cutting a lawn. From the Ecologist:
o E-cards or cards made from recycled material are the best if you want to send cards. Sometimes a visit, if people are local, or a phone callif not, is more personal.
o Get food from local producers to save transportation costs when possible. From Eartheasy:
o Look for locally made gifts and those made from renewable resources. o Avoid children’s toys that promote violence. o Take a Christmas hike, do a bird count, hang suet for birds.
o If you do have a live tree, have it ground up for mulch and don’t ever burn branches in your fireplace as it can cause dangerous creosote buildup. There are many more ways to enjoy a more sustainable Christmas. We’ve added sustainability to our mission, our project charter, maybe it is time we all add sustainability to all project management processes. May all your projects be successful in 2014 and beyond. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all and to all a goodnight! |
Sustainability, IT and PM
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There are many areas where sustainability can play a large role, but the “lowest hanging fruit” for Green IT is the data center. The first and foremost reason is that there is a huge energy cost to operate a data center. Secondly, or tied for first, is the magnitude of data we collect, move, store, manipulate, and retrieve. Because of that massive amount of data, we need more and more infrastructure, and larger and larger, capacity to handle that data. Relatively simple solutions are available for reducing energy consumption, therefore electricity costs and carbon dioxide emissions (2 of the three elements of the triple bottom line - profits and planet). Here is an example of a green IT project. I also teach project management at the same university, and one of the requirements for my class is a group project. This semester, one of the groups developed a project plan for a project that we defined in our book as Green by Project Impact (projects that may not have a green outcome like an electric car, but do have an immediate impact on their environment). It is a project to green up a data center by upgrading the servers to thin clients. Think of thin clients as similar to the terminals that were connected to a central computer, before desk tops (although a lot of you will not remember those “good old days”). Take my word for it, there was a time when there was virtually no processing power on the desk , but rather everything had to go through a central computer. With a thin client, the computing power, software, applications, storage and network access are available and managed at a central location. The student group did a comparison of thin client deployment versus traditional PCs. They found that a thin client uses about 14% of the energy (therefore about 14% of the electrical costs and 14% of the CO2 emissions) than a traditional PC. This is not quite an apples to apples comparison as there are associated costs with the data center, but we have to remember that in most organizations, the data center already exists for storage, backup, etc., therefore is already a cost center. The result in a thin client project deployment is a significant savings in energy consumption which goes right to the bottom-line. Of course there is a cost to the project. The group predicted that a project to deploy 1100 thin clients would be approximately $1.2 million for equipment, $179,000 for resources with a total project cost of approximately $1.4 million. Given that all factors stay the same, energy cost payback period for the entire project would be about 6 years. One factor that makes the project even more attractive is that the average PC is about $1500, the thin client about $300. In this instance, it is an easier decision by the project manager to recommend a thin client deployment for a data center upgrade. It takes into account the greenality of the project as well as the aspect of cost reduction. The payback period is reasonable and the fact that the thin clients are significantly less expensive makes it more attractive. The final “p” in the triple bottom-line is people, so is there an increase in productivity with thin clients? That question still has to be answered, but as Meat Loaf said, “Two out of three ain’t bad.” |
Green (sustainable) IT is becoming more and more popular for many reasons. A couple of years ago I developed a graduate level Green IT course for a major university. I will be teaching it for the third time this coming semester. It has always gotten good reviews from the students. Most of them have been full time computer science students or IT industry practitioners. I am confident that they will take their learnings back to their organizations or apply them to their new jobs when they graduate. 
