People, Planet, Profits & Projects

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.

No, that's not a typo, I was acually referring to IKEA, the big box seller of RIKTIG ÖGLA  and FLÄRDFULL.

We want to send you off to a great new TED talk.  It's by Steve Howard, a sustainability professional who now holds the position of Chief Sustainability Officer at IKEA.

This will be a short post.  Why?  Because Steve says what he says so well.  We do, however, want to make one very subtle, quiet point, delicately, and carefully...

YOUR BUSINESS LEADERS ARE 'GETTING' SUSTAINABILITY!  NOW IT'S OUR TURN AS PORTFOLIO, PROGRAM, AND PROJECT MANAGERS TO GET IT, TOO! 

Now, enjoy the show.

In the US, it's almost Thanksgiving, a major family holiday.  Mom, Dad, family, and friends - kids of all ages -  gather to give thanks for all that they have and to celebrate this 'harvest' time of year. 

And so we choose this timeframe to talk about the important role that Mom and Dad play as project managers - and/or leaders in general - when it comes to integrating sustainability thinking into the mindsets of their families.

We'd like to draw your attention to Project Sunlight.  This is a project created by Unilever targeting parents as the key influencers for their families, and thus communities.  They invite, and we also invite you to first  watch a film online which aims to both inspire and motivate parents to then act by doing a number of small things which, added together, will contribute to a better society and environment. Unilever, the parent company of well-known brands like Ragu, Hellmans, Lipton, Popsicle, and Ben & Jerry's, is trying to get the public to join a movement and become part of a growing community of sustainability-minded people and organizations.

We know how hard it is to start grass-roots, ad-hoc movements.  As a company of two people, EarthPM is finally seeing some success in this area but only after years, hundreds of blog posts, and scores of presentations at PMI Global Congresses, PMI Chapter Meetings, and PMO Symposia as well as in local sustainability organizations, constantly pushing the message that there IS an intersection of Sustaianbility and Project Management and how we as project managers can contribute to lasting success - triple bottom line success - of our projects' products.  But this is Unilever, a large multinational corporation.  They can make a quicker, deeper, broader difference.  We urge you to help them.  At least watch the video, and as you do so, consider the Project Management role that Mom and Dad have in influencing the world around them.  Most likely, you - as a project manager who is the child of Mom and Dad and a Mom or Dad yourself, are at least at that intersection: the intersection of parent and project manager.  Now, just extrapolate that to the intersection of project management and sustainability.  Of course, if you're having trouble extrapolating or just find this idea intriguing we invite you to read our book, Green Project Management, which covers the topic well, so we're told.

Unilever's Project Sunlight lets you take action locally as a Mom, as a Dad, as a child, as a Project Manager.  And by definition, if you take on one of these challenges, you are a Project Manager!  Check out what you can do in the USA on this Facebook link.

Happy Thanksgiving to our USA-based readers.  We're thankful to have this opportunity on Projects@Work to share our thoughts and hope you have a terrific holiday week and weekend!

We've just returned from the West Coast (sometimes called the 'left coast") of the USA, after a great week at the PMO Symposium in San Diego, California.  Our presentation, "Should Your PMO Serve as a Chief Project Sustainability Office" was well received, and although the visit was good, it was short, and it was time to fly back over our magnificent continent and return to the East (right) Coast.

And just around the time of our visit, the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, along with the province of British Colombia, did something that the corresponding national governments have failed to do. 

They agreed on something.

But hey, what's the big deal?  How big are these few states and a province?  Well, combined, they would be the world's 5th largest economy.  That's why it's a big deal.

And what does this pact mean?  Further, since you're probably a project manager, what does it mean to you?  To us?  To your PMO?

Actually, you can easily find out yourself.  The document is surprisingly succinct, given that it comes from 4 governments and 2 countries.  Have a look at it here.

In this two-page document, the word, 'program' appears explicitly four times, the word 'project' appears explicitly four times and both are implicitly woven through almost each and every paragraph in the document.  Here are a couple of paragraphs to illustrate our point:

We’re just back from the PMI North America Congress.  It was a very good take with well over 2,000 colleagues sharing knowledge and doing some pretty intense networking.  We were presenters ourselves, but this post is not about that talk, it's about others.

Let's start with the venue - New Orleans was the backdrop and theme for 2013, and that city knows how to host a convention full of project managers.  Everywhere you go in NOLA there is music, beautiful music, flowing around each streetcorner and from classic locations like Preservation Hall.

The music of New Orleans is jazz.  We got to experience this wonderful, expressive, eloquent music at Preservation Hall.  This is some of the most eloquent music we've ever heard.

And speaking of eloquence, that’s what we want to discuss with you.  Although there’s a twist.  This is eloquence in which the speaker doesn’t necessarily even realize that they’re being eloquent.

Here’s the deal.  Over the last four or five years, we’ve been expressing (hopefully eloquently) a need for project managers to be more focused on their products’ triple bottom line.  Yes, we mean product, not project or process.  Every project has some sort of outcome – we’re using the word product to refer to this.

And we’ve seen others discuss this topic – or surrounding topics – in such a way that they describe our exact main points - the points of what we call greenality:

• Long-term (sustainability-oriented) thinking - beyond the delivery of their project's product to the steady-state operation
• Use of information from the above in initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing processes
• Connectivity to the organization’s mission/vision/values
• Strong awareness of, and concern for, for a triple bottom line, including social, economic, and ecological aspects.

But they do this in a way in which they don’t…. quite… get… to sustainability.  We've seen it in PM Journal magazine articles (see posts on EarthPM).  We've seen it in blog posts.  And we saw it in the presentations at PMI North America Congress in New Orleans. They come so, so close, but don’t make the point that this is really about integrating sustainability into project management.

Here’s an example from the PMI Congress.

One of the speakers, Kevin Repa, in his talk, “Planning for Program Closure”,  was eloquent in his description of the closing of the Space Shuttle program.  He held the audience’s attention as he described the intriguing story of ending the space shuttle program and figuring out what to do with its significant artifacts (see sidebar). 

To summarize, the shuttle program initiated a “closing project” initially estimated to cost $2.8B or more in and of itself.  Through good project management practices enumerated by Kevin, the project came in well under that, almost by a factor of ten.

One very striking and practical example is what happens to the shuttle vehicles themselves.  They are a “must” for the museum that has one of everything.  And when these shuttles go to a museum, the planners have to know whether the shuttle presents any safety issues to museum-goers.   Are there radiation issues?  Are there any components that will outgas poisons to bystanders?  These are questions that may not have been thought of if the project managers hadn’t thought about the steady-state disposition of the product of their project.

But the underlying message was this: had the planning for the disposition of the shuttle and all of its supporting infrastructure been incorporated into the project from the start, the closure would have had better management of risks, lower environmental impact, and overall even further improved financials.

Mr. Repa used the phrase, “think centuries, not decades”.  Eloquently put.  And unconsciously, Kevin was a huge proponent of our effort to incorporate sustainability thinking into our discipline of  PM.

Kevin, we at EarthPM salute your eloquence, and your being right on target from our perspective.  We would humbly suggest that you and others could parse out the excellent message that you have with the 'greenality' framework we provide above.

And the rest of you?  Eloquent or not, we urge you to be very, very conscious of your key role as project manager when it comes to disposition of your project’s product.  Stay tuned here and at EarthPM's main blog, we can help.