People, Planet, Profits & Projects

A primer...

Today we step back.  Way, way back to some fundamentals – fundamentals which are important to ‘ground’ us in understanding the concept of sustainability and how it possibly could have anything to do with us as project managers – our projects – our organizations.

We’re really enthusiasts of vocabulary-building and common understanding of terms, so let’s start with the term ‘bottom line’ itself. It’s a phrase which is used often in today’s sound-byte, instant-gratification-oriented world.

How often have you heard (perhaps from your boss, spouse, or customer):

“just give me the bottom line”?

The expression “bottom line” has its origins in accounting, referring to that number at the bottom of a list (below a summary line) of positives and negatives that, when all is said and done, represents the net value, income or loss.

But it has also come to mean ‘a final result or statement’ or upshot, and also the ‘main or essential point’, as in a “Cliff Notes®” version of a long novel.

So let’s just say that the “bottom line” is the net effect, condensed version of something much bigger – how you would summarize a large effort in an encapsulated form.

As far as the Triple Bottom Line, that term was “first coined in 1994 by John Elkington, the founder of a British consultancy called SustainAbility. His argument was that companies should be preparing three different (and quite separate) bottom lines. One is the traditional measure of corporate profit—the “bottom line” of the profit and loss account. The second is the bottom line of a company’s “people account”—a measure in some shape or form of how socially responsible an organisation has been throughout its operations. The third is the bottom line of the company’s “planet” account—a measure of how environmentally responsible it has been. The triple bottom line (TBL) thus consists of three Ps: profit, people and planet. It aims to measure the financial, social and environmental performance of the corporation over a period of time. Only a company that produces a TBL is taking account of the full cost involved in doing business.”

We can derive the concept of sustainability from the three “legs” of the triple bottom line. These three legs support sustainability(per the figure below) – but also concepts like viability of interactions between economy and environment, equitability of arrangements between society and economy, and bearable interactions between society and the environment (i.e. what’s endurable by people as well as by nature over time). Only where the interactions between the three  aspects themselves - viable, equitable and bearable, are all considered can we find actions, processes, materials, and industries acting in a way which can be considered sustainable.

So – as project managers – do we care about this?  Do we have a connection?

Of course we do.  And if you read the 200+ blog postings on earthpm.com you will get much more detail about how.  Here we will just assert that we are already trained (or should be) to conserve a project’s resources, which normally we think of as human resources, raw materials, money (budget), time (schedule), and so on.  So in a way, we already think in terms of a multiple bottom line.

Visually, the Triple Bottom Line can be represented in the nearby figure.

How can you apply it?

We always recommend one simple thing: go to your company’s (or organization’s) external website and find out what your leaders are saying to the world about their goals.  We’re willing to wager that they’re saying things along the lines of People, Planet, Profit.  Your project – it’s really a microcosm (or to use a less fancy word, a ‘core sample’ of your organization’s operations and behavior.

Then, use the messages your enterprise gives the world to make sure that your project is on the same “frequency”.

For example: what happens to the product of your project in the long term?  Yes, you, the project manager can (and should, we assert) think beyond the handoff of your project’s product to its ongoing and steady-state use.  As we said above, there are many blog posts on earthpm.com cover this angle so we won’t preach too much here.

So, let’s put the final coat on our primer.

There is a larger, more ‘holistic’ bottom-line that includes not only profit, but also environmental concerns as well as concerns for the human community.

And we think that by understanding at least the concept, but perhaps the vocabulary, and even better, the way your own organization interprets this, you position yourself to do a better job on your projects.

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References and further reading:

http://www.economist.com/node/14301663

http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/tripleBottomLine.pdf

http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/7_questions_CEOs_should_ask/$FILE/7_questions_CEOs_should_ask.pdf

http://www.e4sw.org/papers/Hart_Milstein.pdf

With this introductory blog post we’d like to introduce our view of what is sometimes called “Green Project Management”, or as we like to more accurately describe it, sustainability thinking in project management.

You can get a great digest of our philosophy with EarthPM’s five assertions, but the gist of it isfairly simple. By taking a longer-term, more holistic view of your project’s context, you do better, your project does better, your stakeholders do better, and – the focus of today’s posting – your project’s product does better.

What do we mean by better?

That’s really the key. We realize that stepping back and doing a ‘deeper dive’ into how your project – and its product – fit into the areas of corporate social responsibility and environmental, and expanded economic concerns (the so-called Triple Bottom Line) is going to cause some extra work for your team, and may even involve more expense and schedule. So why the heck would you do it?

We remind you of the Cost of Quality teachings of Philip Crosby, who, in effect, said, you can pay me now or pay me later. Build quality in. If you try to bolt it on later, you will pay dearly later.

To answer the question, “what do we mean by better?”, we assert that investing in up-front sustainability thinking pays off in:

• Better (more thorough and correct) risk identification, analysis, response, monitoring, and closing
• Improved linkage to enterprise goals
• Improved morale
• Enhanced image for your organization
• Increased transparency
• Possible huge cost avoidance in the operation of your project’s product (see first bullet)
• And yes, a lower environmental impact (although, you can see it is only one of several benefits, and is not meant to be the ONLY reason for including sustainability in your project’s plan)

Doing the above does require a sort of mind-shift for many project managers. These folks – for very good reasons – will tell you (paraphrased composite of actual quotes):

“I am not a product manager, I’m a project manager. As long as I deliver a product that meets customer requirements, I’ve done my job. I could care less about long-term impacts of the product, especially if dealing with them now them makes the project more expensive, late, or causes the product to fail to meet the basic requirements. Also, I have enough to worry about with the constraints I already face. I don’t need more constraints. Go away and leave me alone”.

We’re here to tell you that it’s not that simple today.

We’re here to tell you that your enterprise likely has mission, vision, and value statements aspiring to new heights of corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and transparency, and that they are intended to reach you as project managers.

In fact, “reach” is way too weak a word. The president of Shell Oil, Marvin Odom, was recently quoted as saying that he has to drive his project managers to convey these sustainability goals into their projects and the products of their projects.  Yep, he specifically calls out his project managers!  You can read the entire interview (a very good one!) right here.

Even better, watch the video of the interview here.

We think one way to do that is to think of yourself as a “prod-ject” manager, using the double meaning of the word “prod”, first to evoke the word product, and also to use its meaning “to rouse or incite”.

So this is the crux of our posting. Think about your project’s outcome. Think hard not only about what it is supposed to do when it is ‘first turned on’ or ‘thrown over the wall’, but when it is running in its steady state.  Are there any attributes of that steady-state operation that are warning signals to you as project manager on CSR, environmental, or long-term economic problems? Shouldn’t those signals be read and used in your planning?

Of course they should.

Projects, programs and portfolios are the essential channel for your organization’s ideas and strategies into longer-term operations. 

For reference, see Stanford Univerisity/IPS Learning's Stragegic Execution Framework, pictured below.

We’ll blog again about that soon. But for now, know this: without you as the key “prod-ject”manager, the full and true intent of your company’s mission, and its resulting execution strategies, which NEED to get to your organization's operations, could get clogged-up right under your watch.

Don’t be a bottleneck, be an accelerator. Be a prod-ject manager.