People, Planet, Profits & Projects

...they are, why aren't you, Mr./Ms. Project Manager?

Who is "they"?  We're referring to the very people and agencies that are likely funding your organization.

Many executives embrace the conventional wisdom that mainstream investors care little about an organization’s performance on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. Few companies make it a priority to communicate their sustainability performance to investors, or even develop a robust story about their sustainability performance. Why should they? Investors won’t shift their investments, the thinking goes, based on a company’s ESG performance. However, a growing number of investors are paying attention to ESG performance, as evidence mounts that sustainability-related activities are material to the financial success of a company over time. Investors care more about sustainability issues than many executives believe.

This is the opening paragraph of the latest MIT/Sloan & Boston Consulting Group report, “Investing for a Sustainable Future”.  Keeping in tune with the last two posts, in which the entire principle of project managers thinking ‘too broadly’ and ‘inflating their jobs’ was raised by some critics, it was meaningful to see this report which says that investors and C-level executives (key stakeholders of projects, programs and portfolios – and often the sponsors of the projects on which project managers work) are increasingly focused on sustainability, not only for altruistic reasons but because a concentration on sustainability has shown to yield financial benefit.

Here's a little more about the survey, for validation: The input came from over 3,000 respondents from commercial enterprises. Within this commercial sample, 579 survey respondents self-identified as investors: Most were strategic (39%), institutional (24%), or retail (11%) investors. Few identified themselves as mission-oriented or socially responsible investors – so the choice to ‘invest in ESG’ is not (only) driven by a thread of fiery environmentalism or cause, but rather, success of the enterprises in which these investors put their money.

Where’s the project connection?  Well aside from the key connection already mentioned (can anyone say “stakeholder”?), there are initiatives and projects which are themselves focused on sustainability, and they are yielding financial benefits.  Here are three examples from the report, which illustrate why this has the attention of investors – and in our opinion should have the antennae of project managers and PMOs fully up and tuned in:

• Florida Ice & Farm Company SA, based in Costa Rica, is (an) example. In 2005, the company respondedto Costa Rica’s looming water access crisis by investing in water-saving measures. Within two years, the organization had decreased its use of water in production by an eye-popping 82%. The reduction drove down production costs and helped sustain 20% annual growth between 2010 and 2014.
• Deerfield, Illinois-based healthcare company Baxter International Inc. estimates it earns $3 for every $1 invested in environmental initiatives.
• Johnson & Johnson is achieving a 19% internal rate of return on its CO2 projects.

In all three cases, the benefits were realized with projects – projects that look like they were focused on environmental activism, and may indeed have been - - but the line between taking on an ESG initiative and just “taking on an initiative” is blurring, quickly.  This is why project managers need to be aware of ESG principles, and increasingly positive ESG sponsor-stakeholders.

How does an enterprise move forward to gather in more investors, now that there’s evidence that investors increasingly care about ESG?

According to the article, these are key steps:

<> Build awareness of sustainability challenges and programs — both within the company and among stakeholders, including investors.

<>  Identify and analyze material issues and create alignment within the organization to ensure an integrated response.

<> Invest in and focus on tangible and measurable sustainability outcomes instead of positions on ratings lists.

<> Formulate a strategy once tangible sustainability measures are established.

<> Incorporate the sustainability strategy into the overall corporate strategy, including a clear business case or proof of value.

<> Engage investors, and a broad range of stakeholders, to discuss the company’s sustainability strategy and progress.

Look at that list.  For one thing, aren’t most of the items in the list actually projects in and of themselves?  Yes.  As a project manager, shouldn’t your project seek to align to the strategy and higher-level portfolio/program objectives?  Of course. 

So again, we feel ‘charged up’ by this report, we feel that the comments about job inflation and overstepping our bounds as project managers to be just plain wrong-minded and out-of-step with the way business is changing.  At a minimum we recommend that those who assert that the PM should stay tucked away in isolation from the value chain is not only under-utilizing the talent and capability of the PM, it is actually breaking a ‘golden thread’ all the way from investors to end-customers.  As PMs we need to be conveyors of organizational strategy and objectives, not blockers.  As I final message I suggest you read the recent post by Cornelius Fichtner, “Benefits Realisation for Project Managers”, which coincidentally came out just around the time of our two posts on job inflation.

In the prior blog post, I posed a question, and asked your opinion about whether or not project management - and project managers - should think more broadly about the products of their projects.

The trigger for my question was a negative comment (well, I saw it as a negative comment) about our discipline, stating that PMs should stop 'inflating their roles'.

The feedback here (and on LinkedIn, which had a parallel post) was significant, in volume and thoughtfulness.

Some of you seemed to agree with the 'inflationary' comments, and some took the view that a project manager, indeed, should step up and speak up about the long-term effects (social, environmental, economic) of even design decisions, even product-oriented decisions, even seemingly way-past-the-project-handoff effects that you anticipate as a project leader.

I respect all of these views, and I thank you for them.

And the thing is, this discussion has reminded me why we started doing this work in the first place, and that our work is nowhere near done.  One of the most interesting things about the responses from colleague project managers who seem to think that we have to 'keep in our place', 'keep our nose to the grindstone", and "just think about project deliverables" is that they are not in line with the thinking  of enterprise leadership, and even the investment companies believe. 

See this report:

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/investing-for-a-sustainable-future/

I'll be covering this report in more detail in a future post, but consider this logic:

• Project managers are indeed responsible for delivering projects.
• Projects are meant to be aligned with the mission/vision/values and strategies of the enterprise.
• Enterprise leaders, and their sponsors (investors) are driving sustainable decision-making.
• So... (follow the logic?) project managers should be making project decisions (and even assertions) that are connected to the enterprise strategies.

Look for a follow-up post on this MIT Sloan/BCG report and other supporting findings that continue to energy us to focus on this very important intersection of project management and sustainability.

More and more, project managers – and project management as a discipline – is focused on benefits realization, on strategically connecting project outcomes to the mission and vision of the company, and yes, since this is a blog on sustainability, considering long-term effects of project decisions, including design and use of the project's product, on the planet and on our communities.

It's what we read in the excellent Pulse of the Profession reports from PMI, it's what we hear at PMI Congresses, it's threaded through stories in PM Network magazine, and it's prevalent in the many project management discussion boards on LinkedIn.

Do you think our discipline is inflating its role in the corporate environment?

I ask this because our book, Green Project Management, which won the Cleland Award for Literature from PMI in 2011, received a book review earlier this year that had some negative comments on the book (which is fine – everyone is entitled to their opinion).  We are proud to have the Cleland Award and a ton of positive comments, so we're fine, thank you very much.  However, this review didn't stop at the book - it expanded and went on with this statement:

“I suggest that project managers stop inflating their roles in the corporate environment.”

So I am turning the tables in this blog post and rather than writing a large post, I’m instead asking you what you think about this statement, since it goes beyond the book and instead makes a sweeping suggestion about the discipline of project management.

Here are some discussion starters:

• In a project, should the PM keep tight-lipped about design issues?Design is design, implementation is implementation (according to the suggestion). Right?
• If a project manager sees a way to make a project’s outcome more sustainable, they should not say anything, right?The project manager should wait until the full set of requirements are implementable but should not pass any judgment on the product or service, because we are restricted as coordinators and expediters to ‘get-r-done’, right?
• Designs/commitments/contracts should be “thrown over the wall” to the PM and she or he is tasked with getting the commitments met. Right?
• If there are ethical or social issues or decisions being made that may have long-term negative effects or may be just plain-old wrong (e.g. from recent news stories, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, BP) we need to keep our nose to the grindstone, shut up, and churn out project deliverables, because we are project managers - not lawyers, philosophers, environmental engineers, nor ethicists, right?  Right?

I’m just wondering what you think here.  Can we get a little feedback?  Is our project management discipline bloating, expanding, greedily beyond its boundaries as I feel the statement suggests?

Do it!  Think this through and post a response!  Thanks.

In part I we talked about lizards and their need for shade.

In part II of Shady Deals, we will discuss an effort to provide shade for evaporating reservoirs by using (this is real) plastic balls partially filled with potable water. 

The other part of this shady article is also about shade, but rather than a desert environment, this is quite the opposite – it’s about shade and reservoirs and evaporation.  The idea of this project is to prevent evaporation of water from reservoirs by using polyethylene balls.

You can start this portion of the story by just watching this short video about the solution.

If you want a little more on the Shade Balls, check out this video from CBS TV.

And you can supplement it with this article from Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-11/who-s-behind-the-96-million-shade-balls-they-just-rolled-into-l-a-s-reservoirs-

(and this extract)

These are not your average Chuck E. Cheese’s ball-pit numbers. They’re hermetically sealed, with water inside them as ballast, lest when the wind picks up “they’ll blow out, and you’ll be chasing them down the road,” says Sydney Chase, president of XavierC. You could drink the ballast—don’t want nonpotable water leaking into the reservoirs.

Chase is a 30-year veteran of manufacturing who left a $300,000 job to start XavierC. She sold her house to raise the capital to seed the company. “Either I’m going to end up under an overpass, or this is going to take off,” she recalls thinking. And as much fun as there is to have with “shade balls,” the company was founded for two serious reasons.

Learn more about the shade balls directly from the company’s web site: http://www.xavierc.net/

But as project managers we’re very aware – or should be – of secondary risk.  That’s new risk (usually threat) that is added to the project’s objectives from a risk response.  If we think of the shade balls as a risk response (which it is), there are a bunch of secondary risks to be considered with the shade balls, including leaching of the plastics into the water, and the acceleration of the growth of bacteria.

For the first issue – plastics leaching into the water, we suggest you read this story from Grist, from which we provide a key extract below:

The black additive [in the balls] is carbon black, which isn’t supposed to be harmful when it leaches, which is great. Yet even with this precaution, most plastics leach endocrine disrupting chemicals that interfere with animal and human hormone systems (Yang 2011). Some endocrine disruptors, like bisphenol A (BPA), break down in water after a few weeks or months. Some don’t. We don’t know what chemicals are in the Shade Balls, but they will leach, especially because the balls are in the hot sun and are meant to be left in the water over a long period (reports say 10 years). Most water treatment systems don’t take these kinds of chemicals out of the water.

And with regards to the bacteria, this extract from the Daily Mail is informative:

It was billed as an innovative solution to four years of record-breaking drought. But it seems the 96 million 'shade balls' that California officials released on to the Los Angeles Reservoir to stop evaporation may cause even more problems. According to hydrologists, the black plastic spheres could simply fuel the amount of bacteria in the water, ultimately heading to taps and showers in people's homes. 'The black spheres form a thermal blanket which provides new surface area to breed bacteria,' Soni Pradhanang, a professor of Water Quality at the University of Rhode Island told Daily Mail Online.

These two stories are worth reading if you want to build your skills in thinking fairly, even-handedly, and importantly about secondary risk.

The plastic secondary risk:

http://grist.org/article/why-shade-balls-arent-such-a-great-idea-after-all/

The bacterial secondary risk:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3204873/How-100-million-shade-balls-brought-protect-LA-s-reservoir-evaporating-fact-bacterial-nightmare.html#ixzz4KdMSvxtt

We are certainly not dismissing the idea of the shade balls and applaud the innovative solution they bring. We need to see how this story plays out.  But in the meantime, there’s a real learning opportunity for project managers in the concept of secondary risk.

Made in the Shade Part I

This series of two posts is about shade, and lizards, and black plastic balls.  You’ll see – it will all come together nicely.

Let’s begin  here in Part I…with the lizards.  Like them or not, lizards are an important part of our ecosystem.  And not only are they endangered, there is now a new level of uncertainty in the speed at which they may become extinct.  According to this study from the University of Southern California, 20% of all lizard species could go extinct by 2080.  That’s bad enough, but recently, according to this story from NPR, those numbers relied on certain assumptions about how easy it is for lizards to find shade from the increasingly hot sun.  Lizards, being cold-blooded, of course, don’t really regulate their body temperature – they adjust it based on their environment.  And that environment is generally getting warmer for them.

And so, per the article, a scientist from Clemson University named Michael Sears, recently did a study – we would say, completed a project - using computer modeling and real-world experiments to see how the kind of shade available affects a lizard's ability to keep its body temperature in the optimal range.

Sears’ project team surgically implanted tiny temperature sensors into dozens of spiny lizards, and then did experiments in special enclosures constructed in the New Mexico desert.

"We use these pieces of shade cloth to cool down temperatures in spots to see how the animals react to it," Sears says.

They published their findings here in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the bottom line conclusion is that the lizards did much better when they had access to lots of small patches of shade, compared to just a few big patches.

This uncertainty as to how lizards are able to find these (decreasing) small patches of shade makes the prediction of the effect of climate change on lizard extinctions much harder to do and most likely indicates that the estimated forecasts issued so far may actually be optimistic – and at a minimum, closer to ‘uncertainty’ than to ‘risk’.  As the NPR article puts it:

In general, lizards that live in already-warm places probably will suffer from increased temperatures, while lizards that live in cool places might actually benefit to some extent, says Sears.

"Everything in between, all bets are kind of off now," he says, "because what our study suggests is that how bushes are placed in an environment might really impact the lizards just as much as the temperature itself."

Here are the project management lessons from our lizard friends (and more importantly from these intrepid researchers):

• When it comes to risk analysis, there usually is more than meets the eye
• There is a distinction between risk and uncertainty
  • Read more about this subtle but important difference at this blog post
• More significant risks (and we’d put extinction in that category) deserve further quantitative analysis
• This is yet another example of a green-by-definition project

In part II of Made in the Shade, we will discuss an effort to provide shade for evaporating reservoirs by using (this is real) plastic balls partially filled with potable water.