People, Planet, Profits & Projects

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.

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 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. 

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.

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:

• They provide specific examples of how to make a software project more efficient (free of wasted effort)
• They provide a context for connecting the project to business goals and 'greening' the project itself, even if it has nothing to do (directly) with social responsibility or the environment.  The article does this by conveying the concept of 'proejct debt'.

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.

¹( the article on P@W and their book, Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from "Waterfalling Backward" by Leslie Ekas & Scott Will, published by Pearson/IBM Press, Oct. 2013, ISBN 9780133375626, © Copyright 2014 by International Business Machines Corporation. For more info please visit http://www.ibmpressbooks.com/store/being-agile-eleven-breakthrough-techniques-to-keep-9780133375626 )

McDonalds - purveyors of millions and millions and millions of hamburgers, has been making some sustainabiilty moos (er... news) lately.  It drew our attention and we thought we'd share it with you because as project managers we love - or at least need - guidelines.

Sustainable beef.  Many would simply call that an oxymoron.  We're not going to get into that argument now, nor the argument over meat or vegetarian or vegan diets.  We realize that beef is a carbon-intense food.  However... this blog post is about guidelines for sustainabilty - and their connection to projects.  So when McDonalds says that they will begin buying 'verified sustainable beef' in 2016, they need to be able to say what that means.  And for that to happen, there need to be guidelines covering sustainable beef.

Well, sure enough, a guideline now exists.  Principles for Sustainable Beef Farming, linked here for your convenience and reading pleasure, organizes 39 principles into four categories:

• Sustainable Farming Systems, asking questions like these:
  • Are individual groups of animals fully traceable from birth?
  • Are the Principles being applied with a philosophy of continuous improvement?
  • Is feed produced/sourced in accordance with the Principles & Practices for the Sustainable Production of Arable & Vegetable Crops?
  • Is land use optimised?
• Economic Sustainability, asking questions like these:
  • Are effective biosecurity measures in place?
  • Are there long term business plans in place that consider, amongst other things,the long term viability of the farm?
• Social Sustainability, with questions like these:
  • Is the health of both consumers and the general public protected?
  • Is cattle health and welfare safeguarded?
  • Is the breed of cattle and choice of production system suited to the localclimate, soil, pests & diseases?
  • Are the health, safety and rights of all workers protected?
  • Are all workers sufficiently competent?
  • Is business conducted with integrity?
  • Does the farm positively contribute to the local community?
  • Does the farm manager act as a responsible steward of the rural environment?
• Environmental Sustainability   , with questions like these:
  • Are the natural resources soil, water and air being managed responsibly?
  • Are greenhouse gas emissions being measured and is action being taken to reduce them?
  • Are farm wastes managed responsibly?
  • Is biodiversity on the farm enhanced?
  • Are High Conservation Value lands (HCV) protected?

Although a farm is clearly an operation, we point out thatmaking a farm more sustainable is a project, and that there is still learning that can and should take place from these operational principles.

These are the sorts of questions that you can be asking your project team - preferably near the initiation - to integrate long-term thinking...sustainability thinking into your project.  We'll be discussing this much more during 2014.

Additional references:

This article from BusinessWeek

This article from GreenBiz

A recent e-article on Redd News talks about the inclusion of “natural capital” when figuring the profits and loss of a company.  Pavan Sukhdev, a former Deutsche Bank AG banker and current board member of Conservation International, a U.S. based environmental group, “estimates that the top 3,000 companies fail to account for $2.1 trillion of charges related to the use or pollution of natural assets – say by releasing carbon dioxide into the air or waste into a river. That figure nearly doubles to $4 trillion, or about 6.7 percent of global GDP, when the world’s entire corporate sector is included.”  He also had another interesting quote in the article.  He said “We cannot continue to do business thinking we are adding value to stakeholders while at the same time destroying value for stakeholders.  This is bad management.” 

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 5^th 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.  

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.