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Viewing Posts by Richard Maltzman
Sustainable Sustainability in Projects
Categories:
persistence
Categories: persistence
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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:
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.
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A Question For You (?)
Categories:
criticism of project management
Categories: criticism of project management
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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:
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.
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Made in the Shade - Part II of II
Categories:
secondary risk
Categories: secondary risk
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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: (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: 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
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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):
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.
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Eww.
Categories:
beauty products
Categories: beauty products
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I had intended to write (and probably will later) about a Microsoft effort to trial underwater data centers, to solve the issue of heat generated by server farms. Instead, another water-related project issue hit me – literally – when I stumbled on a BBC article about, of all things, beauty and tooth-care products. The article (click here for it) discussed a proposal for a worldwide ban on microbeads. I didn’t even know what these were, but vaguely in my memory I recall using products that have a ‘gritty’ feel to them, for example, a toothpaste which promises whiter teeth, or a body scrub that promises smooth skin and exfoliation. The more I read, the more the article ‘hit home’. I saw a connection to sustainability in PM. Here is a product concept that launched (many times over, with many manufacturers) without the long-term thinking into the use of the end product. This is one of our key themes in our books, Green Project Management and Driving Sustainability Success. Think beyond the handover of your product (and/or service) to the steady-state use. So what’s the deal here? From this article, here is an excellent short-form description of the issue: What Is A Microbead? A microbead is any solid plastic particle that is less than 5 millimeters and is used for the purpose of exfoliating or cleansing. These tiny plastic beads can be found in hundreds of products ranging from body scrubs to toothpastes. Why The Concern? Because microbeads are made of plastic, they do not dissolve and thus pose a threat to the environment by polluting oceans and lakes. A study published in Environmental Science & Technology reported that more than 8 trillion microbeads were entering the country's water habitats daily, which is enough to cover the surface of 300 tennis courts every day. Turns out, President Obama (read the rest of this article) just signed into law some bipartisan legislation (I didn’t think we did that anymore, but evidently we can do it!) which addresses this issue and will take these products off the shelf. And that includes my shelf.
This is the part where the story really hit home, because on our shower shelf, indeed, is a product called Bliss Super Minty Soap'n Scrub Energizing Exfoliator for the Body. Although the product talks about 'blue jojoba beads', the second ingredient after water (which it also calls 'aqua' - seriously?) is polyethylene - no mention of 'jojoba' after the marketing blurb. And indeed, the product shows up bright red on a site called “beat the microbead”, a Dutch non-profit which provides product lists worldwide and via color-code (red is bad, of course) shows where your products fit on the spectrum. They have even introduced an app which lets you do this research very easily on your smartphone.
It’s important. A single shower can result in 100,000 plastic particles entering the ocean. And here’s a chilling way to think about it. You may be eating someone else’s used microbeads. Eww. Eww! Microplastic pollution is potentially more environmentally damaging than larger plastic waste, because it is more likely to be eaten by wildlife. Microplastics also have a greater surface area to attract toxins. Professor Tamara Galloway from Exeter University said: “We find pieces of plastic in every sample of seawater we study from round the world. Many marine animals ingest microbeads, mistaking them for food. They can then be lodged in the animals’ gut – preventing them from eating nutritious food. “An average plate of oysters could contain up to 50 plastic particles. We don’t have any evidence yet for the harm this might cause but most people would probably prefer not to be eating microbeads with their food.” The connection to project management – one more time – think about your project’s product IN USE, in its steady state. That includes thinking about eating someone else’s shower effluent when you have seafood. Is that why the oyster above has a sardonic smile? |