This is Part I of a two-part series which references PMI’s two major publications – PM Network magazine and The Project Management Journal. In particular we focus on the two most recent editions of these magazines – the February 2016 PM Network and the February/March 2016 Project Management Journal.
Part I: Hidden Success
The cover story and theme of this month’s PM Network magazine is “the Long Haul”. And while it’s focused on “marathon” projects – meaning those that (although temporary) are long-duration projects, there are several articles and features that talk to the version of “The Long Haul” that we like – which is this: even for a short project, the project manager does right for the project, and right by the project, if he or she thinks way, way, past the end date and to the steady state – to the “long haul” of the project’s product.
Let’s discuss The Hidden Success Factor – an article by Frederico Cox, Jr. In this article the author implores project managers to look beyond scope, budget, and schedule – to the client – to determine if your project succeeded or failed. The entire concept of defining success in a project context (see Part II) is not only fascinating, it is increasingly important for project management maturity. An immature project management culture is obsessed with project measurements around scope, schedule and cost. There is of course, nothing wrong with focusing on these project efficiency measures. They do indeed indicate how well the project is going, and how well the project meets PROJECT goals. But step back for a moment. Think about the timeline as you step back and think about the project timeline (say 8 months) relative to the life of the product of your project (maybe 8 years or 80 years!). With that view – the “Long Haul” view – it is important that the project ran efficiently but isn’t success really defined by whether or not the customer really gained benefits from using the product of your project? This is Cox’s point – a customer may be extremely happy with a project that didn’t achieve its planned scope quality or cost, and, although not stated, the other side of the coin is that the client may be very unhappy with a project that is exceedingly under budget, exactingly on time, and meticulously meets scope.
As you can see from the figure, our view of project success, like that of Cox, takes into account the way the project was run (“Efficiency”) along with the target producing a result that the client base liked (“Effectiveness”) and we add depth to this by asserting that the missing dimension is how that product serves its customers over time – in the Long Haul – well after the project variances are long-forgotten (“Endurance”).
You can see one example here that was high in Effectiveness and low in Efficiency. The Sydney Opera House.
Check it out. We dare you. Ask anyone who has been to a performance at the Sydney Opera House. Go ahead. Ask them. Ask them if they think the Opera House was a “failure”. They’ll say, “how can you even ask that? It’s a symbol of Australia. We had a great time! It was spectacular!”.
Yet the statistics of that project are spectacularly BAD.
The project was originally scheduled for four years, with a budget of AUS $7 million. It ended up taking 14 years to be completed and cost AUS $102 million. That’s a 1400% over-run in costs and a schedule that ran 10 years late. The original design lacked any considerations for acoustics.
So – to make a very un-Australian baseball analogy… • Time: swing and a miss
• Cost: swing and a miss
• Scope: swing and a miss
Three strikes and… yer out?
Not necessarily. What does that failed ‘efficiency’ look like now?
“It has turned into one of our most valuable national assets. According to modelling by Deloitte, the Opera House adds $775 million to the Australian economy every year in direct ticket sales, retail and food spending and by boost to tourism to Australia.” - Source" article from Australia's Courier Mail
So maybe, in the long run, it was a home run.
In Part II we’ll talk further about success, based on an article also geared to construction projects, focused on success factors. Until then, you can dream of enjoying a nice show at the Sydney Opera House!
In Part I of this series, we discussed the Signal Crayfish and its human-led introduction into Crater Lake – originally as fish food for Crater Lake’s (also human-introduced fish for humans to fish for sport), and the problems that the Signal Crayfish is now causing for a rare newt only found in Crater Lake.
So in that story, the Crayfish is the villain, or appears to be. Certainly, it is a story fraught with lessons for project managers – unintended consequences (threats), stakeholder management, and also fraught with science lessons (climate change induced temperature rise at the root of the issue). But now we move on to Part II, in which the crustacean is not the villain, but the hero. Sort of.
This story, brought to our attention by a very recent episode of NOVA, “Mystery Beneath The Ice”,
Here’s the ‘teaser’ for the show:
"Tiny, transparent, and threatened, krill are crucial to the Antarctic ecosystem. But the population of krill is crashing for reasons that continue to baffle the experts. A leading theory says that krill’s life cycle is driven by an internal body clock that responds to the waxing and waning of the Antarctic ice pack, and as climate change alters the timing of the ice pack, their life cycle is disrupted. To test it, NOVA travels on the Polarstern, a state-of-the-art research vessel, to the frigid ice pack in the dead of winter. From camps established on the ice, scientists dive beneath the surface in search of the ice caves that shelter juvenile krill during the winter. There, they hope to discover what’s causing the krill to vanish and, ultimately, how the shifting seasons caused by climate change could disrupt ecosystems around the world."
The show raises some questions and we add some additional ones: The questions:
• What’s causing the krill to vanish?
• Is this indicative of a larger problem?
• Is this indicative of a need for more projects to better understand how climate is changing?
• Will these projects need project managers?
• Will these project managers need a better understanding of sustainability, climate, triple-bottom-line results? (we hope you will agree that the answer to that is increasingly a resounding YES)
Now don't get us wrong, we still think that you should watch the video. But [SPOILER ALERT] we’ll give you the spoiler right here. There are a few elements of climate change that are causing the decline in krill population. The krill need to eat after they hatch – a critical time in their development. They eat phytoplankton. The lack of a fully frozen ocean area stops the collection of phytoplankton (which the krill eat) and its preservation until summer. In the show they call this the shrinking of “the giant phytoplankton Popsicle”. Also, it appears that the change in sea ice patterns, caused by climate change, is affecting the krill’s circadian rhythms. The krill need to eat after they hatch – a critical time in their development. They eat phytoplankton. In fact many organisms in this Antarctic region are very “hard wired” to particular patterns of melting and re-freezing and even slight changes to those patterns can cause huge problems for them all.
For those who are interested in further understanding how krill can be considered a bellwether for the effects of climate change, check out this link from National Geographic magazine.
If you think that our detective work in this Case of the Missing Krill is wrong, and perhaps that climate change is innocent (or even non-existent), the numbers are worthwhile looking at,. Consider the facts:
• The temperature in this region of the world (Antarctica, see photo below) has risen 7 degrees C (11-12 degrees F) in the last 50 years – that’s 5 times the global average temperature change. So the changes are magnified here, and to me that means the ‘early warning signs’ can be better measured here.
• Trillions of tons of ice has been lost in the past 20-30 years alone just in this area (Sheldon Glacier) of the Antarctic
• Winter season has shrunk by 90 days.
All of these things are contributing to the krill population decline. And that’s important because of the food web’s dependency on the krill (see figure).
The program ends with one particularly heavy question. They say that the krill will find it exceedingly difficult to change their behavior – can we change ours?
This is a two-part story. In Part I, the crustacean is the villain. In Part II, the crustacean is the hero. Or… maybe it’s not so cut-and-dry. In any case, it is a two part story, and, as Yoda might say: “Read it, you can - learn from it you must”.
Just like in project management, stakeholders can be on either side of a project issue. Or, more interestingly, they can be on BOTH sides of a project issue.
Crustacean Frustration - Part I: The Crayfish Crime of Crater Lake(including a lesson in Stakeholder Management!)
Our story unfolds at Crater Lake. Crater Lake is a unique environment in south-central Oregon. It’s known for its natural beauty and crystal clear, deep blue water.
In the story you’ll find in this video, you’ll see that a series of decisions to attempt to preserve the environment of Crater Lake has led to some problems, one which threatens the existence of a critter that lives ONLY here – the Mazama Newt. That’s correct; this is the only place on the planet that you will find that species. Until the introduction of the Signal Crayfish (see feature photo above), the Mazama newt thrived here. And actually, the Signal Crayfish population was under control until suspected climate change effects have increased the temperature of the water by several degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the newt is on the run. Please watch this short video so that you can get the most out of this post.
The issue has launched several research projects and will likely launch one or more rescue projects as a result. These are green-by-definition projects (as discussed in both of our books) which are aimed at reacting to a realized threat which in turn is a result of a risk response from an earlier project.
You may ask: why was the Signal Crayfish introduced? Interestingly, the crayfish were introduced to serve as food for fish that were introduced in order to make Crater Lake a destination for fishermen. So, in effect the crayfish were introduced to be prey – to be fish food! Read about it in this extract from High Country News:
Over the past century, crayfish — aka crawfish, crawdads, or, if you study invasive species, “aquatic cockroaches” — have colonized lakes and streams from California to Taipei. In some places, as in Crater Lake, they were introduced deliberately to control weeds or feed fish; in others, they arrived accidentally as bait. They are, in many respects, the perfect invader: hardy, omnivorous, aggressive. “They have those big claws, and they’re really good at essentially brutalizing other animals,” says Jake Vander Zanden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has waged war against crayfish in midwestern lakes.
You don’t need to be an ecologist to guess what happened once the disastrous decapods arrived at Crater. The fish didn’t eat them, and all but two species (rainbow trout and kokanee salmon) eventually perished. The crayfish, meanwhile, persisted in the lake at low levels until the 1990s, when populations exploded — perhaps thanks to climate change, which may have warmed Crater Lake’s waters enough to stimulate rapid breeding. As the crustaceans boomed, they devastated aquatic invertebrates, like worms and midges, which plummeted by nearly 80 percent in infested areas.
So now the hunted have become the hunter. And they are also displacing and greatly endangering the Mazama Newt – which as you learned earlier are only found a this one location on the planet.
We see the effect here – on the environment, and on projects – from a very slight change in climate. In a way, this could be a ‘canary in a coal mine’ signal advising us of further potential problems, an early warning sign of other threats to be triggered by climate change, and of course projects to be launched to remediate them. The immediate threat is the possible elimination of the Mazama newt by the Signal Crayfish.
With all this talk of triggers and early warning signs, this could be a story about monitoring and controlling risks and issues. And it is, but it’s not the main spin of the story from our perspective.
So this is a lesson about the environment. And you can take significant value in the learning derived from the environmental piece. But there is a takeaway for project managers as well. This is where this blog lives – right at that intersection.
Here’s a project management connection: Stakeholder Management
Is the crayfish truly a villain? It is doing what we expect it to do in its environment. It’s the environment that changed. So as a project manager, if we look not only at power and attitude, but also interests, we know that the stakeholder will behave in its best interests – and that changes depending on the environment. In this case, the environment changes such that it continues to maintain its interests, but its power goes significantly up as it seeks to follow its interests. In your projects, look for the ‘signal crayfish’ out there – those whose power may go way up due to a changing environment. It doesn’t only happen in Crater Lake – it can happen on a new app development project just as easily.
The larger issue is the climate change indicated by the temperature rise in Crater Lake. Let’s move on to another story in which the crustacean is no longer a villain, but a victim – even a hero.
Coming soon... Part II: The Case Of The Missing Krill
Originally I was going to call this blog post, “The Low Spark of High Tech Boys”, but I was pretty certain that not many people would get the reference (to an 1971 album by Traffic, “The Low Spark of High Heel Boys”),and this is not about boys – it’s about men and women of science and the projects they are leading.
So I focused instead on of our main messages: you don’t have to believe in climate change to believe in the intersection between sustainability and project management. You just need to have at least a little respect for science and you just have to be aware of how much money is going to be involved in launching climate change oriented projects.
Have a look at this table we assembled, mainly from The Financial Times – showing some pretty big bucks coming as a result of the Paris climate conference COP21:
Just a sample of some climate change-oriented developments (thanks to this link from the Financial Times)
• India and France unveiled a plan to mobilize more than $1 trillion (with a T) over the next 15 years to make solar energy affordable in sun-rich developing countries.
• A group of 20 countries including the US, China and India vowed to double their existing combined $10bn of spending on clean energy research over the next five years.
• Norway, Germany and the UK said they would deliver more than $5bn over the next five years to support countries committed to reducing deforestation, a significant contributor to global warming.
• Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland unveiled a $500m plan to make large scale cuts in greenhouse gases in developing countries, in league with the World Bank.
““We’ve demonstrated these technologies are possible, but we don’t know yet how to manufacture them at a large scale,” he said. “We need to be trying a lot of things, in parallel with one another. We have many more ideas than we have the funds”. – Jeff Grossman, MIT professor of materials science and engineering.
This in turn reminded me of one of the best lines from the film, The Martian, which gave me the actual title for this post.
The article goes on to talk about some of the research projects being done at MIT and the manufacturing projects they will launch. It’s easy to see from the table above, and the quotes below – there will be PLENTY of project managers needed to oversee the vast quantity of projects that this investment will kick off. From the article:
Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering who cofounded the companies A123 Systems and 24M, has spent years studying how to make batteries cheaper and last longer. He’s now seeking to cut in half the costs of the kind of lithium-ion batteries that power cutting-edge electric cars made by Tesla. He’s also looking at building batteries for electrical grids that can store energy from wind turbines or solar farms, so it can be distributed when needed.
“The right storage can solve many of the problems we have now with creating a low-carbon future,” he said.
Meanwhile, MIT is embarking on an unprecedented program to accelerate progress on low-carbon energy technologies. In the coming months, MIT plans to launch eight “energy centers” on campus that will seek more than $300 million in research funding over the next five years from companies, foundations, and other sources.
The centers, announced last fall as part of a “plan for action” to curb carbon emissions, aim to further research and ultimately commercialize new technologies in the areas of solar energy, nuclear energy, energy storage, energy bioscience, electrical grids, nuclear fusion, materials science, and the capture and use of carbon.
Another global effort called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition involves recent pledges by 20 billionaires, including American tech magnates Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, to invest in new clean energy projects and help commercialize them.
So whatever your views on climate change, there is no denying the straight up fact that if you are a project manager, you can be ‘chomping at the bit’ to get to work on some of these exciting project opportunities!
I’m a fan of the television series NOVA. I think it’s one of the better produced TV programs, containing great value and educational content, perhaps second only to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
A recent episode of NOVA was entitled “Life’s Rocky Start” and it covered the ‘co-evolution’ of minerals and life on our planet, spanning back a few years – say 4.5 billion or so. I’ve also been a rockhound (a person interested in rocks and minerals), so this show was perfect for me. In and of itself, it’s a worthwhile investment of 50 minutes of your time – and since it’s produced by the USA’s Public Broadcasting System, it is available streaming, free, here. Please do have a look.
While I watched this program and appreciated the insight of professor Robert Hazen, author of “The Story of Earth”, a book which divides Earth’s history into six distinct stages (more on this later), I noticed a theme that got me wondering about climate change. The theme was that the planet’s minerals contributed to the evolution of life (that’s logical) and that the opposite was also quite true – life on the planet, not necessarily humans, but life in general – had an immense impact on the planet’s development. A great example is the Stromatolites, a microbial form of life which themselves form mineral, coral-like structures (see photo below) which expelled massive amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, which at that time had almost none. The arrival of oxygen meant that the Earth’s atmosphere – at the time consisting mainly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen was increasingly corrosive and also increasingly supportive of life on land. Not only this, Hazen has determined that 2/3 of the minerals that now exist on the planet are only there thanks to this introduction of oxygen by the Stromatolites.
So in this case, life significantly transformed the planet, moving it from what Haze calls “Blue Earth” to “Red Earth”.
I’ll fast forward to the stage we’re in now: “Green Earth”.
At the end of the show, Hazen talks about humans. Are we the new Stromatolites? He doesn’t ask that per se, but this was my takeaway. He does say note the “power of life to transform a planet” and does say this: “humans are transforming the planet, we change the composition of the atmosphere, we change the composition of the oceans”. Well, that’s what the Stromatolites did.
Whatever your view on climate change, this show is a very good take for a project manager, if for no other reason than to expand your ‘timeline’ back a ways, having you look back at our planet’s formation, perhaps allowing you to put your own project in more of a long-term perspective. Looking back that far backwards can only help you look forward, as well, to the product of your project, and its long-term effects, looking past the traditional 'end' of your project.
Speaking of endings, here’s how the show ends: “there are going to be global changes, changes whose consequences are now beginning to unfold. This is the latest chapter in Earth’s epic story. A story that began 4.5 billion years ago…with a rock.”
Below: Stromatolites at Shark Bay, Western Australia.
and this is not about boys – it’s about men and women of science and the projects they are leading.
