People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Photo Credit: Gallo Images/Thinkstock

There’s a little bit of ‘karma’ associated with this blog post.  I sat down to write the post – a post ostensibly to be (only) focused on E. O. Wilson’s, book Half Earth (and I will indeed cover that book a little bit).

I had just reached the point where I had the piece outlined, and I went into the neighboring room where I could hear (from the TV) the voice of Peter Coyote narrating a documentary.

I sat down with the rest of the family, who had settled in to watch the program.  The show was Ken Burns’ excellent documentary, National Parks: America’s Best Idea, being rebroadcast by PBS – it first aired in 2009. Parks, as described by PBS, is “a six-episode series produced by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan and written by Dayton Duncan. Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales – from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska.  In this series, Burns, aided by the talented voices of such celebrities as Adam Arkin, Tom Bodett, Andy Garcia, Tom Hanks, Derek Jacobi, John Lithgow, Amy Madigan, Sam Waterston, and George Takei.

The lengthy series covers the history and implementation of 58 US wilderness national parks, featuring some of the most beautiful photography and editing you have ever seen.  And yes, because creating these parks required the cooperation of key sponsors and the participation (sometimes forceful) of many types of stakeholders, there are lots of project lessons simply in that aspect of the show.  In fact, the subtitle of the show, “America’s Best Idea” aligns with our assertions that project management is about bringing ideas to reality and that is what happened in these 58 parks.

So where’s the karma?  It is in the connection of (1) the National Park theme, which is one of stopping development and carving out space for nature - - and (2) the theme of Wilson’s book.  So now on to E. O. Wilson and his book, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.

E. O. Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a professor emeritus from Harvard University.

In his book, Half Earth, Wilson says, well – I think I’ll let him speak for himself, via this snippet from a recent New York Times interview:

Reading your book, one senses you felt a great urgency to write it?

The urgency was twofold. First, it’s only been within the last decade that a full picture of the crisis in biodiversity has emerged. The second factor was my age. I’m 86. I had a mild stroke a couple of years ago. I thought, “Say this now or never.”

And what I say is that to save biodiversity, we need to set aside about half the earth’s surface as a natural reserve. I’m not suggesting we have one hemisphere for humans and the other for the rest of life. I’m talking about allocating up to one half of the surface of the land and the sea as a preserve for remaining flora and fauna.

It’s a huge, controversial, sweeping proposal. And we suggest you read it, even if you’re highly cynical of the idea. 

Both the book and the concept of the national park have to do with long-term thinking.  Drastic steps such as preserving vast areas of land for the future are not taken by those who are looking to the next quarter’s profits.  They are ‘generational’ in nature (excuse the pun) and take a view that is about benefits realization to the extreme.  Thinking like this is Portfolio Management on steroids.  And that’s a good thing. Moreover, this is the type of thinking we are trying to encourage our project management audience to consider.  It does not mean that you have exactly this same attitude on each project – in fact, there are many cases where this thinking just does not apply.  But there are many (surprising) cases where it does apply.  We, of course, would send you to our two books (Green Project Management and Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success) to see some of these in action.

References:

National Parks: Americas Best Idea – A series by Ken Burns, written by Dayton Duncan, broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System of the United States (PBS)

Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life - a book by E. O. Wilson

https://nature.berkeley.edu/breakthroughs/sp15/eo-wilson-on-saving-half-the-earth

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/can-world-really-set-aside-half-planet-wildlife-180952379/

NOTE: This post is not an endorsement of any political candidate!  If anything, it is an endorsement of project management and project managers.

 “I will build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively.  I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will make Mexico pay for that wall, mark my words.”

- Donald Trump, candidate for President of the United States

This post is indeed about walls.  But instead of border walls, it’s about sea walls.  Why sea walls?  Well, they’re an instrumental part of several huge, huge, great projects (to paraphrase Mr. Trump) which will engage many of our peer project managers, whatever their politics.

An article in The Edge, from the April 2016 issue of PM Network, says, “a growing number of organizations are now launching projects to generate power from the ocean.  Many of these projects are based in the UK, but they are also going to take place elsewhere, particularly in North America and in China. 

Projections (see chart, imagined from data in the article), take the investment from $25M in 2013 to over $10B in 2020.

 That’s quite a ‘wave’ of investment, and spells lots of opportunities for project managers.  Key to this demand is the predictability of the tides, as contrasted to the uncertainty and variation in solar and wind power – forcing them to rely on effective storage of power (another area of research and project management!). 

Here’s an example: In Swansea, Wales, there is a $1.5B tidal lagoon project which is set to generate power for 150,000 homes for over a century.  This project includes the creation of large (great, great!) sea walls.

Here’s another one: in China, there is a $30B proposed tidal wall, using special curved blades to help limit damage to sea life, which will be built by a consortium of eight Dutch companies.  In China, this is illustrative of the gigantic increase in renewable energy spending.  China is leading the way here with $110B invested in 2015 alone, and the US in second place at $56B.

Here is an excellent video (just 3 minutes) showing the technology behind the tidal project to be built off the coast of China.

Of course, China has some history building great, Great Walls…

In any case - these green-by-definition projects present great opportunities for project managers who have learned about the importance of sustainability in projects, and in project, program, and portfolio management.

Let me begin this post with a story from my own engineering work from long, long, ago.

I was a test engineer in a department that specialized in testing and troubleshooting the difficult, “dog” circuit boards that failed manufacturing test (yes, manufacturing, in the United States.  I told you it was long, long ago!).  These were telecom circuit boards with complex designs, featuring analog to digital conversions, signal processing, and usually containing hundreds of integrated circuits (chips).  When they passed test – fine.  When they failed, usually the sophisticated automated test sets, or technicians equipped with data analyzers and oscilloscopes could trace the problem.  But there always a few outliers that were hard to troubleshoot – the dogs.  And it was expensive inventory to have these hanging around – and although junking them was an option, if there was a way to find the problem, not only did it make one more product available, it also gave the designers and test engineers useful information for redesigning the product or the process.

So I went on a hunt for a way to solve these ‘animals’.  And I ended up using a solution called thermal imaging to get a thermal signature of a good circuit board and to compare it to a 'dog'.  Often, this led to finding very interesting flaws, such as capacitors with slightly leaky dielectrics, or ‘soft short circuits” between layers on multilayer circuit boards.  Thermal imaging worked very well on the 'dogs'.

I was always impressed with the system’s ability to show fractions of a degree centigrade in different colors.  In fact, when I demonstrated this to other engineers in the company one day, in a large auditorium, after setting up the infrared camera in the back of the room, I noticed two bright hot spots on the carpet in the center of the room.  I mean, these were bright red-orange flare-ups on the carpet, near the viewgraph machine (yes, it was that long ago!).  I wondered if there was some kind of heating system between floors, or a mouse under the carpet – I had no idea. 

Turns out: these two spots were the signature of my own knees.  I had been setting up the viewgraph machine (once again, this was long ago!) in the center of the room, and my kneeling down for a few moments on the carpet was enough to leave those “hot spots” on the carpet.  So that’s some background – thermal imaging, even back then, was pretty (excuse the pun) cool.  See figure below, showing the thermal image of a circuit board.

In those days, the thermal cameras actually needed liquid nitrogen (to have a known reference temperature to work with).  And the cameras and associated electronics were a bit large and unwieldy.

Flash forward to 2016.  Today I ran across this article (and associated broadcast snippet) from NPR’s outstanding blog called “Goats and Soda”, about applying this technology also to find “dogs” but in this case, human “animals” who in turn are poaching protected species around the world.  The solution uses the same sort of thermal differentiation available in these cameras to identify human body heat – in this case the body heat of poachers – catching them in the act of killing (for example) elephants rhino, certain gazelles, and impala.

If you are interested in these green-by-definition projects, check out these other articles which also include the application of drones carrying these cameras.  Check out this article from NBC News, and this one from The Observer, and this one from Popular Science - of particular interest to project managers because of its radical scope change that occurred midstream.

Your animal instincts know that project management and sustainability are intertwined.  This is just some more proof.

Imagine three hamburgers on a plate.  Or, it could be three uitsmijters, three tortas, three bowls of laping, three plates of mansaf,   Whatever cuisine you prefer, imagine 3 servings of it sitting in front of you. 

Now - throw one in the garbage.  Use your imagination, of course.

Unfortunately, this is not imaginary.  In the US, we waste – “throw away” – about a third of our food.

In fact, most of the 130 billion pounds of food that Americans wasted in 2015 sits in landfills, giving off methane, directly to the atmosphere.

There is well, not a solution, because the solution would be eliminating the food waste, but a partial solution – turning that food waste into electricity.  It’s done with an anaerobic digester.  The US Department of Energy does a good job describing what that is, at this link.

In simple terms, it is a gigantic stomach.  It uses 'friendly' bacteria to emulate the digestion process and to convert organic waste into inorganic gasses like methane and carbon dioxide.  It's the methane we want, because it can be used to produce electricity.

If all of this talk of food waste and manure has you hungry for more (learning), there’s also an excellent video from Washington State University, here.

This is being done on a large scale, in particular at a facility in northern Colorado.

Here is the Heartland Gas story from their website:

Using a mixture of cow manure from local dairies and organic waste from restaurant grease traps, spoiled grocery store products, cafeteria waste and food processing residuals, the facility will produce over 50 megawatts of renewable natural gas. Additional products include compost and liquid fertilizer which will be used by local farms. After the biogas is cleaned and compressed, it will be injected into the Colorado Interstate Gas Company pipeline.

A recent report from the nonprofit group ReFED found that digesters not only generate renewable energy, they also divert food waste from landfills, cut down on harmful emissions and provide a few jobs along the way.

So, you may be thinking, as you have your second uitsmijter* - what’s the project management connection here?

We can think of three right away:

1. This is a Green-By-Definition project, as described in our book, Green Project Management
2. This is an example of taking a negative risk (a threat, in the form of food waste) and turning it into a positive risk (an opportunity).The AD plant creates electricity, jobs, and prevents food waste from going into landfills and generating methane (a very bad greenhouse gas) directly into the atmosphere.
3. Project management is about efficiency and reduction of waste.It doesn’t always have to be about cash.In this case, its’ more about trash…which turns into cash.

Of course, ideally we want to do what we can to reduce the waste in the first place, and you can go here to learn about what the USDA is recommending about this.

Note:  We got inspired to write this post after eating two-thirds of a bagel and… no – really, our inspiration came from this article by Luke Runyon at NPR.  Thanks to him, we are literally watching what we eat!

*an uitsmijter (description courtesy of holland.com) is an open-faced sandwich with ham, cheese and fried eggs. The sandwich is eaten with knife and fork and is considered a full meal. Most often the choice of meat will be ham, if not specified, but uitsmijters can also be served with roast beef, pastrami, turkey, bacon or even just with cheese.

The eggs are usually served sunny-side up, over-medium. If you order an uitsmijter (the word means “bouncer” or “out-thrower”, if you translate it literally: the dish was often the last thing served at parties or in bars before closing time) for breakfast it's served by itself. As a lunch item, it usually comes accompanied with a small salad on the side or some greens to spruce it up. 

As you may be able to tell, there is a certain irony in our choice of this food: it's about throwing out food!

Once in a while on this blog, we focus simply on projects which are what we call “Green By Definition”.  This means the project’s charter of the project and its main outcome is focused social or ecological bottom lines – even though, as in this case, it could be very much a profit-driven effort as well.

We recently encountered an example in PMI’s PM Network magazine (March 2016, Page 10, “Underwater Energy”) which we’d also like to share with you, drawing also from other resources which give more background this project.

To get started, I want you to make a strange visual image in your head: a balloon and a battery… balloon on the left, battery on the right.  Now, put them in motion – slowly.  Move them closer and closer to each other… that’s right… and let them merge to become one.  Excellent job!

Imagine an un-inflated balloon.  Now bring that balloon under water, perhaps deep under water, and inflate it.  Would you agree that the balloon is storing air?  And you’d agree that the water pressure would help deflate the balloon, right?  Sure.  Now imagine that the balloon can be deflated under control, rotating the blades of a turbine, which in turn produces electricity.  Would you agree that now the balloon is storing energy?  Sure.  So balloon = battery.  It can be charged (inflated), and it can be discharged (deflated) to convert one type of energy to another.  In the case of the battery it is a chemical to electrical conversion – here it is air-flow to electrical.

Is this loony?  Not at all, as it turns out.

In the PM Network article, we learn that the project is sponsored by a company called Hydrostor.  A visit to their website is informative, as you can learn about their ‘golden thread’ from mission and vision to the operation of their project’s product. The business case for such a system (what would make us put giant balloons under Lake Ontario?) is the fact that the promise of wind and solar energy is somewhat deflated (excuse the pun) by possible dips in availability of those sources, since they are dependent on nature.  This “rounds out the curve” and becomes an enabler for wind and solar by providing storage when those sources are not producing the needed power.

So, with a business case, a charter, and a dedicated sponsor, the project was launched in November 2015 and is aimed at reducing Toronto’s reliance on fossil fuels.

In this article from the Financial Post, we learn that the project is well into execution.  Near the shore of Lake Ontario, 30-centimetre steel pipes already extend deep underground before jutting out into the Lake, traversing over 4 kM.   We share a key figure from this article below, and highly recommend that you have a look at the full article.  In it, we learn that already, new contracts are being signed by Hydrostor, including one in which Hydrostor will build a plant in Aruba: it will construct a 10-MWt facility on the small Caribbean island of Aruba to help round out the potential power dips of a 30-megawatt wind farm there.  Here's a really cool video on the whole concept (click here or on the image to watch this 6-minute video).

The full story is here.
 

Here is the promised diagrammatic explanation:

If you want to go to the original article in PM Network that triggered our interest, you can go to PMI directly on these two links:

http://www.pmi.org/Learning/pm-network.aspx

http://www.pmi.org/learning/Publications-Online-Library/PM-Network-Past-Issues.aspx

The Ballooning Bottom Line

Here we see the relationship between project management and sustainability in a very direct way.  We know it’s not always that direct and that’s why we’ll continue to write about the more subtle connections, such as planning for the long-term success and ecological and social aspects of any project.  But in the meantime, let’s not burst your bubble – enjoy the story of how a balloon becomes a battery and the projects that this has yielded.