People, Planet, Profits & Projects

As we research the intersection of project management and sustainability one of the questions we run into is "who's driving?".  Don't take this literally, we're not talking about driving a car, but more from the standpoint of stakeholder analysis.

As our observant readers will know, the PMBOK(R) Guide's 5th Edition, recently released, has a brand new Knowledge Area, called Stakeholder Management.  PMI has correctly surmised that this is a major piece of what we do as project managers.

As we've always said, an unidentified threat is an untreated threat, and an unidentified stakeholder could mean a whole family of both threats and opporunities that are unidentified.

So we should know our stakeholders.  And obviously, one key stakeholder is the customer.  There is hardly much bigger of a customer for many companies as global retailer WalMart.

Walmart has made some news over the past few years pushing for sustainability from their suppliers.  And more recently, this story from Reuters indicates that WalMart has quite literally become a threat to laggards in the field of sustainability.  The threat is this: comply with our environmental rules within 5 years or your projects are off of our shelves.   Off.  Kaput.  Finished.

Here's a key clipping from the article.  We suggest you read it all because there is more to the story, especially surrounding WalMart's contribution to the trade deficit between the US and China.

The new requirements, announced in China where Wal-Mart has more than 20,000 suppliers, will compel workshops that churn out much of the world's toys, clothing and electronics to improve on energy efficiency, waste reduction and other markers on the retailer's checklist.

Wal-Mart said the checklist was voluntary. But if suppliers fall short, they could be cut off from the nearly 4,000 Walmart discount stores and more than 600 Sam's Club wholesale warehouses that the company operates in the United States.

The standards set in Wal-Mart's "sustainability index", which has helped to burnish an image tarnished by criticism from labor groups and local communities, have already been embraced by 500 of the world's major consumer product makers.

The retailer said that by the end of 2017, U.S. Walmart and Sam's Club stores will get 70 percent of their goods from global suppliers that use the sustainability index.

Our take - as project managers?  Well, you're right to identify this as an operational thing more than a project thing, but consider this.  How would a supplier to WalMart start to meet these requirements?  With a project.  What is the entire roll-out of WalMart's initiative to control its suppliers?  A project.

And from our perspective as project managers it helps answer the question we asked up front in this post.  Who's driving sustainability in your project?  Sometimes it's the EPA.  Sometimes it's a group of 'environmentally-minded' employees.  It could be the CEO, after having a sort of green epiphany.  Or, as in this case, it could be a gigantic big-box store which just happens to be your biggest customer.

Sustainability in project management it is not about how to manage projects, but how to be.  This has been and always will be our message.   We never wanted to see a separate PMBOK® Knowledge Area called Project Sustainability Management.   Sustainability must be interwoven, intertwined with project management in a way that it cannot be separated out, a piece to be negotiated or used as a tradeoff.  The only way to do that, to make sustainability real in projects, is for the project manager to be.  “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”  Mahatma Gandhi 

It is a leap of faith.  It requires discipline, but discipline is the project manager’s middle name, after all.  We use the discipline of project management to do our jobs every day, don’t we?  We don’t fly by the seat of our pants.  We don’t trust luck and intuition to bring project in on budget, on time, and within stakeholder’s expectation. 

So how do you be when we’re so busy now? And, how do you be unless you know?  “Why should I care about sustainability?  I’m a project manager and my job, which is hard enough, is to deliver the project on time, on budget and meet my stakeholder’s expectation.  I don’t think they care about sustainability, why should I?”  Oh, have we heard this before.  It is interesting.  Among project managers there are pockets of resistance to sustainability.  It just may be a case of not knowing.  I’m not saying that it is pervasive, but more localized.  For instance, we have had over 100 people attend one of our webinars.  I can’t say that kind of attendance happens regularly, but we always have good attendance, whether it is a webinar, seminar or course.  It may be that we’ve target the audience that already buys into the intersection of PM and sustainability (EarthPM) because we don’t receive a lot of pushback.  So for those who may not have bought into it yet, in the words of Sergeant Joe Friday, “All we want are the facts.”   Let’s not just be, let’s be the leader and the change agent for sustainability, the connection between sustainability and project management.  Why, because it is the right thing to do and it is substantiated by the facts.

Whoa, facts?  Yes, facts.  Surprisingly enough, the answer to “If my stakeholders don’t care about sustainability, why should I?” has its foundation in fact.  You may have made the assumption that your stakeholder is only interested in having the project delivered on-time, on budget and within the specifications agreed to in the beginning of the project.  Sounds about right, so what am I missing?  What you are missing is the fact that sustainability may be very important to this stakeholder and even though the project is delivered on-time, in budget and in spec, the stakeholder is not satisfied.  We all know that specs aren’t perfect.  And there is a difference between a customer who reluctantly agrees to the end product and one whose expectations have been met or even exceeded.  Wouldn’t you rather have the latter than the former?

So where are these facts?  A little investigation can go a long way.  Let’s say you are managing a project and the stakeholder is Rockline Industries.  What does Rockline Industries do?  They manufacture a lot of the products that we buy from retailers, like baby wipes, antibacterial wipes and household cleaning items, sold under the retailers own brand.  You might assume that they are not interested in or don’t necessarily care about sustainability.  Did you check?  (Have you checked in on your stakeholders?)  That’s where the facts come in.  Looking at Rockline Industries’ website, the first clue to their caring about sustainability is that one of the tabs is “Environmental Sustainability.”  If you click on that tab, under the logo you see “Changing Our Environmental Footprint™”  There is further information on “Sustainability Aspirations”,  a sustainability report for 2012, and their “Rockline-Zero Landfill” effort.   The sustainability report for 2012 is particularly impressive.  These are the facts, so before you say “If my stakeholders don’t care about sustainability, why should I?” I challenge you to check the facts in your organization or customer.  Make sure you connect your project’s sustainability with the organization’s (customer’s) sustainability efforts.   It is a way to be.  

Since we started asserting that there is a vital, fundamental intersection between project management and sustaianability (since about 2009), we have seen three basic responses, which we summarize below with representative composite "quotes" from these response populations:

• The Purists: "We manage projects for our sponsors and we have to worry about turning over that project's deliverables, period, full stop."

(now leave us alone, we have enough constraints already)

[To you, we say, with the deepest respect, you are missing the boat.  Look at your sponsor organization's website - you will find that they are indeed comitting publicly to CSR goals.  To be honest, as a pure PM you need to take a step back, look at your project's objectives as linked to enterprise-level objectives, and look at the steady state success of the product of your project, not just the project handover - you'll actually be serving your sponsor more effectively]

• The Knowledge Seekers: "Yes, you're right.  How can we help?  Tell us more, what can we do?"

(I'm willing to learn, even to become a change agent)

[To you, we say, welcome.  Join us.  There is a lot to learn.  And here's a secret: there is a lot to gain, both from an altruistic standpoint and for you personally.  As a person well-versed in sustaianbility language and familiar with these issues, you will likely advance more quickly than your colleagues in the other two categories]

• The Busy Ostriches: "I'm very busy, I think you make a lot of sense, but I just can't handle another issue"

(La, la, la, la, I am not listening)

[To you, we say... well, it doesn't matter what we say.  But we'll wait.  One day you will end up unblocking your ears, even if it's because your current projects are successful but there are no more forthcoming because you took the short-term view.]

What's alarming to us is that even some very respected voices in our field fall into to the Busy Ostrich or Purist categories - either straightway disagreeing with us, or choosing to simply not really listen.

One of the ways we realize in which we have to make our point is that sustaianbility issues, only ONE of which is ecological in nature, don't seem to have an impact on our projects.  To that particular end, we wanted to provide a couple of recent videos that show that climate change is not only an environmental challenge but rather one that is economic and more "overall human" in nature.  Sustainability is also increasingly a drivier of innovation, and thus a "launcher" of projects (the Cesara Harada response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an excellent example).  This is evident in the final video from the BBC.  As project managers, overseeing budgets and people, and wanting to understand the rationale of the project's launch in the first place, perhaps this will strike a chord, if you are in the Purist camp.

Consider.  Think.  It really can't hurt.

My wife and I just watched Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.  I know, we are behind the curve.  But with a busy life and an early start to our days, it causes a backlog of movies to see.  Because I am a fly fisherman, the movie held a particular appeal to me, and as those of you who saw the movie know it wasn’t about the fish.  It was about sustainability and a project.  Most of us as project managers have experiences a project that seemed impossible.  This project was particularly difficult, and as one of the main characters, Dr. Jones, puts it, “conditions in the Yemen make this project fundamentally unfeasible.”   Of course the movie is somewhat predictable, but there were some moments that I could resonate with.

First, a little bit about fly fishing and its appeal for me.  I am a process guy.  Whether or not fly fishing helps me to understand project management better, or the discipline of project management makes me understand fly fishing better, it is a “chicken and egg” thing.  But like projects, the end product is important, but the journey is just as important.  For me, it’s not about the fish.  It is about sustainability.  Take trout fishing, for instance.  Trout need clean, clear, cold water to survive.  And, they need to survive.  What I mean by that is that they are a limited resource.  That is why there are both “catch and release” areas and “catch and kill” areas.  Typically, catch and kill areas are places where the water will warm to a point where trout will not survive.  They are areas that allow local fishermen to partake in the sport (get their value from their fishing licenses) early in the spring.  Hatchery raised trout are stocked into streams to allow fishermen access to the sport.

My favorite pursuit is for wild or native trout, and here is where sustainability is most important.  Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries (MDIF) defines wild trout fishery as “a body of waterthat has not been directly stocked with brook trout in the previous 25 years.”  MDIF defines a native trout fishery trout as “abody of water that has no record of being directly stocked, or indirectly stocked as a result of a stocking event in a connecting water.”  These fish, both wild and native, are self-sustaining.  They breed in the wild.  They need protection.  Some waters are fly fishing, artificial (no bait), and/or catch and release fisheries.  However, there are other aspects of sustainability that come into play.  It is not just the trout that need to be protected, that is not enough.  The areas where the fishery is located need to be protected and those protections garner increased benefits.  Protecting water supplies by limiting development and regulating land use also helps an areas biodiversity.  Regulating water usage so that streams are not dewatered and adequate water flow is maintained keeps fish spawning areas open and helps maintain water supplies for the human populations downstream, and the effects go on and on.

Keeping with the analogy of downstream, sustainability has “downstream effects.”  Back to the movie; Sheikh Mohammad was trying to irrigate the desert by building a dam.  To paraphrase the Sheikh, the downstream effects would “green” the desert and provide sustainable agricultural for present generations and future generations.  The salmon are a symbol of that effort, doing the impossible, bringing cold water fishery (and agriculture) to an area that would seem impossible to do.  Another and perhaps more subtle sustainability aspect, was the fact that no matter how much it was bred out of the salmon (farm raised) somewhere in the DNA they were imprinted to swim upstream to spawn.  Again, it is a movie, and movies have a tendency to play fast and loose with facts, and that is an interesting premise that seems to be believable.  The Salmon Fishing in the Yemen project was definitely a Green by Definition, using the definition in our book.  It was attempting to “water” the desert, provide a viable coldwater fishery and provide a sustainable future for the human inhabitants.

But for me, the “aha” moment of the movie came at the very end, *SPOILER ALERT* after the attempt to destroy the fishery.  My “aha” moment came when the project team discovered that some salmon survived the onslaught of the dam being opened.  It was then that the impossible seemed even more possible.  At that point Dr. Jones says “I’ll start again.  I’ll do it on my own, if I have to.  I’ll start small, a few fish to begin with, and involved the local community more so that it is their project, not ours.  That’s the way it will be protected.” So, lessons learned, right? 

Sustainability projects are unique, not that all projects are not by definition.  So I should say, projects and sustainability is a unique undertaking.  Stakeholder involvement (in this case the community) is critical for success.  If not considered, the results may not be as overt and violent as those in the film, but the ramifications can be significant. 

On a side note, a salmon fishery in Yemen may not be as far-fetched as it seems.  Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power generating dams in the United States have provided a cold water fishery (through cold water releases from the bottom of their dams) in areas of the Deep South that would not normally support cold water fishes.  

Let's say you are in the market for a new desktop computer.
And...when I say new, I mean "new" in the sense that it is one of the first ever.
How about these headliner features for your new machine:

• 16Kb of RAM, expandable all the way up to 64Kb
• CPU running at 4.77 MHz (that's Mega, not Giga)
• A cassette port and an internal 160 Kb floppy disk drive
• Built-in speaker
• Equipped with the BASIC computer programming language

Those are some of the key features of the new IBM 5150 Personal Computer!

And all of this for a starting price of only $4400 (in 2013 dollars)!

So - are you buying?

Probably not (unless it's for collectability reasons).

Why do we mention this in a blog regarding sustainability and project management?

Simple.  It has to do with innovation, with inspiration, and with the fact that if you do things right, the environment - as a stimulus - falls to the wayside in comparison to the end result in terms of innovation.

So the analogy of the PC is meant to help take away the 'sticker shock' (pun intended) of the Tesla Model S - an all electric vehicle, costing about $75,000, which just received the following quote from Consumer Reports:

"it's not only the best electric car we've tested, it's now our top-rated model overall".

So that's the point, isn't it?  We can - and should - use sustainability as a trigger for innovation.  But it doesn't mean that everything having to do with sustainably-developed products has to mean sacrifice and skimpiness.  The Tesla is luxurious, comfortable, spacious, and loaded with features.  Sustainability can be a driver (pun again intended) but does not have to be the rationale for purchasing.  The Tesla is an example of a product that in-and-of-itself is just better than its carbon-hogging peers.  We need more of these innovations.

And yes, it's expensive.  But that brings us back to the IBM PC.  Go back up again and look at the features and price.  When it first came up, only the extremely wealthy (or extremely geeky, or both) were buying that machine.  Same for the Tesla. 

But look what happened to the great-great-grandchildren of the IBM PC.  Witness the fact that your $50 MP3 player or even perhaps your coffeemaker has more computer power than that PC, and you can buy a Chromebook for $199.  The $75,000 price of a luxury sports Tesla can easily become a price that is more than competitive with combustion-engine sedans.  If not ourselves, our kids will be driving cars like this (carefully, we hope).

It will take projects and project managers to get that price down - to design more workaday vehicles that you and I may drive - but it will happen.  And it's going to take sustainability thinking built in to our discipline of project management to keep the spark of innovation alive and to keep electrigfying products like the Tesla Model S coming down the road.

The move to electirc vehicles is a good thing for the planet.  Yes, there is debate over the fact that this simply "moves the problem", but we're on the side that says it's much better to have the car run on electricity because we can innovate more easily on making power generation (in general) more renewable, and not so easily when each vehicle is a small fossil-fuel power plant itself.   In fact, each combustion-engine car generates about 20 pounds of C02 for every gallon it consumes.  And transportation consists of 29% of all human-generated CO2.  We just blogged about great successes in the ICT industry, which makes up only 2%.  So improvements in the area of transportation are more than 10 times more effective in impact - clearly showing that innovation in this area is key.

We at EarthPM have been working in this area ourselves, as we've described on previous blog posts, running workshops for the ECOCAR2 program of the US Department of Energy and General Motors.  We look forward to more collaborations in which project management contributes to innovations that electrify us and improve our lot - and, oh-by-the-way contribute to a more sustainable world.

Note: the inspiration for this posting came from a great opinion piece in today's Boston Globe by Tom Keane.