People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Have a look at this stock price chart.  Noting where the price is today and the general trend you can observe over the past 3 years or so, it looks like a pretty enviable position to be in.  Right?

Well, if that’s true, why would an officer of the company be quoted recently as saying, “we’re not proud of where we are right now”?

The answer, as well as an exceedingly well-done parody video, can be found here:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/01/28/379395819/coffee-horror-parody-pokes-at-environmental-absurdity-of-k-cups

This is a story from NPR’s “The Salt”.   As mentioned above, It contains a horror-film parody video that you really must see (mild obscenities and violence).  Really.  You should go to the link and play the video – it’s worth it. 

As for the text part of the article, here’s a key extract:

Concerns about the K-Cup's environmental impact have been brewing for several years. "It's a warranted criticism," says Monique Oxender, chief sustainability officer for Keurig Green Mountain. She says the company has been exploring recyclable alternatives since Green Mountain acquired Keurig in 2006.

"We're not proud of where we are right now, and we're committed to fixing it," she tells The Salt.

Several competing coffee pod makers offer recyclable options. Nespresso, for example, makes its pods out of aluminum. But K-Cups are made from No. 7 composite plastic, which isn't recyclable in most areas.

The company says its newer coffee pod systems are made from recyclable plastic: the Vue, K-Carafe (which holds multiple coffee servings in one pod), and the Bolt (designed for workplaces). But those models are just 5 percent of the beverage packs Keurig Green Mountain produces; the rest are K-Cups.

So why not simply adopt those new materials in the far more ubiquitous K-Cups? The sticking point is backward compatibility — there are already millions of Keurig brewing machines out there, Oxender explains. "It has to work on all models," she says.

So – the reason for the lack of pride, despite the economic success, is that there exists something called a triple bottom line.  And there exists something called long-term, or life-cycle thinking, and things like Life Cycle Assessments.  A project manager needs to be aware of these things.  We may have to be the one to raise the flag and look at the company’s mission, vision, and values and ask the question – despite the potential economic success of this product, what does it do when it’s in use?  By the way, here is Keurig’s value statement about sustainability:

 “At Keurig Green Mountain, Inc., we are passionate about our business and look for ways to be more sustainable in everything that we do.”

That’s laudable.  But has this value been applied in decision-making when launching projects, programs, and portfolios?  One could certainly question it – and it appears that in stating “we’re not proud”, the company itself is questioning whether they’ve acted in line with their values, and whether or not they have considered the triple bottom line.

We took a shot at compiling the information available to show just how many K-Cups® have been placed into landfills, using the measurement of K-Cups, placed end-to-end around the world.  Turns out, the number of circles they can make around the earth is quite impressive.

Now, do us a favor.  Contrast this with the stock price chart.  The attributes are both going up, but one is in line with the company’s goals (to make money) and the other is at odds with their values (be sustainable, responsible, etc.).  We’re not advocating abandoning the desire to make money.  Quite the opposite – as project managers, we crave economically successful projects – they provide great financial opportunities for us.  But we also know that the objectives of a project must be aligned with the program, portfolio, and enterprise in which they belong.

That’s why we push so hard for project managers to accept their role as change managers and the ones who might step up early on (here, when we had only a couple of rings around the planet) and ask some very, very tough questions: “Do we really want people making nasty videos about our company?  Do we want to be the ones responsible for billions and billions of non-recyclable plastics going into landfills and doing who-knows-what to water supplies as the chemicals leech out?  Do we want our officers have to say to interviewers that “we’re not proud of where we are right now”?

We know some of the project managers out there are shaking their heads, saying that this is out –of-their control, not in scope, and so on.  We feel you.  We know.  We don’t think that’s enough of an excuse to NOT be a change agent, but we do have empathy for that attitude.  This is why we have raised the level of our focus up to the Portfolio level.  Our new book will focus on the Portfolio and Enterprise level.  We think you’ll find several cases like this one of interest.

In the meantime, watch out for giant coffee pod monsters!

From time to time on this blog, which – after all – fits under the banner of “Perspectives”, we like to simply provide you with resources that do just that – provide perspectives on project management.  In this case, the perspectives of a group of colleagues who have been focusing – separately – on sustainabiilty and project management, and what they have to “say” to each other.

Herein you’ll find the link to a video recording of a “Google Hangout” sponsored by Paola Morgese, author of The Handbook of Sustainable Projects.  It was all part of A Day For Sustaianability in Project Management.  You can click on the image below (or here) to go to the full day (about 2.5 hours' worth) of presentations.  This is totally free and doesn't require any signup - just go and watch.

There are an array of presentations from colleagues around the world who have been thinking about, writing about, and consulting in this area and we suggest that you give it a viewing.

In the section by EarthPM, Rich Maltzman brings up a few ideas you may never have heard before and makes some connections between not only PM and Sustainability but PM and Change Management, using the Head, Heart, Hands “CQ” model being advocated by Dr. Barbara Trautlein.  We think you may enjoy the way he’s embedded the fact that project managers, as (generally) “hands” folks, may view project management – and the places where roadblocks pop up to prevent a good solid itegration of sustainablity thinking into PM.

Here's that piece of the Day:

Have a look.  As we end the first month of a new year, give sustainability a Day.  Or at least part of one.

Thanks.

From a recent article in Scientific American:

"In July 2012 three of India's regional electric grids failed, triggering the largest blackout on earth. More than 620 million people — 9 percent of the world's population—were left powerless.

The cause: the strain of food production from a lack of water.

Because of major drought, farmers plugged in more and more electric pumps to draw water from deeper and deeper below ground for irrigation.  Those pumps, working furiously under the hot sun, increased the demand on power plants.  At the same time, low water levels meant hydroelectric dams were generating less electricity than normal ...

Energy, water and food are the world's three most critical resources.

Although this fact is widely acknowledged in policy circles, the interdependence of these resources on one another is significantly underappreciated.

Strains on any one can cripple the others."

Sound a little familiar?  Increase your project's scope, and you proably have a budget and schedule problem.  Fiddle with the schedule, bringing the date in by 3 weeks, and you probably have to spend money on overtime and may have to leave out some featres.  Got hit with a budget cut?  Get ready to just admit that the delivery date has moved out by a couple of weeks, and/or once again, you have to take a scissors to some features.

Sure enough, the Iron Triangle - or Triple Constraint - has lost its mojo recently, at least in terms of presence in the PMBOK(R) Guide.

But as Gene Wilder said so well in Young Frankenstein... "IT"S ALIVE!". 

Sure, the PMBOK(R) Guide 5th Edition talks about multiple contratints on page 6, and now leaves out the formal reference to the Triple Constraint, but you know - you feel - that it is still there.  And it often rules your proejct - doesn't it?

Now back to Scientific American.  The point of the article - definitely worth a read - is that the triad of Food, Water, and Energy is a similar set of constraints.  And as we work on our projects, it's worth thinking about the relationships that our project - and the project's outcomes - have on the social infrastructure around them.   We realize that not every project has the obvious connection to food, water, and energy, but any such connection is easier to imagine if you think about the product of your project in action -  cumulatively - say 5 or 10 years from now.  And it may not be the exact "Cripple Constraint" called out by Scientific American, it may be some other set of dependent variables.

We just urge you to think about your project - just as Gene Wilder did - not only in its assembly stages - but when... IT'S ALIVE!

Hot off the press!

Here are ESI‘s top 10 trends for project management 2015:

1. Lofty expectations: PMs need to become adept at managing gaps between the constraints of cloud-based platforms and the business expectations.
2. Out-of-whack: Talent management within the PM community comes back into focus.
3. Fuel for the hybrid: As the pace of change continues to accelerate, hybrid project methods will become the norm.
4. Too little, too late: The ability to find and hire top PM talent is dwindling.
5. Bottoms up: Organisations must build bottom-up processes to link project outcomes to organisational strategy.
6.  Ignore them at your own peril: Project managers will continue to be ignored and not get the coaching and mentoring they are screaming for.
7. Run!: Project managers continue to sacrifice project transparency as they flee from conflict and avoid difficult conversations
8. Change is coming: The disciplines of change management and project management continue to merge as PMs become responsible for delivering project and business outcomes.
9. Knocking at the door: Project management and business strategy better align to the benefit of the organisation.
10. Culture shock: Organisational culture becomes a bigger consideration in risk management practices.


You may have noticed that we highlighted two of these - #5 and #9.  Why?  It's because both of them are evocative of - or more accurately, speak directly to - sustainability thinking in project management.

Let's look at them one at a time (and then together).

5. Bottoms up: Organisations must build bottom-up processes to link project outcomes to organisational strategy.

When we see "bottoms up" here, we think of the Stanford Execution Framework (SEF) which is a model describes how enterprises really work.  And it goes from "Purpose" at the top, to "Operations" at the bottom.  "Strategy" is an itermediate step, which connects ONLY through Portfolios, Programs, and Projects, to "Operations".  So the "bottom" here is operations - the steady state result of projects, programs and portfolios.  And those projects, programs, and portfolios are the precious connective tissue that allows the enterprise's purpose (think mission, vision, and values) to really show up for stakeholders.  However, that only happens if the project manager looks "up" and "down" to know the purpose of the company and the longer-term effects his or her project's product actually has.  This is so critically important and urgent to us, we took the time to write a follow-up book to Green Project Management with a title that sounds like it may have come right out of this Top Ten  List: "Sustainability in Projects, Programs, and Portfolios: Realizing Enterprise Benefits and Goals".

Bottoms up, everyone!

And we're only halfway there - let's move on to #9.


9.  Knocking at the door: Project management and business strategy better align to the benefit of the organisation.

Alignment of projects, strategy, and steady-state benefits!  It's what we talk about throughout the new book and, well, what we covered above in #5, except this time the focus is on "Benefits".  When we see the word "Benefits" we think of success.  And when we think of success, we want project managers to realize that there is a huge difference between Project Management Success and Project Success.  The former is about meeting deadlines, sticking to a schedule, staying under budget and providing deliverables.  Don't get us wrong; these are all worthy, importnat, difficult things to do which require PM maturity and excellence.  But it's extremely narrow in its vision and viewpoint.  Project Success, on the other hand, is focused on the long-term benefit realization provided by the project's product.  It considers the economic, ecological, and social byproducts of the product while it's operating for a year, two years, ten years, five hundred years.  It's holistic.  And project success yields better project management because it assures that the project is aligned with the enterprise's purpose, which inevitably is geared around longer-term, triple-bottom-line concerns.  Where Project Management Success might be reprsented by a Cost Performance Index of 9.957, Project Success would be represented by a product that responsibly delivers a profit for the organization for 4 years.
We're extremely pleased that the Top Ten list produced by ESI is 20% focused on sustainability thinking in PM.  Now we turn our sights to standard documents like the PMBOK^(R) Guide.  Can such documents put 20% of their focus on sustainability thinking?

We hope so.

And we leave you with this hope:

May 2015 be one of your Top Ten Years!
 

An outstanding article by Ed LeBard, PMP, in the December, 2014 edition of PMNetwork Magazine, makes us very optimistic about 2015 and beyond.  Our positive reaction is due to LeBard's focus on key and traditional project management process groups, such as procurement, but applied to an important consideration for us temporary-endeavor-with-definitive-start-and-finish-minded project managers - the product of the project in the steady state, holitically viewed, and for the long term, in operation.  Just like the photo above which we used to decorate our blog post - projects are not just about where the rubber hits the road - they're about the success of the product of the project way, way down the road.

The first line sets us straight:

That's what we're talking about!

Of course, we'd assert that it goes way beyond construction projects and into any type of project with any type of product.  But let's stay focused on this article, because although it's fairly short, it has so much to convey.

We really like the perspective the article takes on - one of ongoing performance, of expected benefits from the building, rather than (only) the usual focus on project management excellence - on time, within budget, and meeting scoped requirements upon delivery and handover.  No.  This article takes on the proper perspective - focused on realization of benefits, and performance in the steady state, the way that the customer (and residents) of the building see it, to say nothing of the other stakeholders (fellow dwellers of the planet who seek lower impact).

But the article, despite the use of the word "Green" in the title ("Mastering the Green Domain") is not about "Green" in the way we are sometimes bombarded with; it's not an article about saving the whales and hugging trees.

Instead, it's more about the view of sustainability that we prefer - a triple bottom line view, that yes, includes ecological elements but also social and economic sustainability.  A project is successful if it is able to STAY 'in business' for a long time, without causing undue impact on people or environment.  Thankfully, that's what comes across in the story.

The article contains advice about the extra effort (e.g. great communications and teamwork) required to make a project this sort of long-term success.  To us, this illustrates once again the 'integratedness' of sustainability into PM.  It's not a little throw-in extra.  It needs to be a consideration in all of the process groups and Knowledge Areas.  Heck, in the first few paragraphs, LeBard has three out of the ten Knowledge Areas covered already!

But perhaps one of the best parts of the article is the term used to describe this philosophy: "performance-based design".  We love it.  It speaks in very active terms about the thinking necessary for a project manager - beyond handoff... to steady-state performance.  If a project manager can inundate his or her team with that phrase, it will yield more projects that are focused on benefits realization, which, the way we see it, is the true meaning of sustainability.  We'll be covering this much more in an upcoming book.

Have a look at the article.  And even if you're not in construction, imagine your project in this light.

May it shine on ... and on...