People, Planet, Profits & Projects

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...

...or rather the lack thereof...

In this post we present to the PM Community the first known revealing photographs of actual examples of projects in 'various states of success'. In our upcoming book, Sustainability in Projects, Programs, and Portfolios: Realizing Enterprise Benefits and Goals, we talk a lot about success and what it means from a a project perspective.

In particular we look at Project Management Success versus Project Success.  In other words, the “efficiency” of how the project works compared to the “effectiveness” of the project’s product, in the longer term.

The graphic below shows the three elements: PM Success on the horizontal, Project Success (the product’s success) and Endurance as a third element/dimension (shown as depth on the chart).

So now on to the photographic evidence.

Let’s first look at a photo of a project that went very well.  The Sony Betamax was released on time, and within budget, and did exactly what the designers and marketeers at Sony wanted it to do.  At least for the sake of this discussion, we’ll say that it did.  But what happened to the Betamax itself?

If you’re younger than us (not too hard) you may want to hear the story.  We provide it to you courtesy of The Engineer Guy:

"This mighty machine sparked a revolution in our use of media. It’s a Sony Betamax video cassette recorder from 1979. This monster weighs about 36 pounds. The engineer in me find it fascinating: there is nothing digital, it’s a truly analog machine -- all moving pieces and parts.

Early adopters of the Betamax used it to record television shows -- a revolutionary concept at the time -- because prior to the Betamax you had to watch a show when it was broadcast. It threaten the entertainment industry so much that in 1979 they argued that recording television shows at home infringed on their copyright. It all came to a head in a Supreme Court case -- Sony Corporation of America versus Universal City Studios -- where five justices allowed home recording. Although Sony won this court battle, they ultimately lost out to a machine that used this size tape. This is a VHS recorder made by Sony’s great rival JVC.

Both machines solved the same problem: How to store information compactly on a tape. Here’s the brilliant innovation used by both machines. The machine grabs the tape, drags it forward, as this silver drum starts to spin rapidly. The drum has two electromagnets (called heads) arranged on opposite sides of the drum that read the magnetic information on the tape. That rotating head allowed for a compact recorder: in many previous recorders the magnetic heads didn’t move, only the tape. Because there was a limit to how fast the tape could move, it took a lot of tape -- about a seven inch reel to record an hour, which means that a movie would need two 7-inch reels inside a cassette. So, the rotating heads dramatically reduced the amount of tape needed, reducing the size to where it could be easily held in a cassette.

So, if the machines are so similar why did Betamax lose to JVC? Many thought the betamax machine would win: It had the better image quality and the Betamax is decidedly better built. Compare ejecting a tape on the Betamax to the VHS. First, watch the Betamax. Note how smooth it is. And then watch the VHS. That’s abrupt and will wear out the mechanism. Yet, to my engineer’s eye the VHS was the better solution.

First, the VHS was lighter than the Betamax: 29 and a half lbs compared to 36 lbs for the this Betamax machine. That’s a huge difference for a mass manufactured object. It impacts everything from material costs to assembly time to shipping costs. So, at the low end of the market the VHS machines were cheaper than Sony’s Betamax.

Second, the earliest Betamax tapes played for only one hour, VHS played for 2 hours -- enough time for a movie. The ultimate killer, though, was the rental market.

While, Betamax focused in its ads and energies on time shifting -- their ads featured headlines like “Watch whatever, whenever” -- while JVC, the maker of the VHS system, created relationships with the nascent video rental industry. When this market grew, VHS dominated in titles. While you could for a while find both formats eventually retailers began giving shelf space to the slightly more dominant brand, which then dominated even more.

So, the Betamax versus VHS dispels the notion that simply being first to market is the most important issue. It reminds us that technical excellence in one area isn’t enough -- here the superior picture quality of Betamax -- but that all technical aspects matter. For any mass manufactured object, the winner is usually the one that is just good enough."

Now, let’s go diagonally to the opposite side of our matrix – a project which itself is considered a failure but its product – at least in the long term – is considered a success.  Representing this corner is the Sydney Opera House.

Some of its project attributes, from this article in the Australian newspaper The Courier-Mail:

In 1957, the Danish architect Jorn Utzon won a NSW government competition to design a public building for a prized piece of harbour land at the time employed as a tram shed.

Utzon's concept was little more than a sketch when then premier Joseph Cahill, facing electoral defeat after more than two decades of Labor power, hastily decided to begin construction within two years.

Budgeted at an initial cost of $7 million, the Opera House ended up costing more than $100 million and took more than a decade to construct. That cost blowout, of 1400 per cent, makes Sydney's Opera House the most expensive cost blowout in the history of megaprojects.

And yet:

“....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.

The Opera House is (one of the most) most distinctive (icons in the world), attracting tourists from all over the world.”

Finally let’s go to the southwest corner of our matrix, where we have a project which is considered by many to have had poor project management efficiency and also has a product with enduring issues.

Boston’s  “Big Dig”

We won’t go into lots of detail here because the story of the Big Dig is fairly well known (refer to the Wikipedia entry for a good review).  The project was over budget by many billions of dollars and very late ($2.6B versus $14.6B and many years behind schedule).  That's of course bad enough. No, here, our focus is on the continued problems the project’s product has had.  This includes the death of a driver as a result of a concrete ceiling panel.  Here, we provide the 'revealing photo' as evidence that the project's product continues to have problems.  What you are looking at is a set of lighting fixtures.  The black bands that you see indicated by the arrows are straps which are holding up the lights because the project’s design failed to take into account the galvanic corrosiveness of the environment (and its long-term effects). Galvanic corrosion is an electrochemical process resulting in oxidation or corrosion of two dissimilar metals in contact in the presence of an electrolyte.  This takes place over time.  Projects are handed over in a moment of time.  The project manager has to get their team to think past – way past – that handover! 

In this case, the repair cost over $54 million – and the installation of 25,000 support straps like the ones in our actual photo- and caused frequent and disruptive lane closures.  The final deliverable of the project was ‘eased traffic’.  You can see that aside from the project efficiency – the things we’re used to measuring like schedule and budget and immediate product delivery, this project also continues to have problems with effectiveness: the project’s product and what it offers stakeholders in the steady state.  Here’s a story from a local news station, including a video that shows the issue.

We do not yet have a photo of the elusive northeast corner – here is where a project is run efficiently and it yields a product which works in the long term.  We know they're out there.  And we know there are a lot of smartphones...equipped with really good cameras... often on project sites...

Perhaps you have one?  Send in your photos!

As a project manager – or simply as a curious person, you may have been interested in the idea of sustainability – what it is, what it means, is it meaningful, and can we do anything about it.

In today’s Boston Globe, on the front page of their Ideas section, you’ll find an interesting article which is actually an interview with author Jeremy Caradonna on his book, Sustainability – a History.

You may have been interested in sustainability, but Caradonna has been fascinated by it.

The book is full of great background information on sustainability, for example, the skyrocketing use of the word over only the past 20 years or so.  Does that mean that our ancestors were not interested?  Does that mean that sustainability is only the proprietary use of the radical, left-wingers of the past, present or future?  Not at all.  The interview (and of course the book) is not your average history book.

In the interview background, we found this:

 Among his surprising discoveries is that many of sustainability’s forefathers were far from radical tree-huggers. They were, rather, aristocrats and colonialists—people hoping to profit from the land—who began to fear that the heedless plundering of natural resources could jeopardize the economy. The philosophy has since evolved in various directions; some now believe that social equity is a key part of a sustainable society. What the different offshoots share is respect for the planet’s limits—though debate will no doubt continue on the best ways to implement that principle.

We’ve made this point for a long time – and will “sustain” it.  We covered this in Green Project Management and we will continue this theme in Sustainability in Projects, Programs and Portfolios, our upcoming book to be published in 2015.  The point: although it somehow now seems to be natural now to connect sustainability with politics, with culture, with social status, that’s simply not the case, nor has it ever been.  Not only that, stamping sustainability with any other attributes or ‘brands’ besides concern for the long term is not productive for anyone.  And that includes Mr. and Ms. Project Manager.

See how Caradonna responds when he is asked if sustainability is a ‘radical’ concept:

I would not say that the sustainability movement and its origins were radical. I would say in many ways they’re critical. They’re critical of deforestation, later on they’re critical of unchecked economic growth and deregulation, and they’re critical of pollution and social inequality. But in many ways, it’s quite conventional. I mean, one of the things I’ve noticed is that some of the early advocates for what we could call sustainable living were aristocratic bureaucrats, or imperialistic bureaucrats who are stationed on islands in the West Indies or the East Indies. Or someone like Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who’s part of the Saxon Dynasty, he’s part of the monarchy there. None of these people, as far as I can tell, are interested in the natural world, in and of itself. None of them. They’re interested in natural resources because they have an impact on the economy and they have an impact on the human realm, in one way or another....Perhaps counterintuitively, the sustainability movement has roots in good old-fashioned economic and monarchical self-interest.

And as we’ve said, project managers are about preserving precious resources ourselves.  Granted, they may be the resources of our project, but if we can get ourselves to think a wee bit longer, the resources that the PRODUCT of our project will consume should also be of concern to us .  It’s a valid idea – and this is a book worth adding to your project management (or just your general) bookshelf.

This blog post is coming to you from Cape Cod, indeed almost exactly from the location of the first Thanksgiving.  And it's from this location that we wish our American colleagues the best of this holiday season!

And one of the most traditional parts of the traditional meal served on this very American holiday is cranberry sauce or cranberry relish.

 However, there is concern that the state’s popular native fruit may be affected by climate change. Scientific research indicates that heat stress, insecticides, rising sea levels and other factors will affect the harvesting of this little blood-colored fruit with the distinctively tangy taste.  Botanists have, in fact, been working on projects to develop new cranberry strains that they hope will be hardier.

These are green-by-definition projects, as described in our book, Green Project Management, which, in honor of the holiday, we are renaming Cranberry Project Management.

 An article on the front page of today’s Cape Cod Times newspaper highlights these projects, and the research projects which examine the impact of climate change on cranberries - one of only three native cultivated fruits in the United States. The others are blueberries and Concord grapes.

From the newspaper story:

 Especially in Massachusetts, “we have a special feeling, I guess you’d say, for the little fruit,” said Susan Playfair, author of the new book, “America’s Founding Fruit: The Cranberry in a New Environment.”

 Playfair, whose interest in climate change stemmed from sailing around New England in her youth, gathered The United States produced more than 8 million barrels of cranberries in 2012, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.

 The cranberry is especially connected to Massachusetts, where it is the state fruit. Cranberry cultivation began on Cape Cod in 1812; Ocean Spray has its world headquarters in Middleboro. In the United data from bogs and researchers, reaching out to Boston University biologist Richard Primack. Along with Primack Lab researchers Elizabeth Ellwood and Caroline Polgar, they published the study “Cranberry flowering times and climate change in southern Massachusetts” last fall. The study found that cranberries flower roughly two days earlier for every 1 degree centigrade temperature increase, Primack explained.

 Complicating the temperature threat is a problem with pollination. A lot of pollinators are being killed by insecticides or fungicides, Primack said.

 “It’s a big problem with cranberries if they’re not getting pollinated enough, so often, their fruit yield is lower,” Primack said. “Growers are sometimes having to bring in honeybees to pollinate the crops. ... Temperatures are getting warmer, which is not so suitable for the bees.”

 Storms also are a problem, other cranberry experts say. As sea levels rise, storms have the “potential to move fertilizers off the farm in runoff, which is bad for the environment,” said Carolyn DeMoranville, director of the UMass Cranberry Station.

From a project management perspective, the issue is timeframe.  Currently there is a glut of cranberries.  So for the short term, it looks like everything is (excuse the pun) peachy.  But in the long term – thinking in terms of decades – temperature increases and sea-level rise also must be considerations and indeed have triggered the projects we’ve mentioned above.

Again from the article:

In a recent talk at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Playfair acknowledged that the effects of climate change on cranberries were long-term, not sudden. “I think what’s a little deceptive here is that we’re talking about something that’s gradually happening,” she said.

So our message to you: think long-term.  It may help in your current project and may be important to you in planning new projects.  Have a cranberry on us...right now, there's a surplus.  But it may not always be so.