People, Planet, Profits & Projects

A wind turbine whirrs wistfully, whispering eagerly and urgently of its unbridled energy.  Sunlight glimmers off the sleek, shiny surface of a solar panel, as it emphatically sends surges of sustenance to energy-hungry inhabitants.  A shapely new red Croatian electric vehicle veers vivaciously by a vineyard.

These are the images we're presented with when the marketeers have their way in showing us what sustainability looks like and feels like.

It reminds us of air travel.  You don’t see (unless it’s depicting the ‘competition’) images of a paunchy, middle-aged man sitting in the middle seat, struggling to set up his laptop as the seat in front of him reclines fully, while a baby cries two seats ahead, and a rambunctious 2-year old is kicking the back of his seat, and… well you get the picture.

It’s not sexy.

What we see instead are happy people, relaxing with apparently unlimited legroom, headroom, in blissful relaxation as they are whisked promptly to their destination.  Which brings us back to our shapely Croatian model.

Our expectations in sustainability are set around the whirring wind turbine, the wave-action power generator, the biofuel facility, the winery that uses finches and bluebirds as a natural insecticide.

But as in air travel – it’s just not always that sexy.  Most of you frequent flyers will agree, it’s rarely that ideal.

Take the feature story in today’s Boston Globe.  Titled “A Basic Approach”, it’s the story of Ameresco, a local company which does its work in sustainability by retrofitting companies to be more efficient in their energy use without up-front cost via the financing of these improvements from the expected future savings.  It’s the ‘blocking and tackling’ of energy, as opposed to the quarterback, if you will allow us an American Football analogy. 

As an example, Ameresco has a US$21M project with the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, involving 47 buildings; this project is targeted to provide annual savings of $1.5M via upgraded equipment, weatherizing of buildings, new lighting, air conditioning, and boilers, and some solar installations.

Ameresco averages about 35% savings on their projects, so clearly they will pay back.  And their financial performance has reflected this success.

And so it is with project management's engagement with sustainbility.  As authors of PMI's Cleland Award-winning book, Green Project Management, our pubisher asked us to pick between two covers, one of which had sunflowers, wind turbines and shimmering solar panels.  We went for the other one - a picture of a tree yielding money.  We knew back then that it is indeed the blocking and tackling - the integration of sustainbility thinking into our discipline that will make the difference.  This is to take nothing away from shapely Croatian models - like the one we just blogged about.  These will also contribute, and may represent huge leaps forward.

But it's going to be the focus on efficiency, removal of waste from projects, connecting the enterprise's long-term vision to your project vision that moves us forward consistently.  And although it may not be as flashy, numbers like Ameresco is flashing, while not sexy, are at least...attractive, n'est pas?

We know.  We're at the intersection of sustainability and project management.   We think it's pretty cool but...would the general population give us cool points for being at this particular intersection?

I mean, really.  We get it.  No. Not at that intersection. Maybe we'd be cooler if we were standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona...

But today we'd like to share with you something that is at the corner of sustainability, projects, and very, very cool.  No, it's not on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.  It's more likely to be found at a corner in Croatia.  In particular, you will find it precisely at 10431 Sveta Nedelja, Croatia.

We're talking about the Concept_One car from Rimac Automobili.

It's for sale, according to several stories breaking this week.  And it's available for the low, low price of only $980,000.

What caught our attention was the drive (excuse the pun) of the designer (Mate Rimac), as well as the performance achieved by the design.

From the design perspective, it was developed over a two-year period after he converted his own BMW to an electric vehicle for racing.  As he continued replacing components from the BMW, he realized that he had almost nothing left of the original.  So he was pretty much starting from a blank piece of paper.

Rimac says that the company will be making 88 versions of the car but already had pre-orders from "the Abu Dhabi royal family". The car is now officially on sale after its latest outing, this time at the Top Marques event in Monaco. The first shipments are expected to be next year, and we wonder how many other royals will now be raiding their coffers.

As to performance, this EV is capable of 0-60 mph acceleration in just 2.8 seconds and top speeds of 190 mph. The world-beating performance figures, for an electric car at least, are courtesy of Rimac’s innovative quad-motor design, which has a combined output of 1,088 horsepower and 2,800 pound-feet of torque.

Rimac also boasts that 92kWh of energy can be stored in the Concept One’s liquid-cooled batteries, which is enough to carry the car a distance of 372 miles on a single charge.

Below is a little video that explains a bit about how it works....

We share the automotive press world with Rimac this week, not because we've released our own vehicle - no, as we said, we just don't have those cool points.  However, we did partner with EcoCar2, a great program to develop an electric car, sponsored in part by GM, Argonne National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy, and 15 university teams from all over North America.  Our organization will be providing PM coaching for these teams of students, who have 3 years each to impress the heck out of judges and win the competition for the best design of an electric vehicle based on a 2013 Chevy Malibu.

Our take on this: there are projects like the Rimac Concept_One, where everyone is focused on sustainability.  But a project manager is a change agent wherever he or she is working.  Think like Mate Rimac.  Maybe you can rework - and rewire - your project for sustaianbility, no matter what type of project it is.  At least consider it.

Rimac's press releases can be found here:

EarthPM's much less cool press release can be found here:

PMI™ has published their “Ethical Decision-Making Framework” (EDMF), and are we excited!  You may ask – “Well how does that fit with sustainable project management?  Isn’t sustainable project management where your focus is? “  And we say, glad you asked. 

Looking through the document, we don’t see many overt references to sustainable project management, and we see it covertly referenced throughout the document.  The framework lists five EDMF steps, Assessment, Alternatives, Analysis, Application and Action.  Let’s looks at a couple of examples.  Granted, we may be looking at this through a “green/environmental or sustainability lens”, but that’s okay.  We asset that a project manager should add that lens to his or her repertoire. 

As an example, “Assessment: Make sure you have all the facts about the ethical dilemma and ask these questions: 

• Does it abide by the law?
• Does it align with the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct?
• Does it agree with your employer’s and client’s code of ethics and conduct?
• Does it align with your ethical values and those of the surrounding culture?" 

In other words, does it take into account environmental rules and regulations, is it connected to the organization’s mission vision (their code of conduct perhaps), and does it meet stakeholders expectations of sustainability?  

While you can read it yourself at http://www.pmi.org/About-Us/Ethics/~/media/PDF/Ethics/Ethical%20Decision%20Making%20Framework%20-%20FINAL.ashx and draw your own conclusions, we’d like to offer a couple of more examples of our interpretation.  Let’s just look for a moment at the Horizon Deepwater (BP's Macondo Well) disaster that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 to illustrate some of the principles of the Framework.  Did they truly consider the pros and cons of their decision to drill where they were drilling and to drill the way they were drilling.  We always asserted that we weren’t in the room when these decisions were made, but we know that they did not even consider any environmental risks in their risk register for the (Macondo Well) project.  You can verify that for yourself at http://www.boemre.gov/pdfs/maps/AppendixJ_RiskRegister.pdf. 

 One of the overt mentions of sustainability occurs in the Analysis step; “Will your candidate decision have a positive impact or prevent harm to ....the environment or future generations.”  In our book we reference the Bruntland definition of sustainability as “…meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  This question seems to address that.  One of our favorite questions in this section is “Looking back, will this decision seem like a good idea a year from now?”  We don’t think we have anything to add here.  That question says it all.  Not that they all aren’t great questions, and again, we urge you to read the entire framework on PMI’s site, other great (sustainability) questions include; “Would you choice result in the greatest good? (Application Step) and “Could you make your decision public and feel good about it?”  (Action Step) 

We applaud PMI’s effort in capturing a decision making framework that addresses ethics.  It is a great first step in understanding what it takes to be responsible in your decision making processes and from our point of view, to use this framework in conjunction with a “green lens” for the best project  decision that consider sustainability.

Note: We first saw the term "Environmenal Lens" while reading Esty and Winston's book, Green to Gold

We found an interesting post over at one of our favorite websites: Earth Techling.

So the first finding from our post so far: go ahead and make a note to visit and subscribe to that site if you are at all interested in the interesection of technology and envrionment.

Now, on to their story.  It's about a series of electronics certifications for environmental responsibility, given by the Green Electronics Council, their tool, EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool), and a new designation which you may see alot of, called EcoSense - which we've featured at the top of *our* posting.

From the Earth Techling article:

EcoSense will be used to identify sustainable electronics from computers to TVs, printers to mobile devices and likely tablet PCs. And yes, it could be a very big deal.

EPEAT, which is managed by the non-profit Green Electronics Council, is probably the most comprehensive sustainability identifier you’ve never heard of. To be listed on the EPEAT registry, products must meet more than 50 different criteria, from energy efficiency to RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) compliance to ease of recycling. Computers listed on its registry must comply with 28 mandatory criteria, with 23 remaining optional. A Bronze designation denotes meeting the minimum 28 criteria, while a Silver product also meets 50 percent or more of optional criteria and a Gold-designated product meets 75 percent or more of the options.

Why is this important to project managers?  Well, we get involved in procurement, don't we?  And procurement has elements like constraints and contracts and guidelines.

From the article:

The (EPEAT) registry is used primarily by government agencies and large corporate purchasers to meet mandates for buying green computers. Some 95 percent of computers purchased by many U.S. government agencies, for example, must be EPEAT-certified. An estimated 100 million computers a year are sold based on the EPEAT designation.

So this is not at all trivial to business and not at all trivial to your project.

EPEAT’s criteria is based on IEEE 1680 standards, each of which can take a year or more to develop and finalize. O’Brien says it’s unclear whether tablets will be included under the mobile devices or the computer standard, the latter of which will undergo a revamp starting this fall.


Just to show that this is gaining traction, again from the article:

The EcoSense designation is currently being tested at an Office Depot store in Portland, Ore., and O’Brien says other partners like Staples would like to test the designation as well. EcoSense will be the consumer face of EPEAT, though whether EcoSense will have gold, silver or bronze designations remains to be seen.
From the EPEAT website:

EPEAT® is the definitive global registry for greener electronics. It’s an easy-to-use resource for purchasers, manufacturers, resellers and others wanting to find and promote environmentally preferable products.

Our vision: A world where the negative environmental and social impacts of electronics are continually reduced and electronic products are designed to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainability

Our mission: Operate the most successful global environmental rating system for electronic products, helping connect purchasers to environmentally preferable choices, and thereby benefiting producers who demonstrate environmental responsibility and innovation

Our values: Leadership, transparency, continuous improvement, collaboration and market-orientation
 

For the techies out there, here is an outline of the EPEAT criteria:

    Introduction
    Protocols 4.0 Manufacturer declaration
    Protocols 4.1 Reduction/elimination of environmentally sensitive materials
    Protocols 4.2 Materials selection
    Protocols 4.3 Design for end-of-life
    Protocols 4.4 Product longevity/life cycle extension
    Protocols 4.5 Energy convervation
    Protocols 4.6 End-of-life management
    Protocols 4.7 Corporate performance
    Protocols 4.8 Packaging
    Annex 1 Plastics materials form
    Annex 2 Packaging materials form
    Annex 3 Plug-in guidelines checklist

These protocols are all available as hyperlinks on the EPEAT site, provided below.

http://www.epeat.net/resources/criteria-verification/

IT Project Decision Making and Energy Policies, EMEA

Because if the huge impact of IT on energy use, we have a particular interest in it; specifically how the “greening” of IT can positively affect a reduction in energy.   While we believe that one person can make a difference, a significant impact can be achieved by policy.  We not saying that the establishment of policies is the end-all-be-all for sustainability, just those policies can provide a “guideline”, albeit forced at times, for project decision making.  A recent report by Green Grid provides information on energy policies in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and how those policies “that informs business decisions and prepares data centers for the effects of current and pending changes in the regulatory environment and ensures they can budget for and exploit these policies to gain a competitive advantage." 

One of the primary duties of a project manager is risk management, identifying and assessing the impact of risks in order to prepare for managing and controlling risks.  Failure to include the sustainability aspects of a project, in this case the “legislation, regulations, costs” (or policies if you will) relevant to data centers can have a detrimental effect on you data center projects.  While 2012 shows some decrease in spending for data center projects according to Steve Wexler (http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/240002548) “data center equipment sales in the first quarter surged 17% year over year - that was still a 6% drop from the fourth quarter. Data center network equipment revenue for the first quarter came in at $2.2 billion.”  2011 spending is predicted to be $98.9 billion up 12% from 2011 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1822214).  That’s a lot of money for data center projects.  By giving attention to energy policies, that money can be better spent on equipment, rather than addressing any "surprise" regulatory or legislative issues.

Just a reminder, Green Grid is “a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve resource efficiency in information technology and data centers. With more than 175 member companies around the world, The Green Grid seeks to unite global industry efforts, create a common set of metrics, and develop technical resources and educational tools to further its goals.”