People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Stakeholder management has always been important.  The new PMBOK® has placed additional emphasis on it by creating an entire knowledge area “Project Stakeholder Management.”  We’ve all seen the various power/interest grids, assessment matrices, and other tools, including analytical techniques, all to determine the influence of a stakeholder. 

How about a tool to determine the where stakeholders are along a sustainability continuum?  As sustainability continuum, what is that?  One of the more popular concepts we developed to help determine an individual’s greenality is The Hugger-Hummer (H-H) Scale.  We’ve talked about this scale before in general terms, but never really defined or explained it.  The H-H scale is configured with the two extremes, those who are tree huggers, or environmental fanatics, to Hummer drivers, or those who really don’t care how much fuel they consume.  I’m not saying that every hummer driver disregards the environment; there are good reasons for some driving larger, less fuel efficient vehicles, like towing trailers, accessing rural areas in bad weather over questionable roads, etc.  I’m also not saying that every hugger is an environmental fanatic that takes saving the environment to the extreme.  It’s just that we needed a scale and those two terms seem to fit the extremes.  As a matter of fact, most of us (if I can speak about most of us) hover around the middle, one side or the other from top dead center.   For instance, I have a fuel efficient car as well as a powerful pickup truck.  The car I use for commuting or daily travel, and the truck I use to tow a camping trailer and to tow a boat (separately) so I can enjoy the outdoors more.

This is what makes it a little difficult when you are assessing stakeholders.  I am interested in the environment, and have a gas guzzler (for a reason).  Your stakeholder may be in the same boat, excuse the pun.  It also makes the H-H tool useful.  To be able to assess a stakeholder along a scale is like using an objective standard.  To be most effective in developing the objective standard, expert judgment can be used to validate the incremental differences along the continuum. 

More and more stakeholders are becoming aware of sustainability issues, on both ends of the H-H Scale.  It is helpful for a project manager to know where the most influential stakeholders appear on the scale.  Combining a power/interest grid with the H-H Scale, helps the PM better understand the stakeholder’s needs and desires.  There are no guarantees for project success, which is why we need to use all tools available.   

To put it in perspective, ignoring the sustainability interests of stakeholders only adds to what?  Project  Risk!  Adding the H-H Scale to your quiver will help you better understand potential risks to the project, therefore “will better equip them to identify, manage, and respond” to those risks, and will add to better stakeholder management. 

We DO NOT know if climate change is real.*

What we DO know, as an absolute, undisputed fact, is that climate change change is real.

Here's the executive summary, fellow project managers: whatever you believe or don't believe about climate change is actually trivial from a project management perspective, compared to the fact that businesses are initiating changes to their fundamental business plans and business cases based on what they perceive to be an issue important for their survival.

Projects - by definition - are about change.  Projects are initiated to incorporate changes, and they are selected by businesses based on their fit with the portfolio of programs and projects that help them stay true to their long-term, sustainable success.

Back slowly away from this blog post, and read this article.  Then return.

If you read the article - great.  That means you can skip this pull-quote because you've already got the point.  For those of you who didn't, please at least read this:

'...many businesses in Boston and beyond are taking matters into their own hands, preparing for a warmer world in which severe weather, rising sea levels, and increased flooding threaten property, operations, and earnings.

Developers have moved electrical units from the basements to rooftops of buildings in the Seaport District along Boston Harbor. Utilities in New England have elevated substations several feet above the ground and replaced wooden electrical poles with steel ones that can withstand powerful winds.

Insurance companies, in response to clients, are testing products designed to protect against varied effects of climate change, and providing more coverage against natural disasters. The Hartford insurance company now offers small businesses policies against losses due to widespread power outages, a growing concern as major storms occur more frequently.

“We think the time for debating [climate change] is over,” said Ed White, vice president of customer strategy and environmental for National Grid, a British company with its US headquarters in Waltham. “We see it occurring. We’ve lived through the flooding, we’ve seen the damage that it had to our communities and our equipment.”'

So, in other words, as we said in a previous blog post, "Get Your Head Outta The Sand", your sponsors are "on board" with climate change.  This means:

• projects are already being launched by businesses in response to challenges posed by perceived threats (and in some cases opportunities) caused by climate change
• enterprises are more commonly connecting their fundamental mission statements and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with their portfolios
• a knowledge of the issues, the language, the nature of climate change is an advantage whatever your beliefs
• jobs - even entire career paths - are bending to the reality of organizations responding to climate change.

What kinds of organizations are reacting to climate change?  Is it just biofuel companies, fair-trade clothing co-operatives, and organic food family farms?

Hardly.

Again, from the article:

'Insurers, too, are concerned about hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires occurring more frequently. Three of the top six years for catastrophic insured losses have occurred since 2005 with a combined $142 billion in expenses, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry research group that has tracked the costs since 1989.

Data about climate, which was primarily used by federal agencies and insurance companies in the past, is now sought by all types of businesses and organizations, from health care providers to banks to manufacturers, said Kyle Beatty, the president of Verisk Climate. Verisk, headquartered in New Jersey, bought a Lexington climate research firm six years ago in anticipation of growing demand for climate information.

A retailer may want to know the likelihood of major storms downing power lines and triggering blackouts that would close stores, Beatty said. A manufacturer might want to diversify suppliers if a particular contractor is in a flood-prone region.

“The business reaction is to the fact that they’re experiencing impacts to their operations and earnings that they haven’t in the past, they need strategies to address that,” Beatty said.'

So it's retailers, manufacturers, insurers, financial institutions.  These are the types of organizations that get their work done through - you guessed it - projects.  That means they need project managers who understand the background and drivers of these changes.

We insist that it's time to get smart about this, if only for increased job opportunities and security.  Stay tuned to People, Planet, Profits & Projects.  We'll continue to keep you knowlegeable about sustainability and project management - and the increasingly important intersection between the two.

*although the overwhelming majority (97%) of climate scientists will tell you that it is...

I started doing project management work before I knew it was project management work.  Just like a lot of us, I “accidently” became a project manager. Then there was a time when I purposely did project management work.  It was no longer an accident that I was doing it.  The next logical step in the project management progression was to somehow manage a group of projects that have similar or related content is a coordinated way.  Back in the day, at the 1998 Lucent-wide Project Management Conference, I gave a talk entitled Program Management - An Integrated(ing) Approach to Setting and Meeting Customer Expectations.  That was in the relative infancy of program management at Lucent Technologies.   The Project Management Organization was an outgrowth of the coordination of project management within an organization; putting the same face on how projects are managed across the organizations internal boundaries.

Project Portfolio Management is another progressive step in the overall process of managing projects to meet or exceed customer expectations.  It looks closely at aligning organizational strategies and business goals with the projects the organization undertakes.    I needed this first bit of information as background, as a foundation.  Now I’d like to look at the overall, “overall” and the specific of the “specific”.  Meaning, I’d like to kick this all up a level and look at the overall, governance, and the specific, IT governance, as it relates to sustainability.

Simplified, governance is the way an organization is structured in order to pursue its business.  I believe that structure needs to be sustainable.  When I refer to sustainable in this context, I am looking at the way an organization pursues its business with relationship to the social, environmental, and profit (Triple Bottom-line), rather than just its profit objectives.  Of course, one of the objectives of a business is to stay in business.  Even with a not-for-profit, there is a money making motivation to keep the operation afloat.  So both for-profit and not-for-profit are included.

It is easy to relate governance with sustainability when you think about one aspect of governance is the adherence to regulations, as well as using best practices to gain efficiencies, and considering standards and industry recommendations.  One of our assertions state “Project managers must first understand the green (sustainable) aspects of their projects, knowing that this will better equip them to identify, manage, and respond to projects risk.”  This is also words for the governance body to take to heart.  Can you think of any companies that have paid the price because they did not consider sustainability (environmental in particular) risks?  Perhaps those organizations should have thought about including sustainability in their governance strategy.

IT governance is a subset of the overall management of an organizational strategy but has to be closely tied to the overall business strategy.  Why is IT governance so important?  The reason is that an organization’s IT can have the biggest impact to planet, profit and people.  If you are a Google or an Amazon, you rely heavily on IT and can make a huge impact.  Even if you are a one-person company, you probably rely on your computer and Internet connection more than you’d like.  And, whether you are a mega-consumer sales company or a Craigslister, how you manage your power consumption, for instance, will make a difference on your businesses bottom-line, impact on the planet, and how your human resources (maybe just you) are impacted.

It is time to follow the continuum from green project management, to sustainable project management to sustainable program management, to sustainable portfolio management to sustainable governance.  It is no longer adequate to address sustainability only from the project level.  We all know, to be most effective, sustainability has to be part of an organization’s thinking, driven from the top, a strategy incorporated within its governance and particularly its IT governance.   

We know that some project managers are climate change skeptics.  We know that project managers aren’t limited to any part of the political spectrum.  We get that sustainability may seem like a hifalutin, pompous, philosophical idea that just isn’t that, well, project-managy.

We get all of this.

In fact, it’s important that a project manager be a skeptic.  Blindly accepting an overly optimistic estimate, for example, can doom a project.

And yet, take this example: as a team leader, we cannot tell what motives our team members have – we can only observe their behavior.   We need to manage our project teams on that observed behavior, and the best of us look for the root motives to understand and work with team members’ interests.

See: http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/motivation/section1.rhtml

Now, take the example and expand it to what we observe (whatever we believe) when it comes to climate change.

Case in point: Boston.  There is a cover story in a recent Boston Globe Magazine entitled, “Getting Ready for Global Warming – Boston Under Water”.  In it, you will find a list of five things that Boston is doing right now to prepare for the effects of global warming.

Every single one of these “things” is truly an initiative which consumes resources, has a definitive start and finish date, is unique and… well..  does this sound like anything familiar?  It should.  Because all five things are projects.

So our point is this.  Wherever you stand on climate change – you believe it, you’re cynical, you’re skeptical, it’s a sham, a conspiracy, whatever – wherever you stand, real projects are being launched that need real project management expertise and real project managers.

So, for example, would you want to be out of contention for a project to redesign buildings so that their first floors are 42 inches above the current 100-year flood level, with all electrical and mechanical systems on the roof, where a surge resistant reef is built around sites along the waterfront, and it is designed to keep working even after a Hurricane Sandy-like superstorm?

Now let’s open up our blinders even further, beyond Boston, beyond the United States.  The EU has just approved more than 280M Euros for new environmental and climate change projects. - 

So you see, whatever you think of climate change…wherever you are on the political spectrum.. if you want to expand your own portfolio of project management opportunities, it may pay to  get increasingly conversant on the topics of climate change risk and the response that businesses are planning.  And executing.  Now.  Right now.

Ignoring this, by keeping your head in the sand, or letting your own views cloud your view of these opportunities could be hazardous to your career.

Thoughts?

We sometimes blog about subjects that are not strictly project management, but the usually deal with the environment (planet) and will certainly spawn projects in this case, if we are to continue to have something to eat, water to drink, fuel to heat our houses, and electricity to do a lot of things.  One such story in the WSJ the other day caught my eye.  The headline read “China Details Vast Extent of Soil Pollution” by Josh Chin and Brian Spegele.   The sub-heading is About a Fifth of Nation’s Arable Land Is Contaminated with Heavy Metals.  Think about the magnitude for a minute.

There is 3.7 million square miles in China.  Of that, about 522,000 acres are considered arable (fertile, cultivatable) land.  According to China’s Environmental Ministry, 19.4% of that land is contaminated.  More that ¾ of that contamination is from inorganic chemicals, particularly cadmium, nickel and arsenic, all highly toxic to humans.  Can China afford to lose that much land to polluted soil?  The short answer is no and China will have to begin importing food to sustain the amount of food needed for its population.    The other question is how much more arable land will be lost in the future unless something is done about what China puts into their ground?  That is a question for another day.

This is where projects come in.  Besides importing food, one of the alternatives is soil remediation.  While it is a way of purifying and revitalizing land, it is a “technical demanding process that can take decades.”  Another alternative is for the land to be able to increase its yield.  In my Green IT course, I challenge my students to take an in depth look at a Green IT subject of their choice or interest.  In the 42 or so hours we meet in class, I cannot cover any one Green IT subject in that depth, so here is their chance.  One of my students this year picked green IT for sustainable farming.  Not only are there projects that can help the agriculture industry to be more efficient, there are high tech ways to do that.  So, how about this; sustainability (planet), projects, people (food), profits (selling food) and high tech.  It doesn’t get any better than that!

Just to give you a couple of examples from the paper:

1.       Precision agriculture – irrigating specific areas of a field based on the dryness of the soil or fertilizing a specific area of a field based on local nitrogen areas, rather than broadcasting fertilizer or water.  Sensors throughout the field monitor dryness and nitrogen levels and then activate the necessary delivery systems for water and fertilizer.

2.       Integrated management system – using software to provide an end-to-end solution from controlling the precision delivery systems to supply chain management of raw material to transportation of final product.

I don’t mean to imply that IT will be a solution so that we can continue to use our resources in an unsustainable manner.  What I want to offer is high tech farming as a project to compliment to managing our scarce and critical resources.  I’d say eating is a priority!