People, Planet, Profits & Projects

We've just returned from the West Coast (sometimes called the 'left coast") of the USA, after a great week at the PMO Symposium in San Diego, California.  Our presentation, "Should Your PMO Serve as a Chief Project Sustainability Office" was well received, and although the visit was good, it was short, and it was time to fly back over our magnificent continent and return to the East (right) Coast.

And just around the time of our visit, the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, along with the province of British Colombia, did something that the corresponding national governments have failed to do. 

They agreed on something.

But hey, what's the big deal?  How big are these few states and a province?  Well, combined, they would be the world's 5th largest economy.  That's why it's a big deal.

And what does this pact mean?  Further, since you're probably a project manager, what does it mean to you?  To us?  To your PMO?

Actually, you can easily find out yourself.  The document is surprisingly succinct, given that it comes from 4 governments and 2 countries.  Have a look at it here.

In this two-page document, the word, 'program' appears explicitly four times, the word 'project' appears explicitly four times and both are implicitly woven through almost each and every paragraph in the document.  Here are a couple of paragraphs to illustrate our point:

We’re just back from the PMI North America Congress.  It was a very good take with well over 2,000 colleagues sharing knowledge and doing some pretty intense networking.  We were presenters ourselves, but this post is not about that talk, it's about others.

Let's start with the venue - New Orleans was the backdrop and theme for 2013, and that city knows how to host a convention full of project managers.  Everywhere you go in NOLA there is music, beautiful music, flowing around each streetcorner and from classic locations like Preservation Hall.

The music of New Orleans is jazz.  We got to experience this wonderful, expressive, eloquent music at Preservation Hall.  This is some of the most eloquent music we've ever heard.

And speaking of eloquence, that’s what we want to discuss with you.  Although there’s a twist.  This is eloquence in which the speaker doesn’t necessarily even realize that they’re being eloquent.

Here’s the deal.  Over the last four or five years, we’ve been expressing (hopefully eloquently) a need for project managers to be more focused on their products’ triple bottom line.  Yes, we mean product, not project or process.  Every project has some sort of outcome – we’re using the word product to refer to this.

And we’ve seen others discuss this topic – or surrounding topics – in such a way that they describe our exact main points - the points of what we call greenality:

• Long-term (sustainability-oriented) thinking - beyond the delivery of their project's product to the steady-state operation
• Use of information from the above in initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing processes
• Connectivity to the organization’s mission/vision/values
• Strong awareness of, and concern for, for a triple bottom line, including social, economic, and ecological aspects.

But they do this in a way in which they don’t…. quite… get… to sustainability.  We've seen it in PM Journal magazine articles (see posts on EarthPM).  We've seen it in blog posts.  And we saw it in the presentations at PMI North America Congress in New Orleans. They come so, so close, but don’t make the point that this is really about integrating sustainability into project management.

Here’s an example from the PMI Congress.

One of the speakers, Kevin Repa, in his talk, “Planning for Program Closure”,  was eloquent in his description of the closing of the Space Shuttle program.  He held the audience’s attention as he described the intriguing story of ending the space shuttle program and figuring out what to do with its significant artifacts (see sidebar). 

To summarize, the shuttle program initiated a “closing project” initially estimated to cost $2.8B or more in and of itself.  Through good project management practices enumerated by Kevin, the project came in well under that, almost by a factor of ten.

One very striking and practical example is what happens to the shuttle vehicles themselves.  They are a “must” for the museum that has one of everything.  And when these shuttles go to a museum, the planners have to know whether the shuttle presents any safety issues to museum-goers.   Are there radiation issues?  Are there any components that will outgas poisons to bystanders?  These are questions that may not have been thought of if the project managers hadn’t thought about the steady-state disposition of the product of their project.

But the underlying message was this: had the planning for the disposition of the shuttle and all of its supporting infrastructure been incorporated into the project from the start, the closure would have had better management of risks, lower environmental impact, and overall even further improved financials.

Mr. Repa used the phrase, “think centuries, not decades”.  Eloquently put.  And unconsciously, Kevin was a huge proponent of our effort to incorporate sustainability thinking into our discipline of  PM.

Kevin, we at EarthPM salute your eloquence, and your being right on target from our perspective.  We would humbly suggest that you and others could parse out the excellent message that you have with the 'greenality' framework we provide above.

And the rest of you?  Eloquent or not, we urge you to be very, very conscious of your key role as project manager when it comes to disposition of your project’s product.  Stay tuned here and at EarthPM's main blog, we can help.

Here you see a young lady with what dentistry and marketing professionals would tell you is a confident smile.  So much in life depends on confidence and likelihood.

And sometimes our lives and perhaps (dare we say this?) the continuation of our species also depends on confidence.

This time, though, it's about confidence in the much more technical sense of the word: confidence levels in data and assertions and conclusions made from that data.  It is - as we assert during our courses on communications, presentation skills, and project management, about the promotion from Data to Information, Information to Knowledge, and Knowledge to Wisdom.

We know that not everyone agrees on whether Climate Change is real, or if real, whether or not it is caused by 'little old us' humans.  But the international body charged with making those conclusions has recently stated its case.  The sometimes-maligned IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has dug in, checked, rechecked, and rechecked the checking of the checking and has made a bunch of conclusions, which we'll summarize at the bottom of the post.  However our focus is on the idea of confidence levels.

Here is how the IPCC itself describes confidence and likelihood:

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Description of confidence

On the basis of a comprehensive reading of the literature and their expert judgement, authors have assigned a confidence level to the major statements in the Technical Summary on the basis of their assessment of current knowledge, as follows:

Description of likelihood

Likelihood refers to a probabilistic assessment of some well-defined outcome having occurred or occurring in the future, and may be based on quantitative analysis or an elicitation of expert views. In the Technical Summary, when authors evaluate the likelihood of certain outcomes, the associated meanings are:

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Once again, regardless of your feelings on Climate Change, or the UN, or this panel, regardless of your politics, there is a lesson here in communciation.  As project managers, we asssert that 95% or our work is in the area of communicatons and uncertainty.  And of course - the overlap - intersection of both - is in communicating uncertainty, or communicating in an environment of uncertainty.  So the way that the IPCC parses out this scale could be handy to you no matter what you think of the conclusions themselves.

Our coaching to you here is two-fold.  You might say it is about the medium AND the message.  The medium, the careful way in which the IPCC makes its case, is one thing.  And the message - the warning that they have for you and I and everyone on the planet, and we would assert, especially us, as change-agent project managers - is that we need to examine what types of changes may be necessary if we are doubly arrogant (see great George Carlin video here).  That is, arrogant enough to think that we caused some of the climate issues below, and arrogant (and confident?) enough to think that we just may be able to turn it around or at least slow it up.

Here are just some of the key findings.  Note the references to the confidence and likelihood levels they mention above.

The entire summary report is available here.

My brother-in-law is in law.  He's an attorney, in other words.  One day, he was sitting in his (at the time) new Volvo sedan, equipped with what were at the time the newest safety feature - driver's air bags.

He was at an intersection, and had stopped for a light.  The lady approaching behind him also stopped, but at some point, she hit the gas instead of the brake, and hit my brother-in-law at low speed but with some force.

The air bag deployed.  Did it ever.  It deployed right into his rib cage and caused severe rib cage bruising.  Police later told him that had the air bag not deployed, he wouldn't have had any injuries.  He would've been just fine.

So why do I tell you about my brother-in-law-in-law?

Because really, this is a story of risk response (the air bag) and secondary risk (injuries attained from the primary risk response).  And it serves to introduce us to a major intersection of sustainability and PM.  Since PMs manage projects which - by definition - are about change and are -by definition - about uncertainty (since they are unique), we care alot about risk.  Alot.  It's a knowledge area in the PMBOK(R) Guide and a separate certification from PMI (the PMI-RMP(R)).

So we study risk identification, risk triggers, risk response methodologies, secondary and residual risk.  Makes sense.  In the case of my brother-in-law-in-law, the trigger for air bag use is the experience and knowledge of the insurance and safety industry, and in particular, the vehicle in question detecting an impact.  The secondary risk was the injury from the air bag.

Speaking of risk triggers, here is a story about a risk trigger:

Remote Antarctic Trek Reveals a Glacier Melting From Below

We hear about the Arctic ice melting, not much about the Antarctic, partially because of its even greater remoteness.  The team studying this glacier had to travel 1800 miles from an already-remote base station to conduct their research, which happens to correlate perfectly with data from satellites:  ice is melting there at a rate of 2 inches per day.  If this entire glacier, the Pine Island Glacier, were to melt, global ocean rise would be in the order of FEET.  So I suppose we could identify this at least as a risk trigger.

And what about risk response?  The "Whatareyagonnadoabouddit" part of risk management.

Keeping in line with EarthPM's last post about volcanoes, here is an interesting story about risk response to global warming, from today's Boston Globe.

The story begins: The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, blasted enough fine particles and sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere to envelop the Earth in a high-altitude cloud for the better part of two months.

When scientists checked in 1992, they determined that the cloud had deflected enough sunlight to cool the planet by about 1 degree.

With the planet warming and the threat of long-term climate change looming, some experts are wondering whether the time may have come to deliberately attempt such ‘‘solar radiation management.’’

So maybe we start expunging particles into the air to cool the planet?

Sounds like an "early generation air bag" to me.

What do you think?

At a minimum, the two stories hoepfully come together to raise your awareness of just how connected Project Management is to the field of risk management.  And because both the expedition to the Antarctic and the experimentationwith 'solar raddiationmanagement' are projects, we again see strong intersections between sustainability and our discipline of Project Management.

Today is celebrated by the Jewish population as Rosh Hashanah, literally, the "head of the year", or New Year.

It is also considered "The Birthday of the World".  This day celebrates the anniversary of the creation of the cosmos and its continuous renewal.  A very "sustainable" thought.

So - happy birthday, Earth!

There's clearly alot to do if we want to keep this "continuous renewal" going.  And although some are "operations" - the way we do things day-to-day, most involve change - and therefore involve PROJECTS.  So they involve us quite directly.   And there are many indications that we have huge problems to overcome when it comes to overconsumption, buildup of greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, and so on.

But today is a day to stop and reflect on the positive.  To give ourselves a chance to say, despite all of these things, we have lots to be thankful for and we've come a long way.

And with that we want to wish our Jewish readers a sweet and healthy and happy High Holy Days, a Happy New Year,, and to leave all of our readers of any faith (and any level of faith) with the assignment to consider what is "continuously renewable" in your work and personal lives.

Stay tuned to this blog for more - much more - on what you can do as a project manager.