People, Planet, Profits & Projects

We are often asked the question “What can we do to become more sustainable?”  Project managers are not only interested in their processes/projects and making them more sustainable, but also what can they do to make their everyday lives more sustainable.  The answer to that question is very complex because of all of the sustainability opportunities that exist.  We certainly don’t know them all, although we do know a lot ways to become more sustainable, the connection between sustainable business and project management and a more general connection between ourselves and sustainability. 

Here is something we came across recently.  “Boston University (BU) Dining Services is pleased to report the sustainable progress that we have made on 2012 across campus.  As we continue our mission to serve wholesome, delicious, and affordable food to the BU community and its guests, we strive to do so with a parallel goal: the extension of dining hall as a classroom.  As we change how things are done in our kitchen and dining rooms, we strive to communicate both the challenges and benefits to our main customers: students.  By making students aware of our initiatives, goals and challenges, we hope to create knowledgeable and empowered consumers and operators, who will demand high standards from their food sources, both while on campus and as they make their own path after graduation.”

One of our assertions is that consumers are becoming smarter about sustainability and that is a driver for organizations to become more sustainable.  Efforts like this at BU only reinforce our assertion by providing the education to make “smarter” consumers. 

BU’s Dining Services started their efforts with buying local.  Not only does it save transportation costs and carbon footprint, the choices are also wholesome for the students, “preserve farmland in New England and support environmentally friendly agricultural practices.”  Produce, dairy, baked goods and groceries like Ken’s Salad Dressing are locally sourced.   Offerings to the students include vegan and “cage-free and American Certified Humane Eggs.” "BU’s Union Food Court is considered The Greenest Food Court in the Country.”

As we all know, to be truly effective in our sustainability efforts, it has to be a total program.  In 2013, BU Dining Services were asked to serve as a case study for Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Recycling Works program.  BU’s contributions will help other Massachusetts institutions and businesses prepare for the upcoming organics waste stream ban.   We’ll talk more about that ban in a later post.  In 2012 the waste diversion rate at the student union was 69% and 32 tons of waste was diverted at the 2012 commencement ceremony.    There was a 50% increase in beverage purchases and the list goes on.  Metrics are important, as we’ve said many times before; you can’t manage what you can’t measure.   [While this phrase is often attributed to Deming, in truth, no one knows where it came from, although it is also often attributed to Peter Drucker. – a little trivia for your]

Universities, companies and individuals are all getting the sustainability message.  When you think about it, these are changes, and therefore require change agents (project managers) to implement.  That is the just one example of the sustainability connections to project management.  For more information please see full report.

One of the “elephants in the room” when it comes to sustainability is “what’s in it for me (us)”?  We’ve always contended that there is a lot in it for you (collectively), whether you are an organization or an individual, and many of you know that.  One of the aspects of greenality, a word we coined while writing our book, Green Project Management, is the “hugger-hummer” scale.  The hugger-hummer scale is an arbitrary scale that we developed.  At one extreme end of the scale are the so called “tree hugger” and at the other extreme end is the antithesis.  However, we believe that most people live in the area somewhat in the middle.  Those to the right of middle (hummer side of course) may be moved closer to the middle when provided with some information.

In a recent webinar, Metrics that Matter: Leading Companies Know How to Measure Employee Engagement, presented by greenbiz, a great resource for those interested in sustainability, points out that there are ways to measure (provide data) to organizations about the positive effects of sustainability.  There are companies, including the host of the webinar, practically green™ that can provide “digital sustainability engagement programs” to global companies.  Some of the metrics that can be tracked and reported are employee personal activities related to sustainability, commuting and business travel.  These programs use social media, intranets, and more, to make it easy for individuals as well as organization to capture their efforts.

The program includes four level; (1) direct benefits including employee participation rate, ongoing engagement rates, actions/activities completed, number of people influenced, environmental/social impact, and return on investment (ROI).

Level 2 - ROI, Sony Electronics looks at ways to reduce employee footprint while at work and their contributions to Sony’s environmental and efficiency efforts.  The results were a savings of $84/employee, 101.78 metric tons of CO₂ saved, 11 tons of waste diverted, 36,228 gallons of water saved, and 2,000 gallons of fuel saved. 

Level 3 is beyond resource costs including; brand, health, engagement scores, and employee personal savings.   Caesars International uses “Codegreen Rewards”.   It targets increased brand approval from green efforts, employee health through green living, what personal actions by employees have been achieved as well as personal savings resulting from those actions. 

Level 4 is looking to the future with improved verification and real-time metric collection, innovative connections (Smart phones, social media) and engagement between employees, suppliers, customers, and the community.

No matter what size company you have or what size company you work for, there are ways to measure your sustainability efforts.  Those measurements help to show the “real” benefits of sustainability and how they help the bottom line (and social consciousness) of both the organization and the employee.

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.

We've talked about the sea’s warming waters before.  We can look global climate change from many different perspectives, and one of those perspectives (or lens) is that no matter where you are on the Hugger-Hummer Spectrum, as a project manager, you should be looking through the “projects” lens.  So what can we learn from a  recent article from the UK.

The title of the article is “Warm water species spreading northward into British waters” from The Guardian, by Severin Carrell, Scotland Correspondent.  The gist of the article is that because of the warming ocean temperatures, certain species of fish, like the Bluefin tuna, thresher shark, and anchovy are being seen more frequently in British waters.  These are species common to southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Canary Islands, are being caught by fishermen off of southwestern England, and in some cases the North Sea. 

Commercial fishermen are catching anchovies, red mullet and sea bass in greater quantities than the traditional cod and haddock, colder water species.  Northern commercial fishermen are also targeting squid, a staple of Mediterranean restaurants.  That may sound good to those who are fishing for the species, but it will probably adversely affect existing fisheries.

Non-native species will compete with native species for limited resources.  Beside the competition, these non-native fish may introduce parasites and disease for which the native species have no resistance.  One of the projects that may arise out of this change is what Richard Benyon, UK minister for the environment, calls a “whole-seas approach.”  “If fish aren’t in certain parts of the sea, but are going elsewhere, we need to have fisheries management policies that will make sure they are more sustainable, wherever they are.”  One of the factors involved in the project planning effort is that foreign vessels will now be competing for those shifting resources in conflict with local fishermen. 

Prince Charles said that “while his international sustainability unit, a fisheries and environment thinktank funded by his charitable foundation, had established there were numerous success stories where fisheries were sustainable and secure, there were many that were not.” "Vast numbers of people around the world rely upon the sea. Their survival depends upon the ocean's capacity for renewal, which can only be maintained if we take an intelligent approach now," he told the congress.

From the article:

Farmed mussels: a study of commercial mussel farming in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland found that if water temperatures rose by 1C, production would fall by 50%, and by 70% if temperatures rose by 4C. Non-native Pacific oysters would be less affected, declining by just 8% under both scenarios, suggesting shellfish farmers could switch to that species in future.

Boarfish: since 2001, there has been a "dramatic increase" in landings of boarfish, a bony, spiney fish which is ground into fish-meal for fish farms, as it has moved into the south-west approaches and the Celtic seas due to global warming. Last year, 130,000 tonnes of boarfish were landed.

Anchovy: the salty fish better known in the Mediterranean and Bay of Biscay, are moving northwards up the Irish and British coast and now being caught at commercial levels in the Channel and North Sea as far north as the Pentland Firth. About 800 tonnes were caught in south-west England in 2011 but biologists believe they are native stocks, which have bloomed in size with warmer British waters.

Salmon farming: fish-farming cages are very vulnerable to storms, which are expected to get more violent and more frequent as climate change takes hold, presenting economic and ecological risks as they escape and inter-breed with wild salmon. Scottish farmed salmon netted £563m in 2010 but over seven years, nearly 2.2m cultivated salmon escaped after storms, with about 820,000 fish escaping during one storm alone in 2005.

Bluefin tuna: once commonly fished in the North Sea until the population collapsed in the 1960s, Atlantic bluefin tuna have slowly started reappearing in the waters off south-west England: one was caught off Dorset last July. Now critically endangered through overfishing, and a favoured target species for sea anglers, there are demands for a total ban on fishing bluefins.

See if the plight of those “sea creatures” don’t inspire some projects.

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.