People, Planet, Profits & Projects

People always ask us, "do I need to be an expert in a field to manage projects in that practice area?".   Our answer is, of course, 'it depends'.  But if pushed, the answer is no.  No, one doesn't need to be an expert.  But what one needs is something critical and that is conversancy.  One needs to be able to talk intelligently and to know how to find out more and to find the expertise, even if it isn't directly part of your own capability.  I suppose we could say that one doesn't need to be an expert, but one needs to be able to apply expert knowledge.

To that end, we'd like to help you take advantage of some recent research which will provide you with increased conversancy on the topic of clean energy, improving your knowledge not only of the technical aspects of this area but an advantage in terms of knowing where the PM jobs are - and will be - as the green economy grows.

After all, Green Project Management, as we've written about in our book, is about the altruism of doing the right thing.... about PMs being the change agents and the ones who can help apply sustainability prinicples on their jobs... but it's also about the other green.  The money, the opportunity, the growth, it provides for your PM career.  And there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing the right thing for yourself, your career, your discipline of PM.

"Clean Energy Trends 2013" was just released by CleanEdge.  You can download the entire document here.

The 5 trends they identify in this brand-new report are:

• Smart Devices and Big Data Empower Customers, Open New Chapter in Energy Efficiency
• Distributed Solar Financing Comes of Age
• Under the EV Radar, MicrohybridT echnology Saves Big on Fuel Consumption
• In the U.S. and Overseas, Geothermal Picks up Steam
• Perfectly Natural: Biomimicry Makes its Mark on CleanTech

Here are some highlights from the report that shows a project manager how to "follow the money" in terms of clean energy project management opportunities:

• "Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $95.2 billion in 2012, up from $83.0 billion the previous year, and are projected to grow to $177.7 billion by 2022. From 2011 to 2012, global biofuels production expanded from 27.9 billion gallons to 31.4 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel. Market size growth over the next decade is expected to be driven by added production, but also by modest price increases.
   
• Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to grow from $73.8 billion in 2012, up from $71.5 billion the previous year, to $124.7 billion in 2022. Global wind capacity expanded by 44.7 gigawatts in 2012, a record year led by more than 13 GW added in both China and the U.S., and an additional 12.4 GW of new capacity in Europe.
   
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) decreased from a record $91.6 billion in 2011 to $79.7 billion in 2012 as continued growth in annual capacity additions was not enough to offset falling PV prices. While total market revenues fell 19 percent – the first PV market contraction in Clean Energy Trends’ 12-year history – global installations expanded to a record of 30.9 GW in 2012, up from 29.6 GW the prior year. Germany remained the top market, adding 7.6 GW in 2012, followed by strong growth in China, Italy, and the U.S., which each added more than 3 GW. By 2022, solar PV revenues are expected to grow to $123.6 billion.

Together, we project these three sectors will continue to grow over the next decade, nearly doubling from $248.7 billion in 2012 to $426.1 billion in 2022."

Here's a graphic from the report for those visual thinkers out there:

So if you're interested in building your conversancy in the area of clean energy, have a look at the report.

Do yourself a 'career favor'.

As Pope Benedict XVI retires and the conclave meets at the Vatican, it's interesting to us to reflect on his leadership with respect to the environment - and the environmental projecs that he launched. 

Benedict, according to this article in the National Geographic online magazine, "approved a plan to cover the Vatican's Paul VI hall with solar panels, enough to power the lighting, heating, and cooling of a portion of the entire country (which covers, of course, a mere one-fifth of a square mile). He authorized the Vatican's bank to purchase carbon credits by funding a Hungarian forest that would make the Catholic city-state the only country fully carbon neutral. And several years later, he unveiled a new hybrid Popemobile that would be partially electric."

But these are (quite literally) surface-level changes.  If you will, in project management terms, these are 'operations' changes.  What's much deeper, and much more in line with our (I guess you could call it) preaching, is at the mission/vision/values level.

Remember, an enterprise is established, per the Stanford Execution Framework which we adopt to describe it, so that at the top level is "Ideation" which includes mission, vision, and values, in the center is "Strategy:, at the bottom is "Operations" (the steady state) and connecting strategy to operations is an entity with which you'll be familiar: projects, programs, and portofolios.

So we - as project managers of any denomination - care a great deal about the strategy, mission, vision, and values 'above' us.

And what Benedict, and Pope John Paul VI before him did in this area is not insignficant.

Again, according to the article, which we recommend to you, "As Benedict begins his retirement today, the better way to judge Benedict's influence might not be in how many solar panels he had installed at the Vatican or how many gallons of gasoline he saved with the Popemobile, but in how he harnessed the influence of his global church to act on the sort of change he advocated. Many national dioceses around the world now include "environmental stewardship" on their list of advocacy topics. In the U.S., bishops have created curricula for discussing sustainability in school and pushed local officials on issues like clean air."

An additional article on this topic from the UK's Telegraph can be found here.

Also, if this posting intrigues you, the book which we used to illustrate the post can be found here.

In an opinion piece from today's Boston Globe, Richard Murray and Daniel Schrag write about rising sea levels in "The Coming Storm".

We know that the climate change mantra can sound like doom gloom.  I mean, that title...."The Coming Storm".  Cue the Rimsky-Korsakov music.  Indeed, and to the authors' credit, there is hardly a way to avoid sounding gloomy when the data seems to point to all kinds of problems we'll face together as 'the third rock from the sun' comes to terms with significant impacts from a clearly changing environment.

The article, however, despite its grey photo and dreary title, actually speaks of ways in which 'new thinnking', and 'chances of success' - can come into play.  These are optimistic concepts for sure.

Focusing on the community of Billingsgate Isalnd, a typical New England coastal settlement 100 years ago - which is now gone, the article does move into thoughtful ways, all of which will require projects and project managers, to react positiely to the changes we face.

Let me stop here and acknowledge that some of you are thinking, maybe even saying out loud, or even yelling, "these are all just natural occurances...this is normal shifting of tides and normal erosion...who says humans have anything to do with this...".  Okay.  We know.  However, the very fact that this article is publshised, and the very fact that a google search on the word sustainability yields nearly 100 million results, this should tell you that it doesn't matter.  Regardless of the origin, the science, and the politics, the fact of the matter is that there is an increased consciousness about climate change and that this increased consiousness will create projects and change the way we think about projects.  That is an indisputable fact.  We need to at least deal with that. Can we agree?  Thanks.

Now back to the post...

Here's a sample of the article's 'hidden optimism':

The best chance of success in minimizing the effects of sea level rise and increasing storm frequency and intensity will collectively involve industry, government, and individual citizens making challenging decisions that are likely to deviate from historical practices and assumptions. If such measures are not taken, then what happened to Billingsgate will not be an isolated story.

One strategy, complementary to constructing expensive sea walls, is to invest in resilience. This means acknowledging that flooding will occur, but making sure that after the storm recedes, our buildings can be pumped dry, and that we can recover with only minimal damage. This will require new building codes and some significant costs, although not the massive public investment required for large infrastructure.

Another option is a coordinated plan for managed retreat. After the Blizzard of ’78, nearly 10 homes on Peggotty Beach were purchased through a federal program and the land turned over to the Town of Scituate to be kept as open space. Such programs, teamed with enhancing environmental regulations to preserve open space and marshland buffers, can play a role toward managing the growing vulnerability of coastal communities. Insurance companies can also contribute to the solution, as many current policies encourage people to live in harm’s way.

Our point at EarthPM - our blog and our book -is that we need to be ready to tackle new projects like the ones to be triggered by climate change.  We can focus on making our own projects more sustainable even if they don't seem to have a pure focus on - say - renewable energy.  We can get ourselves more well-informed about climate change and the reactions government and industry are having to it (we'll blog more about this shortly).  We don't have to hang our heads or panic.  Urgent action - sure.  Panic and depression....not for us.  We're project managers!

Today, on Superbowl Sunday* - it seems appropriate to talk about success.

For our local team, the New England Patriots, it was a successful season - to a point.  They had a tremendous year, but did not win in their game against the Baltimore Ravens, who now advance to the Superbowl to play the NFC's winner, the San Francisco 49'ers.

But what about PROJECT success?  This has been getting a lot of dicussion lately, and we've been paying attention, becuase a careless definition of project success would be counterproductive to sustainable project management which is our main focus.

Let's use as an example an article iIn this month's issue of Project Management Journal.  This journal, by the way, is often overlooked by practitioners of our field, becuase authors insist on using words in their article titles (and these are all real examples) like:

• Bayesian
• Orthagonal
• Typology
• Psycotherapy
• Criticality

These are not always the favorites of a casual weekend reader.  Still, there is excellent material in the articles - one needs to just trust that you can get past those academic titles and find that value.  It's there.

In this month's issue, there is one article called, "Managing the Intangible Aspects of a Project: The Affect of Vision, Artifacts, and Leader Values on Project Spirit and Success in Technology-Driven Projects".

Yes - it's a mouthful, as usual, but it's actually quite an interesting article with findings about how motivation and success are related to the amount of effort put into the 'team spirit' and identity of a proejct team. 

But we were intrigued (quite orthagonally and in a Bayesian sense) by the listing they featured on the definition of "project success".  Here it is:

• The project was completed on time or earlier
• The project was completed within or below budget
• The product met all customer requirements
• The customer was highly satisfied
• The product improved the customer's performance
• There is a great chance that the customer will return for additional business
• The project resulted in business success for the company that implmented it
• The proejct increased the profitability of the organization implementing it
• The project had a positive ROI
• The project increased market share or outreach amoung customers/users
• The project will lead to additional new markets or new customers/users
• The project will lead to additional new business or new products or services
• The product has the potential to create new markets or new customers/users
• The project created new technologies or new capabilities for future use

Notice that we have highlighted the bottom chunk of 'success bullets' in green.

Why?

These green bullets - and we applaud the authors for this - go beyond the traditional view that project managers usually take when they look at project success (and therefore project completion).  By taking the view that these 'greener' bullets indicate, the PM takes the longer-term, more sustainable view that we have been talking about now for about four years.  We would of course add some others, and we did in our book, Green Project Management.  But for now, just focus on these authors' bullets.

We will continue to blog on this subject, in fact we have a request in to the authors of this article for more data about these definitions and how they contributed to 'project spirit'; but for now, we'd like to hear from you.  How many of the above bullets do YOU and YOUR PROJECT TEAM use when defining success?

So, as you watch the Superbowl - or during halftime as you count up the money you may have won by selecting squares for the end-of-quarter-scores - think about this.  And take a moment to respond, we really are interested in your definition of project success in the light of these bullets.

*in the United States, this is our celebration of the final game of the American Footbal season, with the winners of the National and American Football Conferences playing each other for the National Footbal League  championship

We have based our company on the intersection of sustainability and project management.

And we're hopeless project management professionals who for better or worse see almost everything through a PM's eyes.

Thats' why it was such a surprise this morning - I literally had to rub my eyes - when I saw what looked like an S-curve right under the top, front-page headline story of the Boston Globe.  We're going to provide that graphic for you below to look at, download, and consider. 

But let's start with a mini-lesson on S-curves for our more casual readers.

For this, we turn to Max Wideman's outstanding resource and glossaries of PM, where we can findthat an S-curve is:

"A display of cumulative costs, labor hours or other quantities plotted against time. The name derives from the S-like shape of the curve, flatter at the beginning and end and steeper in the middle, which is typical of most projects. The beginning represents a slow, deliberate but accelerating start, while the end represents a deceleration as the work runs out."

It all looks like this:

As a project proceeds, we track our progress against this S-curve.  The planned progress is called the baseline.  Changes in scope, budget, schedule - any of these must be reflected by formal integrated change control, which (as the picture above shows) involves acknowledging that change and creating a new baseline.

Great!  Lovely.  Now what the bleep does that have to do with the picture on the front of the Boston Globe?  Well, there is a connection.  Turns out, the chart is not cumulative spend of resources but rather temperature from January through December for decades (of Boston data), plotted to show the 'normal' baseline of that pattern and also to show that 2012 was the Boston's (and the USA's) warmest on record.

So although the S-shaped curve's shape was only  a bit of a bizzare coincidence (it had to do with the natrural fact that temperatures in the USA go up from January to December in that particular pattern), the idea of it being a representation of an old baselie and a new baseline was actually seen properly through my tired eyes.  In fact, the last line of the article sums it up well:

It was “a huge exclamation point,’’ said Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch at Climatic Data Center. “This is consistent with what we would expect in a warming world.’’

So, just as we have to re-baseline a project when we face reality and acknowlege triggered risks, issues, scope change, and so on, it appears that we have to acknowledge (and we would assert act on) factual information presented to us as PMs - or in this case, folks who happen to live on Earth.  We're both.

Some of the 'new-baseliney' facts from the article:

• seven of the nation's 10 warmest years have taken place in the past years (measurements taken since 1895)
• 443 weather stations in the US recorded the warmest years ever.  1 single station recorded the coolest.
• The new average temperature of 55.3 degrees F beat the former high from 1998 by a ful degree.  So it's not only a new high, but a new high with a singular 'jump'. 

Have a look at the graphic.  Are you a project management nut like me?  Do you see an S-Curve there?  And...once you realize that it isn't, do you get a feeling, like we do, that this is even more ominous than a project going bust?  It's more like an eco-system giving us a 'risk trigger' that something is quite wrong?

At least consider that possibility.

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