People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Here is a short blog post just to point out sometihing of interest to those most focused PMs - the ones who read the PMBOK(R) Guide.

The 5th Edition of this guide has been out for a little while now, and the new PMP(R) exam based on this version will begin starting on 1-August 2013.

As some of our readers will know, we worked with a "crowd" of about 200 other PMPs to 'crowdsource' 18 changes to the PMBOK(R) Guide.  Most of these changes were 'deferred' to the 6th Edition, one was accepted after an appeal process.  In other words, most of our ideas to integrate sustainability into the PMBOK Guide did not get in this version.

However, as we study the guide further, we noticed that - whether we had anything to do with it is up for debate - but we noticed that one process name changed along the lines of our suggestions.  To quote PMI:

"The Verify Scope process was renamed to Validate Scope and the text was reworked to add emphasis that this process is not solely about accepting deliverables but validating that the deliverables will deliver value to the business and confirms that the deliverables, as provided, will fulfill the project objectives, as well as their intended use to the project stakeholders."

There are some pretty key words in there.  First of all, the main word - "validate'.  We are constantly preaching about the need for the PM to be connected to the organization's mission, vision, and values.  Well - the word validate, at least as we see it, is an affirmation that we don't just veirify scope, we test it against the project's, and as PMI says, the connection to the 'value to the business' and (shudder) 'intended use'. 

Do they mean 'long term' use?  Well, they don't say so explicitly, but they do say "use'.  And use refers to the steady state, to operations.  And that's a major message of our book.

We don't care how it got in there.  It got in there.

And that's what we call valid.

Serendipity?  Maple sugaring is big here in New England.  For the past several years my wife and I have been invited to a small farm in the local area to witness, and at times feed logs into the fire, the cooking down of maple tree sap into that golden nectar we love so much called maple syrup.  It is also a Rite of Spring, although spring may have a different meaning in New England than it has in other parts of the country.  It could be 70 degrees and sunny, but most likely it is cooler than that and sometimes with a snow flurry or two thrown in.  But that is New England!

So getting to my point, at this year’s event, I met a woman (serendipitous) who heads a public relations firm whose client is the Songdo International Business District (IBD), located on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land along the Yellow Sea in Incheon, South Korea (above is an aerial view of Songdo IBD).  Songdo IBD, thought to be one of the largest public/private real estate ventures in the world, will include forty million square feet of office space, thirty-five million square feet of residential space, ten million square feet of retail, five million square feet of hotel space and ten million square feet of public space. When completed in 2017, Songdo IBD will be home to 65,000 residents and 300,000 people will commute in daily. Currently, 22,000 people reside in Songdo IBD and by year-end that number will grow to more than 27,000. More than 25,000 people now work in Songdo IBD.   I invite you to take a look at their website http://www.songdo.com/default.aspx.

Songdo is a model for sustainable city-scale development project as it is one of Asia’s largest green developments.  Heading the firm providing the public relations for Songdo, not only did May Lou provide me with information about Songdo (tremendous high-res pictures), but she is also a wealth of information on sustainability and the entire project/product life cycle.  I intend to share some of that with you over a couple of posts.  It is obviously way too much information to share in one post.  Why should we be interested?  Because it is one of the largest sustainablity projects I have ever run into.  It is a massive undertaking within the shadow of North Korea.

One aspect of the project is the commitment to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design www.usgbc.org/leed).  Songdo is considered a world leader in this aspect for the design, construction and operation of green buildings, quite a project.  To date, Songdo IBD has more that 13.7 million square feet of LEED-certified space in the first LEED-certified exhibit hall in Asia (Convensia Convention Center), the first LEED-certified residential tower in Korea (Central Park I), the first LEED-certified hotel in Korea (Sheraton Incheon) and the first LEED-certified School in Korea (Chadwick International School). 

More than 50% of Songdo IBD is complete including such core components as the Convensia Convention Center; the Sheraton Incheon; the 100-acre Central Park; numerous residential, commercial and retail projects; Chadwick International School; and the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea, which hosted the PGA Champions Tour for the second consecutive year in September, 2011. The iconic 68-story Northeast Asia Trade Tower (NEATT), which will be South Korea’s tallest building is scheduled for completion in 2014. Lotte Shopping Town and an E-LAND mall will together create Korea's largest complex commercial district, and Songdo's planned IFEZ Incheon Arts Center will be one of the country's most sophisticated cultural centers.

In future posts, we will look at some more sustainability specifics of Songdo.  In the meantime, I continue to “sing” its praises.  Pictured below is the Convensia Convention Center. (all picture used with permission)

 

 

 

 

 

The year: 413 BC.

A fleet of Athenian vessels forms a blockade at Syracuse.  It's critical that they have the light of the moon to work and patrol.  One fateful night however, there is a full lunar eclipse and half of the huge 130-ship fleet is destroyed by the Spartans.

The Greeks realized that knowing when eclipses were coming... well, that just might be important. 

Flash forward to 1901.  A sponge diver discovers a wreckage of a Roman ship which clearly was full of Greek artefacts when it sunk, at some point probably around 65 BC.  Amongst the items in the wreckage is a small, laptop-PC sized chunk of corroded bronze metal which clearly is composed of gears.  Lots of gears.  Lots of very small, intricate gears that until that time, nobody thought the Ancient Greeks were capable of making.  Some of these gears even had pin and slot and other sophisticated mechanical 'tricks' to account for the eliptical and changeable orbit of the moon.  It's really quite an amazing device.

What drove them to invent this device, called the Antrikythera Mechanism, was a need for long-term planning.  Turns out that this device was actually a sort of astronomical clock/computer which could forecast not only the timing of the eclipses (both solar and lunar) but even the colors and directions of shadow which would be seen on them.  Pretty amazing stuff.

If you are interested in this story and the Antikythera Mechanism itself we strongly encourage you to watch this video and perhaps the entire episode of NOVA which covers the story (it's called 'Ancient Computer').  You may also like this video:

Our points here are simply these:

• Necessity is the mother of invention... and disaster is the grandmother of invention
  • (In a related but little-known sub-theory from project management, scope creep is the 3rd cousin of invention, and contingency reserves are the crazy uncle of invention, but it turns out that the risk register is only a close friend)
• The need to think long-term can be driven by disaster (such as melting ice caps, increasingly intense weather patterns, and so on) but it's better if it becomes routine and integrated into planning
• Project managers - driven by the constraints of time, resources and meeting the immediate scope or their projects - are not prone to integrate long-term thinking into their projects

Taken together, the Antikythera Mechanism can serve as a symbol for you and your project.  Did you think about the kinds of things that happen when your project is in its steady state?  Have you thought at all about the product of your project while it is in operation?  And - perish the thought - have you considered what happens to the product of your project when it is disposed of? 

All of those should not be 'Greek to you'.  We assert that they should be fundamentally part of your project planning process.

So - go out there and "gear up" for long-term thinking.

 Stay tuned here and also visit EarthPM for more posts like this.

We all know that communications is the key to successful project management.  As a rule of thumb, project managers spend 90% of their time communicating.  At times it seems that we have some difficulty getting our messages out, whether the message is about customer changes, status or performance reports, just simple updates or expressing the value of our work.  Reading a recent article by Cindy Mehallow on GreenBiz.com (www.greenbiz.com) triggered some thoughts about how to communicate with management about the value of corporate socially responsibility efforts.  One of the issues we find with getting management to embrace sustainability is that there is a lack of understanding as to its value.  Perhaps that misunderstanding has a lot to do with the “message” being received.    Cindy talks about “loaded language, over-communication, misdirected messages, semantic short circuits” and “too much noise” as impediments for communications.  We think that understanding and addressing those communications issues may lead to a better acceptance of the message.

Sometimes, we, at the intersection of project management and sustainability, speak in tongues (or as we refer to in our book, the “Language of the Green Wave”), but don’t realize it.  It is clear that there is terminology that should be understood by the project manager.  But because the project manager has a grasp on the terminology doesn’t necessarily mean that the “receiver” has the same understanding (“shared experience”).   A reality check with the receiver needs to be done in order to assure a mutual understanding of expectations and results.  In addition to the understanding of the “lingo,” the effect of the words needs to be understood.  As an example, the words “global warming” can be tempered by the words “climate change” to avoid controversy about the causes of global warming that can cloud judgment. 

That leads us to another point by Cindy, and that is “noise.”  Anyone familiar with the Sender-Receiver Model, first introduced by Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, Bell Laboratories, (Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press), and referred to above, will recognize the references.  In that model, messages are carried over a channel. As the message travels the channel and crosses the boundary between the sender and the receiver and then crosses the boundary back from the receiver to the sender during feedback (across the area know as the "shared experience", there is the potential for noise.  Noise can be anything from literally noise ("I can't hear you!"), to distraction ("Something else has caught my ear!") to competition for the channel (more than one message being transmitted at the same time).  

Reducing the distraction by using a common language, avoiding controversy when possible, making sure that the right stakeholders are engaged, checking the understanding of the message and not "fire hosing" the information to the point of having the receiver glaze over, will go a long way in reducing the noise and allowing your message of the value of sustainability to get through.

Our little company is called EarthPM.  It's named that way so that it's clear that we are about the intersection of project management and sustainability, but also with the intended double-meaning that we are here for the project managers of our rock - the third rock from the sun - Earth.

So why the heck are you looking at a Mars bar? 

Well, we wanted to familiarize you - or perhaps refamiliarize you - with the concept from our book called "A Rainbow of Green".  The idea (although you need to read the book to fully understand) is that projects which are focused directly on sustainability - that is, those whose project product is a reduced impact on the environment or an improvement in CSR metrics, for example, are on the "green by definition" end of the spectrum, and that new Release 8.3.4.3.6b of your company's accounting software would be on the other end of this spectrum.

At a meeting of our local sustainability professionals tonight, the meeting, which took place at local non-profit consulting firm FSG, was kicked off by Special Projects Coordinator Mary Light, who gave us an example of one of their projects - one which involved the Mars Company.

To quote from FSG's web page:

"70% of the world’s cocoa supply originates in West Africa with Côte d’Ivoire as the world’s largest producer. Cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire is grown by more than 700,000 small holders who farm, on average, approximately 3 hectares each. Production volumes and quality have been constantly declining over the last decades due to a multitude of economic, social, and environmental challenges. The underlying problems include: fluctuating weather patterns, low incomes, weak rural infrastructure, lack of improved planting material, aging farms, loss of biodiversity leading to exposure to pests and diseases, deforestation, and declining soil fertility. Without urgent action to address these challenges, the cocoa sector faces the risk of collapse."

That is the challenge.  To address it, the project put in place is described this way:

"The analysis revealed a high potential for shared value creation — Investing in a comprehensive sustainability program in Côte d’Ivoire will help ensure the long-term success of Mars’ chocolate business and at the same time improve economic, environmental, and social conditions in cocoa-growing communities. The goals of the “Vision for Change” program in Côte d’Ivoire thus address all three levels of sustainability including:

1. Economic: Improve Farmer Incomes. Helping farmers to make their farms more productive and to increase the quality of their crops will improve their income and allow them to better cover their family’s needs and reinvest into their farms.
2. Environmental: Improve Environmental Management. Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) will increase soil fertility, and more productive farms should reduce expansion of cocoa farming into protected forest areas.
3. Social: Invigorate Rural Communities. Empowering local communities will lead to improved living standards in cocoa-growing communities.

Mars understood early on that the challenges within the Ivorian cocoa sector are too complex to be tackled by Mars alone. The “Vision for Change” initiative for Côte d’Ivoire outlines a multi-stakeholder Collective Impact approach, combining pre-competitive public goods investments with supply-chain investments. Mars has proactively engaged with other interested stakeholders and sector investors including the Ivorian government, national institutions, the World Bank, bilateral donors, commercial suppliers, certifiers, and NGOs. FSG has facilitated a partnership between Mars and the Ivorian government, national agricultural institutions, and the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). In March 2010, Mars and the government of Côte d’Ivoire signed an MOU as the basis for future collaboration.

Most recently, FSG has been assisting with the implementation planning of the “Vision for Change” program including developing action plans, orchestrating and facilitating meetings and communication among existing and potential partners, and providing continued strategic advice to Mars as the catalyst of this Collective Impact initiative."

This is about as far to the "Green By Definition" side of the spectrum as you can be, and still be on Earth.  And in fact, maybe it's not so coincidental that it's the Mars company that's doing it.  But we jest - the idea is that more and more of these proejcts need to be launched, and even better, managed by project managers with an improved sense of, and understanding of sustainability issues.

We encourage you to read more about the efforts of Mars, by following this choclatey link....

And, of course, we encourage you to read more about this in our book and by following us on Twitter and EarthPM's own blog.  Thanks!