People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Sustainability.  It’s a term that’s being used a lot these days.  It’s being used so much, in fact, that we’re afraid it’s losing its meaning.

One of the definitions that we’ve heard (and we like!) comes from a book called Getting Green Done.  In it, author Auden Schendler says that sustainability can be explained best by working as if you will be “staying in business forever”.

This is very difficult concept for us project managers because we are trained to understand (as we should) that a project has a definitive beginning and end.

So when a story like this one from NPR comes out, describing the decades-old problem of poisoned places – locales ruined for the very long term by industrial toxins - we can empathize, perhaps, but from a PM perspective we would tend to glaze over, since we are “only project managers” and are not focused on the steady-state operation of facilities or the long-term impacts of processes.

But maybe we should be.

And yes, of course we should be focused on the long term for the altruistic reasons that appeal to our sense of ethics, and if we have a lick of sense, because the planet is indeed our home and we must realize that we shouldn’t fill our own home with guck and goo and poison. 

But it goes beyond that.  And it goes beyond politics, and it goes beyond wherever you stand on climate change.

We, as a discipline, have to recognize that focusing on the steady-state can also greatly improve how our projects fit into the enterprise and meet enterprise goals.  More and more companies have very strong environmental statements in their mission and value statements.  Ray Anderson built Interface/FLOR into a tremendously successful example of this marriage of long-term thinking and mind-blowing profitability.

Marvin Odom. President of Shell, talks about sustainability being the top driver for innovation at his company.

And if you read this series of stories from NPR about Poisoned Places you will see what we learn about in the PMBOK® Guide (and rooted in Philip Crosby’s original writings) as “the cost of poor quality”, in the form of lawsuits, closed factories, ill-will, and mounting losses.  In this case, we would call it the “cost of poor greenality”.

As project managers we stand at the intersection of strategy and operations.  This means we have to be connected to both the lofty goals of our leaders - which are increasingly focused on sustainability - and the ongoing goals of our cousins in operations, who are "trying to be in business forever".  Why then should we end up being the ones who break the chain?  We should be a vital connection point, right?  Not a roadblock.

Can you do anything about this?

Funny you should ask.  Yes you can.  We’ve started a petition to drive more attention to the issue of sustainability thinking in project management.  It simply asks the PMI to consider already-submitted proposals about integrating sustainability thinking into the PMBOK® 5^th edition and the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Sign our petition by clicking HERE right now.

Thanks.

At EarthPM, we generally stay away from politics.  So – you may ask - why then is this blog post talking about votes? 

The reason is that there was a quote in a recent radio interview which was so striking and poignant that we couldn’t help taking it as a title.  It also makes the overall point of this post which is this: projects are about meeting objectives.  Project success – and enterprise success – needs to be defined on value, not (only) on traditional cost, scope, and schedule attributes.  This is reflected in the 4^th Edition PMBOK® Guide (see page 6).

The message of providing value came to us in a strange way as we listened to a radio program called Science Friday.

Science Friday is a tremendous radio show on the US National Public Radio (NPR) network.  Recently, Ira Flatow, the host of the show, brought in Rear Admiral David Titley of the US Navy, and director of the Navy’s Task force on Climate Change.  You can hear the entire broadcast of the referenced show here.

We think of the value of a Navy as defending the seas.  So why in the world would they be interested in global warming?  It has to do with the net value that they bring.  Whatever the cause, whatever the science, whatever one believes about climate change, if the geography of the arctic is changing,to allow open naval traffic where it wasn’t possible before – that’s something the Navy needs to know about.  So indeed, the Navy’s value is enhanced by understanding how the geography and coastlines affect their ability to defend.

Take a look at this exchange from the broadcast:

FLATOW: I'm interested in reading your biography and notes about you that you confess to at one time being a global warming skeptic.

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Yes.

FLATOW: What changed your mind?

Rear Adm. TITLEY: What really changed my mind was when you go and look at all the evidence, I think to - at least to me - I think it really showed that the climate was changing.

I was, as you might know, I was trained as a meteorologist, and you see, of course, the day-to-day and sometimes even hour-by-hour changes and variations. I watched the computer models in the '70s and the '80s, and, you know, as we all do - you know, how many times have all shoveled six inches of partly cloudy off of our driveway?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Rear Adm. TITLEY: So how, you know, if that was the accuracy, how well could we really say what was going on? But as I learned more about the topic, you see that really the climate is controlled not so much by what the day-to-day weather started as but by what are the larger things doing - what is the ocean doing? What is the sun doing? And what's our atmosphere doing?

So that really was able to show me. And the other part that maybe even is more important was just taking a look at all the different changes. One of my first jobs in the Navy, I was a navigator, and this is well before we had the global positioning system. So I may be one of the few guys who actually still know how to use a sextant and all that sort of thing.

And we are able to - when you navigate a ship, you don't just use one source of information. You use everything you can. And I kind of look at the climate the same way. So we look at the changes in the Arctic. We look at the melting of the glaciers.

We look at what's going on with the ice fields, especially in Greenland but also West Antarctica, look at the changes of the temperature in the ocean, the changes of the ocean acidity, and all of that observations, all of that evidence, if you will, together, along with my now better understanding of what is driving the climate, has sort of taken me from the, hey, I'm not sure there's really anything here, to there really is, there really is some changes going on. And to make sure that our Navy is ready in the 21st century, we have to look at these changes just as we look at changes in the political spheres and the economic spheres and the demographic concepts.

Facts.  Seek facts first.  This should be the mantra of the project manager. 

Rear Admiral Titley, now aware that there are changes in the Arctic ice, and unfettered by any other bias, is more clearly able to do his job.  This is reinforced as he takes a question from a caller, “Andy”.  Check this out:

ANDY (Caller): Hi, how are you doing today?

FLATOW: Hi there.

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Great.

ANDY: Great. Thanks for taking my call. Here in Oklahoma, we have a U.S. senator, Jim Inhofe, who seems to think that there's a lot of demagoguery and that global climate change is a hoax.

What - and if this isn't rehashing too much, but two questions. One is: What are the maybe top three or top five pieces of evidence that converted you as a meteorologist? And secondly: Do you in the Navy attribute any of the global climate change to human behavior, or are you all kind of staying out of that fray?

Rear Adm. TITLEY: Okay, well, thanks very much for the question. First, the types of evidence that at least I've looked at, and I've talked with our senior Navy leadership, is really the Arctic, is I think sort of a harbinger of the of some of the largest examples of climate change.

We have seen not only the extent of the ice in the summertime, or September, come down dramatically, but even more so the total amount of ice or how much thick ice and thin ice is up in the Arctic.

And we're seeing, really before our eyes, a very different system now in which - just 10 or 15 years ago, there was what people or scientists call multiyear ice, really thick ice last for years and years. It's probably five, 10, 15 or more feet thick. Almost all of that ice is now gone, maybe only 15, 20 percent - at the most - of the Arctic has that kind of very thick ice.

And now, the predominant kind of ice in the Arctic is single-year ice. So it melts in the summer, comes back in the winter, melts in the summer again. That's a very, very different regime.

And I kind of like watching ice because, I mean, ice doesn't vote. Ice doesn't contribute to any political party. It doesn't caucus. It just melts. And the ice kind of tells a story. So there's just one piece of evidence, but as I mentioned before, I look at many pieces.

As to the causes of climate change, again, when you look at the physics, you know, about the only things you can really change is you can change the sun and how much energy's coming in. NASA's done a pretty good job of measuring that, and it shows that pretty much within a couple of tenths of 1 percent the energy from the sun over the last 50 years has been pretty constant. Or you can change the amount of greenhouse gases. You can change the aerosols.

So when you put all this together, it looks like the greenhouse gases have a significant impact. The details, of course, get very, very complicated. It's not for the Navy to say what the policies are going to be or what they should be. But, again, I'm interested in making sure our Navy and our chief of naval operations wants to keep our Navy ready for this coming century. So we need to understand these changes to the best we can and adapt to them.

Titley’s attitude is exemplary.   Granted, he’s not a PM but he is setting a great precedent for all of us. Notice his laser-focus on objectives.  “Keep our Navy ready for this coming century”.  Not assess the validity of climate change, nor take to the table any views that may blind or disperse that focus.

Now we are quite aware that this post has quite a bit of information for you about the science of climate change, and that there is value in that (after all, even a blog post needs to produce value!).  However, we hope that you also take away the main messages: work with facts, and keep a laser focus on project objectives.  That’s the real intended value of this blog post, and we hope you enjoyed it.

If you found Rear Admiral Titley’s topic to be interesting, or just want to learn more about climate change from his perspective, we suggest this video (below) as a follow up.

Rear Admiral David Titley - Climate Change Adaptation Congress Opening Address from 3PillarsNetwork on Vimeo.

We were listening to one of our favorite podcasts the other day - Wayne Turmel's Cranky Middle Manager.  In this particular episode, Wayne was - in his usual witty and outstanding fashion - was interviewing Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, co-authors of The Orange Revolution.

The more we listened to this podcast and the more we heard these authors speak, the more we thought that the Orange* Revolution and Green Project Management had something in common other than an association with a crayon color.  Much more.

In our book, Green Project Management, we assert that the project manager, as a change agent, can be a source of change for their organization.  For example if they are to seek a connection to their organization's Environmental Management Plan (EMP) - and find tha their organization has no EMP, that you - the project manager could be the one to prompt the organization to create one.

And in The Orange Revolution, the authors study hundreds of thousands of people (350,000, to be exact) in a wide variety of organizations, and share their findings about how great teams were formed - teams with "breakthrough" capacity.  In many cases these were operational teams - groups of nurses, for example.  However the principles they expound certainly fit with project managers, and definitely can be adopted by green project managers.

For example, the authors found four essential qualities amongst these breakthrough teams:

• A noble cause
• Simple Rules  (simple, boiled down to 3: [Wowing customers, no surprises due to great communication, and mutual team support].
• Drive engagement
• Have team loyalty, sometimes at the expense of enterprise loyalty - not always popular with CEOs, but it works

In the book they go on to define 6 traits of breakthrough teams:

• Big dreams and ambitious goals
• Belief in in each other
• Belief in what the team can accomplish together;
• Take calculated risks while closely measuring results;
• Perseverence despite problems or conflicts that arise; and
• They have a "charming habit of Telling Stories" exemplifying what they are trying to achieve.

The big dreams and ambitious goals could be the dreems of making an organization as a whole more sustainable (economically, socially, and ecologically), couldn't it.  And that's one of many touch points we found.

Some others, very quickly -

Perserverence despite problems - well we know that getting people to think sustainability takes (ironically) sustained perserverence.  Telling stories - that's what we've been doing at EarthPM and it's working.  By telling stories and giving webinars on the topic of sustainability in project management we have found that our followership (heading towards 1,000 twitter followers, and an exponentially growing LinkedIn Group for example) is growing by leaps and bounds.

Bottom line: we recommend that you start with listening to Wayne Turmel's podcast regularly, but in particular the interview with Gostick and Elton.  Then, or in parallel, pick up their book, the Orange Revolution, perhaps buying it in tandem with Green Project Management.  After all - as the post heading says, they go together.

*why Orange? We knew you'd be curious...it's a nod to the authors' first book, the Carrot Principle.

We want to challenge you with the definition of what seems to be a mundane but pleasant word.

That word: success.

To do that, we're going to use an example provided from a very thoughtful post at an outstanding blog we suggest you visit, called SUKAD. 

So here is the scenario:

You are charged with building a gymnasium at a warehouse facility for an industrial company which has a large number of employees in the region.

And here is the first challenge question:

What is the project?

Many will say that it is the successful construction of the gymnasium.

Don't answer too fast! 

Now we quote directly from SUKAD:

Is the company in the business of building gymnasiums?

No!

OK, then what is the project?

Maybe we should ask the question differently, what is the business objective for the project, the business driver; business case?

Uh!

We understand. In this case we can say “improve employee health.”

To repeat and rephrase: the project is to build a gymnasium to improve employee health.

Great – now we know the project.

SUKAD goes on to discuss their four elements of project success.  And by now you know that although of course the completion of the gym (on time, meeting requirements, and within budget) is an important element of success, it's not an "end-all" measurement of success.

Here are the four measurements of success:

1. Product Success: did we deliver the gymnasium in accordance with the project detailed plan (PDP) and specifications? If yes; good, first success measure is achieved.
2. Project Management Success: did we deliver the gymnasium in accordance with the project management plan (PMP); i.e. within the established time, cost, and other metrics?  If yes; excellent, second success measure is also achieved.
3. Project Success: did we deliver the gymnasium in according to the project authorization (PAD)? Another way we can consider this is: did we deliver an acceptable and good standard gymnasium that the employees would consider using? If yes; wonderful, the third success measure is achieved. It is worth nothing here that since this can be measured shortly after completing the gymnasium, in most situations we consider the project a success and project is closed. However, we do not agree hence the need for the fourth measure.
4. Business Objective Success: We could have delivered an outstanding gymnasium and closed the project. However, the most important question is: did the project deliver the expected benefits that we anticipated when we considered the project and authorized it? Did we realize the benefits? The benefit expected is to improve employee health. It is unlikely that we will be able to give an answer at project close. We can measure the success a year or two after completion, long after the team demobilized.

As you can imagine, this last measure, business objective success, is related, at least in our minds, to the broad sense of project sustainability.  Notice that it doesn't have a thing to do with the environment, and yet it is still a sustainability issue.  We extend the view of the project beyond the deliverable and think in term of the steady-state.

Some project managers will find this objectionable.  "Out of scope!", they will say.  "Not our job!", they will declare.

We would like to agree quite strongly with SUKAD.  Whether or not they realized they had a posting on sustainability thinking, they absolutely did.

We also would like to know what you think.  Is there an advantage to you as a project manager and will you tend to do a better job as a PM if you consider these four measures?

Tell us!  We won't know until you do... and the posting will only be a success if it generates some good discussion....

Oh yeah...one of our deliverables was a link to the full SUKAD posting on this subject.

http://sukadipms.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/four-dimensions-of-success-example/

Freshly returned from the keynote address at the PMSA (Project Management South Africa) conference, "The Good in Green", we found that South Africa's project managers have a mature and considered view of project management.

One example is this article, from the PMSA magazine "The Project Manager", which questions the very definition of project success. Does it have to do only with scope, schedule, and budget?  Or - as we have been saying - should success include the success of the steady-state, ongoing use of the product of the project?

Although not strictly about sustainability, the article does correctly point out that a project is part of an endeavor of an organization, and success should be viewed in this larger context.

So- consider a highway project which goes over budget because it chose to use a paving material which (although more expensive) provides drivers with a 15% increase in gas mileage.  Is this project a failure? 

We think not. 

Have a look at the article and think about it.  We think you'll agree that it's at least worth considering this longer-term view.

Here's the full link to the article.

http://www.theprojectmanager.co.za/index.php/Other/the-elusive-concept-of-project-success.html

We're interested in your views on project success.  How much should project managers consider long-term operations as they seek to deliver the product on-time, under budget, and within scope?

But don't answer until you've read Terry Deacon's article.