People, Planet, Profits & Projects

In our last post on EarthPM, we talk about the possible connection between "Superstorm Sandy" and climate change.  And we of course make a connection to projects and project management.  And you know, we did a pretty good job.  But it's also good to know when someone else, someone with even more knowledge, expertise, and experience on the issue at hand, says it better than you.

And that's the case with Andrew Winston.

As you may know, Winston and Esty's book Green to Gold was the inspiration for our book, Green Project Management.  Winston and Esty were so amazingly convincing in that book (and follow-up efforts since) that they have continued to inspire us.

With that, we'd like to encourage you to read Andrew Winston's full blog post on the topic, which follows along the lines of our posting but gives an even stronger business perspective.

Please read Winston's entire blog post, "Should Companies Care If Hurricane Sandy Was "Caused" By Climate Change?"

If you're impatient (and which project manager isn't?) here are a couple of key extracts:

It's about business continuity, stupid!

"Take the example of one of my clients, a Fortune 200 consumer products company. As the VP of global risk management told me, the most expensive events in company history in every weather category (flood, earthquake, hail, wind, etc.) occurred in the last few years. After making $50 million in insurance claims in 2011 alone, the company's insurance rates will certainly rise. But that's a side issue; the real problem is the constant threat to business continuity. At one of its large manufacturing plants in Asia, a drought stopped production for 3 weeks."

Risk Assessment will be sexier

" Smart companies will be examining supply chains and operations very closely for risks associated with water shortages, floods, storms, and resource constraints. Risk assessment is going to get much sexier and much more important to global organizations. Their leaders will also seize the opportunity to offer products and services that help other companies and society deal with a world of weird weather. Think drought-resistant crops, new insurance products, distributed energy systems (so homeowners won't care if the power goes out), and perhaps boats for getting around Wall Street."

Let's get real!

"..let's get real about business impacts. If you're going to really assess risk to your operations now and in the future, you have to understand how climate change will increase the likelihood of severe events and what it will mean for your value chain. Not doing so would be costly, stupid, and irresponsible to your shareholders.

Companies are waking up to the immediate impacts. The most recent report from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), compiled with the help of PwC (full disclosure: my consulting firm has a partnership with the U.S. arm of PwC), shows that most global companies acknolwedge climate-driven risks. Fully 37% of those reporting to the CDP — most of the world's largest companies — say that climate change is already creating business risk (up from 10% in just two years). Another 43% see risk to the business within the next 10 years."

So as we've always said - it doesn't matter where you are on the political spectrum, the climate science spectrum, or any spectrum for that matter.  The bottom line is, well, the bottom line.  And the organizations in which we work - or to whom we offer project management services of any kind, are taking note of these observations - and you would serve yourself - and your organizations (and perhaps the planet, but that's just our opinion) better by paying attention and acting on the basis of solid information, which means getting smart about this topic.  We intend to help - just stay tuned to this blog and EarthPM and we will do our best to provide you the latest from industry thought leaders.  Stay smart - and stay safe!

It’s not that we are changing our perspective, considering the title of our book is Green Project Management, but as you will find in our book, as well as in our webinars, courses, and real life, that it is really about sustainability.  We just don’t want to limit your thinking about the process.  Beside, just thinking in terms of “green” makes it sound like project managers should only be concerned with the environment.  The natural environment is of concern to the project manager, of course, but sustainable project management goes way beyond that.   And, we will certainly continue to focus of the environment (green) as an important part of sustainability.  The title of this blog is People, Planet, Profits & Projects and could be subtitled Sustainable Project Management. 

Not as an apology, but as a way to put things in perspective, we would have preferred our book title to be reflect sustainable project management, but our publisher thought it best to title the book the way it is as a catalyst to further discussion.  We are grateful that they did make that suggestion because it did start the discussion.  Further, we were given a choice of covers, and we chose the one with the “money tree,” because that is what being a sustainable project manager means.  It means saving precious resources when you can, thus saving the enterprise money. 

And with all of the buzz created around the intersection of green business and project management, we wanted to be clear about where we stand.  First let me say that we are grateful for all the buzz.  When we first started talking about the intersection, it was a blinking yellow light, although at one point we thought that it might change to a blinking red light, first stop, then you can proceed.  So we carefully approached the intersection using a combination of brakes and accelerator.  Now that we’ve gotten safely through the intersection and are continuing down the road, we are still cautious of the traffic.  We sometimes get caught up in our analogy, so please bear with us.

We like heavy traffic when it comes to sustainable project management, we can only hope that the drivers speeding along the highway are good drivers, paying attention to the other drivers and thereby creating a good environment so that all can deliver their products safely (to keep within the analogy).  However, what we’ve seen is that like anything, when a market becomes popular, more and more “trucks” enter the highway carrying products to that market.

So, not to mince words any more, although you can tell by our blogs that we love analogy and puns, make sure that the training you signed up for is the training you receive.  If you want to know about green/sustainable project management, there is a right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it.  In the world of PM, there are many, many initials and credentials you can get;  PMP, PMI-ACP, Prince2® Certification, Masters Certificates in Project Management from various colleges and universities, etc.  The key message here is that these certificates and credentials are “sanctioned” by careful consideration of course content.  In the case of PMP, for example, a rigorous course of study and document experience is evaluated by the Project Management Institute, a not-for-profit organization chartered for the purpose of forwarding the discipline of project management. 

Right now, there is no such organization for sustainable/green project management.  Although ISIS-PM, still in its infancy, it is intended to do just that.  And, it takes a long time to put something like this together with the integrity, rigor and discipline that it deserves. Stay tuned for more information on ISIS-PM in the coming months.  In the meantime, we echo the words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, from the television show Hill Street Blues, “Let’s be careful out there.”

John S. Hoffman, an innovative US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official, died late last month.  We'd like to take a moment to point out some of his work and connect it to our discipline - project management.

In the US, Hoffman was responsible for Energy Star. 

One of his quotes really impressed us - he wrote this in 1992:

"profitably prevent pollution...using voluntary market enhancing programs"

Here's a little blurb about how that got started:

Legend has it that ENERGY STAR began 20 years ago after Hoffman conducted an informal walk-through of EPA offices. He wanted to see if employees remembered to turn off their computers when they left their workstations. He was not pleased with what he saw. He figured that if many of his staff members – who were well aware of the link between energy use and greenhouse gas emissions – forgot or found it too inconvenient to shut off their computers, the situation in the general population was far worse. He thought that a technical solution was needed – a way to automatically power down computers when not in use. And thus, a “star” (or at least a twinkle of a star) was born.

Source: http://ase.org/efficiencynews/memoriam-john-s-hoffman-father-energy-star

It worked - and continues to work.

This program, according to an editorial in today's Boston Globe has saved $230 billion in electrical bills and has avoided 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon emissions in the US alone.  Hoffman's goal - and this is strangely reminiscent of our own blog title - was to "profitably prevent pollution, including greenhouse gases, using volutary market enhancing programs".  His programs were instituted with no cost to consumers.

The connection we see to project management is multi-faceted.  First, the institution of these programs were projects in and of themselves.  Secondly, this shows what one change agent (and we, as PMs are nothing if not change agents) can do.  Thirdly, this shows how partnerships of government, industry, and consumers can be built to further a program objective.  We as project managers do this routinely for our projects.  We can learn from Mr. Hoffman's inspiring work, not only the focus on the environment, but the pure intelligence of consortium-building that he demonstrated.

20,000 organizations now participate in Energy Star programs.

These organizations have had a huge impact on people.

They have helped reduce the impact of energy-hungry devices on the planet.

They have helped companies save money and increase profit.

And they have launched many successful progrmas and projects.

So you see the connection and the reason we choose to pay tribute to Mr. Hoffman's legacy here.

Get more detail about this "warrior for the ages" (Boston Globe Editorial, today, 16-October-2012) at these sites:

Boston Globe, "Energy-saving guru"

Think Progress story

Ocean acidity may conjure up a scene from the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy throws a bucket of water towards the burning scarecrow and accidently hits the witch, “I’m melting, I’m melting.”  But ocean acidity is much more subtle than that.  A recent article in the Washington Post on-line headline “Ocean Acidification Emerges as New Climate Threat”, Juliet Eiperin from the post talks with Kris Holderied, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Kasitsna Bay Laboratory, Alaska about the issue.

NOAA’s major concern is with the threat to U.S. fisheries in the region (The North West and Alaska) due to “human-generated carbon emissions” making the ocean’s waters more acidic.  According to article, the oceans absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide we put in the air.  Presently, the sea is 30% more acidic that before the industrial revolution, and it is predicted that at the current rate of global carbon emissions, the oceans acidity could “double by 2100.”  In other words, pH levels are dropping.  The falling pH levels could affect the nervous systems of some species of fish making them more vulnerable to predation, and inhibit the growth of reefs, important nurseries.  Some areas are more vulnerable than others.  For instance, along the Pacific shelf, deeper water comes up and spills over the shelf.  Increasing acidity levels in this water.  That increased acidity is killing oyster larvae farmers are growing.  Oyster farmers off the coasts of Washington and Oregon recognized this potential issue early and were able to institute projects to to time their intakes of water to reduce the results from this upwelling.   As a result, and if we look at the cost-benefit for this project, “a $500,000 investment in pH monitoring equipment, saved the oyster industry $34 million in one year (2011).”  That’s a ratio we can certainly live with.

The domino effect of these issues is sometimes not so obvious.  But in this case, the spat (the term for the oyster larvae) are used by oyster farmers as far away as Homer, Alaska.  A loss of those spats has industry wide ramification. 

Another project spawned (excuse the pun) from the research is the placing of 4 pH monitoring buoys throughout the state of Alaska to study the pH along the Alaskan shoreline.  However, it is a fair-and-balanced study.  Scientists are also studying the effect of lower pH on surf smelt, a species particularly suited to thrive in lower pH environment, and the Dungeness crab that does not do well in low pH.  The Commonwealth of Virginia has funded a project for six shellfish hatcheries to monitor the water chemistry of the Chesapeake Bay to study the effects of fertilizer runoff, another potential for contributing to water acidity.

But we think that this statement brings it home, not only to business, but to the microcosm of business we call project management:  “When you ask why does ocean acidification matters, often we’re interested because of the fish we eat and the things we make money off of,” said Shallin Busch, a research ecologist at the NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington.