People, Planet, Profits & Projects

My best friend saves Wall Street Journal Reports for me.  He is very disciplined and reads the Journal front to back every morning.  I’m not so disciplined or inclined.  While we share a profound love of fly fishing and the outdoors, he also knows that I am also interested in sustainability.   Thanks to him, I read a recent Journal Report focused on energy, or rather “Investing in Energy.”  This is the first of many blogs about energy and how it affects the triple bottom line (3BL).  They probably won’t be in any sequence as interesting blog subjects come across our desks daily.  We wish we had time to blog all the time, but alas, there are other things we need to do.  To find out more of what we are doing, take a look at our home site, www.earthpm.com.

Continuing with the thought in the first paragraph, while we were preparing this blog post we saw a brief note from T. Boone Pickens, Chairman of BP Capital Management, an energy-focused hedge fund, in the latest issue of Parade Magazine.   He makes the point that we can affect our national bottom line by reducing our impact on foreign oil.  That’s not too original of a thought, but he further makes the point on how to do it.  We should cultivate our own resources more.  Domestic oil is 15% less expensive that foreign oil, and our natural gas is 75% less expensive.  If we were to convert 8 million heavy trucks to natural gas, we could save 3 million barrels of oil per day.  We now get about 4.5 million barrels a day from OPEC, so, according to Mr. Pickens, we would reduce our need for foreign oil by 2/3rds.  Natural gas is not only cleaner than diesel, and, by increasing our production of natural gas, we would create jobs.  Job creation = more people paying taxes = more revenue to the government = debt reduction or at the least somewhere to get money, rather than printing it or borrowing it from foreign govenments.   Just a word of caution, we do need to make sure that we protect the environment when we call for the increase in use or extraction of any of our natural resources.  Back to the Journal. 

In an article by Yuliya Chernova, she highlights an interesting project to modify parking lots.  Now parking lots are notorious for causing pollution problems. Runoff from them tends to be a pollutant itself, lack of surface area to allow rainwater to percolate into the soil and additional heat generated by its surface are just a couple of ways in which a parking lot can be viewed in the negative.  However, there are some parking lot owners who have discovered that can “double up on their under-utilized property, and to offset their utility bills at the same time.”  Putting canopies over the parking spaces that contain solar panels does just that.  “One of the largest solar carports is now under construction at Rutgers University’s Livingston Campus in Piscataway, NJ.  Rutgers expects to save $28 million in electricity over 20 years.”  However, it must be understood that it is not just money that drives sustainability projects.  This project will cost about $41 million before federal and state tax incentives.  However, it reduce the surface area of the paved part of the parking lot, reducing the polluted runoff, and reduce the strain on the electric grid in the area. 

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