A real commitment to operating a business and performing projects in an environmentally conscious and responsible way is a commitment to quality standards that minimize CO2 emissions and promote sustainability. To realize the full benefits of turning green, an enterprise must take a disciplined and systematic approach to implementing green standards.
How green should your PM practices be? Applying green practices and ideas to the management of projects is relatively new to the project management community. Adding “greenthink” to projects means finding ways to practice common-sense conservation techniques that do not hinder achieving the project’s budgetary, timeline and value-add objectives. Are you making the green grade?
One writer understands the need for carefully considering the impact and consequences of our decisions and actions, but why project management? Isn’t it everybody’s responsibility? But after researching and pondering the options out there, she realized that being green is actually pretty easy sometimes...and important.
The project management domain is full of evolving terminology and buzzwords. Just as we get comfortable with the latest acronyms, new vernacular emerges. One writer called on a colleague to learn more about being a Green PM and pursuing sustainability in project management.
As environmental concerns and sustainability become bigger issues across all aspects of society, there is an argument for taking a rather longer-term view of product development--the concept of whole lifecycle thinking, ensuring that the costs of the product are considered from birth to retirement. What can project managers do to help develop and implement the concept?
Adoption of LEED standards is typically framed as a means of reducing operating costs; the greater expense in designing and building sustainable facilities is offset by reduced energy consumption in future years. This becomes a theoretically easy business case that should be readily accepted: an investment in current periods providing future savings in costs. The challenge, however, is two-fold: it requires foresight and a willingness to invest in the long term, and there needs to be confidence that the promised benefits are realistic and attainable.
To really get environmental awareness to stick in an organization, you have to be prepared to go beyond setting an example and start to define green-aware policy and create a culture of sustainability. Here, we look at some practical, easy-to-implement ways that you can start to have a smaller environmental footprint when you execute on projects.
For those project managers practicing agile practices and methods, you already have all the ingredients in place to optimize your green initiatives. This article will attempt to illustrate how agile principles can enhance and compliment projects that have sustainability as one of its main end goals.
Companies can’t address sustainability on their own—they need project managers to do their part.
One of the world's biggest oil powers looks to sustainability to secure its future.
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