Just a reminder that 22-April-2012 is Earth Day.
Visit this official site for details.
And if you want to take action, participate in “A Billion Acts of Green” by clicking here.
Category: General Earth PM Postings
An interesting little story in the China Daily a few days ago caught our attention. It was about Seattle and Chongqing (whose name is written in Mandarin at the top of this posting). These are sister cities. You can read about the relationship between Seattle and Chongqing – which began in 1983 – here.
But back to our story. It begins:
Over the years, aircraft, spacecraft and spare parts have been Seattle’s largest exports to China. But if Mike McGinn, the mayor of Seattle, has his way, the pride of place would soon be taken by the city’s green exports to China.
During a recent trip to Chongqing municipality in Southwest China, McGinn’s team inked a memorandum of understanding to enhance cooperation in the green building sector with the fastest growing city of China to promote sustainable development.
“China has been an important market for Seattle for some time. Seattle’s exports to China include airplanes from Boeing and software from Microsoft. With China’s economy developing in a more sustainable way, we hope to export our green building expertise as well,” McGinn says.
From a project management perspective, this piece was interesting:
As many as 23,000 jobs in Seattle metro area are in renewable energy, energy efficiency, environmental remediation, and recycling and waste management, according to the city government.
McGinn says two of Seattle’s largest clusters – IT and manufacturing – are closely related to the development of building energy efficient goods and services. This has helped Seattle maintain its leading position in the US green building industry.
Of those 23,000 jobs, many of them are project management jobs. So this is opportunity knocking for many of us as PMs.
Collaborating and reaching out for new partners is an important part of sustainability – and an important lesson for project leaders. As it says in the article:
Eric Phillips, Asia market leader of the Seattle-based NBBJ, a leading architecture firm in the US, who was part of the 42-member delegation to Chongqing with McGinn, has similar views.
“Seattle is a leader in the US for sustainable development of a city. There is a lot that Chongqing can learn from that type of process. On the other hand, Chongqing is building the development in a scale that the city of Seattle has never done. A lot of cooperation can be done between the two sides,” Phillips says.
Read the whole story here.
Oh, and for t hose of you (like us) who are a little geographically-inclined, here’s a map that will help you locate Chongqing. We figure you don’t need a map of Seattle. Just sniff, follow your nose to the coffee…
Today – 22-March-2012, is World Water Day. Tomorrow, the long-anticipated film Hunger Games is released.
Coincidence?
Yeah, probably.
However, there is a connection. The world will face significant problems with water in the next few decades and beyond. In fact, at EarthPM we blogged about it very recently (see “The Water Sector” post here). And these problems are very much related to food, hunger, agriculture, and dietary habits. For example, did you know that it takes 2,400 gallons of water to produce only 1 pound of beef?
Rather than drone on about it, we decided to embed a rather short but powerful video, produced for World Water day, below.
We also encourage you to visit the World Water Day site which has facts, figures, and some simple actions that you can take as an individual – and as a project manager – to do your part to [1] become aware of the condition of the world’s water supply, and [2] do something about it.
We just finished listening to (and actively participating in) an excellent webcast by Jennifer Tharp on the PMI Global Sustainability Community of Practice (CoP). Click here to see the slides. If you visit the site they should soon have the replay available – you do need to be a member of PMI to log in and receive it. What a great job by Jennifer, and the Sustainability CoP in getting a high interest level. Kudos to all involved.
In any case, as Jennifer talked you could see people reacting in the (literal) sidebar conversation and much of it was along the lines of: “gee, these are all good ideas but I’m only the PM”, or “how do I have a conversation about this that is meaningful”, or “how can I get my line management to agree with these ideas?”.
This got me to thinking about a model I’ve been studying, a model which comes from David Kantor, and is explained in this nice, short article from MIT Sloan. I was introduced to the model in Peter Senge’s outstanding book about sustainability in business called The Necessary Revolution.
Here, from the MIT article, is how it works – with our own twist on sustainability embedded:
The model asserts that four core acts are the essential building blocks of both dysfunctional and healthy team behavior. They are:
- Move — This act establishes a direction and sets the team in motion.
- Example: “Let’s integrate sustainability into Project X. Sustainability in projects is the best idea out there.”
- Follow — The follow act provides support for the move and serves the function of completion.
- Example: “I agree with the arguments you’ve made. Adding sustainability thinking is the way to go.”
- Oppose — The oppose act questions the move that has been initiated.
- Example: “The data don’t support your claims, and this will take extra time. We’ll be in real trouble if we integrate sustainability into Project X.”
- Bystand — Bystanding provides perspective and invites the team to be more reflective. A bystander might bring in data from another team, an historic perspective, or some insight about the operations of the team itself.
- Example: “We tried some of these same ideas two years ago and they didn’t work. What do we think has changed?”
These four acts provide “direction and energy; momentum and connection; correction and elaboration; and perspective taking, reflection, and openness to the workings of teams.” In the appropriate sequences, these acts enable team members to consider a wide range of alternatives, examine each alternative in some depth, refine and elaborate the alternatives with ideas from inside and outside the team, choose an alternative, and act.
So how does this help us affect change? Well, to be effective, a change agent has to work in a balanced team, gain buy-in, and do a fair amount of “selling”. That’s not possible with an imbalanced team, or by brute-forcing your change proposal through.
From the article again:
What determines the health of the team, one that is effective and “successful,” is whether or not these core acts are performed appropriately and in the proper sequence. Any of the acts can at one point dominate, creating imbalance and damaging team health. Any of the four can also be so weakly displayed, or actively suppressed, as to create a void.
For example, a team with a weak or disabled mover cannot find direction or take a step. A team with a weak follower is stymied because the move cannot be completed. An opposer should raise legitimate concerns, but an ineffective or stuck opposer simply challenges everything, creating strife. And while the bystander’s role is to bring the team information and observations, an unbalanced bystand act can flood the system with data, sowing confusion.
Do you have these roles in your teams? If you have bought our assertion that a project manager is a change agent, do you enable yourself and your team to implement change? This model can help you do so.
You can go to the Kantor Institute and find specific tools and coaching in this area.
In any case, buy in to this idea. You are a change agent. You are a project manager. Projects are about change.
Have you ever heard your enterprise leader declare, “Let’s initiate a project to keep things exactly as they are! I want to see NO RESULTS and I want to see them NEVER!”.
Probably not.
So projects are about change. And you manage them. So…. you are an agent of change. That doesn’t HAVE to be limited to your specific projects, you can take that next step – and initiate change in the way your enterprise does its work. And you can use this model to help you gain traction. Should you decide to gain that traction in the area of sustainability, more power to you.
Better light then never!
We expect that this post may raise some eyebrows. And hopefully, it’s to let in more light.
Boston’s Big Dig project has been a long-term headache for Massachusetts drivers, taxpayers, legislators, and contractors. And if ever a project needed a contingency reserve just for aspirin, this is it.
Aside from an overspend of 1400% (with numbers in the 10s of billions of dollars), being years late…suffice it to say that there’s enough fodder in the Big Dig, in terms of lessons (not) learned, for several project management textbooks.
We want to focus on only one component of the Big Dig – something relatively simple. Lights.
Please take a moment and at least scan this article before finishing this blog post: CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE ON BIG DIG LIGHTING.
For those of you who didn’t click, here are some highlights:
Now, to be fair, we’re not sure what other lighting options were available to the project team at the time the decision was made. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that there was LED lighting available, that the lights were more expensive than fluorescent, but weighed less and would have a much longer lifetime (fact – LED lights last 12 to 15 years versus the fluorescent 2 years). Let’s also assume that the LED lights would not have the issue of, say, falling off onto traffic. Further, let’s say (and this IS true) that the LED lighting would save about $2.5M per year just in power costs, (this does not include maintenance). There is also of course a green aspect to the reduced use of energy for lighting, the reduced emissions from cars not being stalled or stopped while frequent maintenance is taking place…and on…and on…
If you had this choice – to install something which has a lower installation cost, or a lower operation cost, we ask you NOT only which you’ d choose but what THINKING would go through your head.
Choice 1: My concern is about the project. I serve my stakeholders who seem interested in keeping costs down. My focus is on the deliverable to the traffic authorities.
Choice 2: I am considering the mission of the Big Dig which is to provide reliable, safe transport for drivers in the area at the lowest overall cost for the long-term.
We are really interested in hearing which you’d choose as a project manager in this situation.
Be honest. Which would you choose and why?