An article in yesterday’s Boston Globe describes a project in Gloucester (pronounced “Gloss-tah”*), Massachusetts, in which the city will power its school and city buildings fully from wind power.  The windmills will save Gloucester at least $450,000 per year and more than $11 million over the next 25 years.  Located in one of the windiest areas of the state, averaging over 16 miles per hour, and away from any neighborhoods, this project has received little in the way of protest.

Investment in the project is about $10M, and with the savings from the agreement, the town is now jumpstarting two other projects in the next two years, a new police and fire safety building and a new elementary school.

So: project begets project begets project, and the city ends up with ongoing savings that pay back on its original investment.

Not a bad deal – winding up with savings.  And not a bad deal for all of the project managers who’ll be gainfully employed to bring these deliverables in on time, within budget, and with proper scope management.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

*really!

The irony for this blog post is quite amazing.  Astounding, actually.

I’m writing this blog post from a friend’s house, because a freak snowstorm in the northeastern US caused thousands of trees and major branches to fall on electrical transmission wires (due to excess weight from wet snow).

I had no backup power.  No generator.  No batteries.  No resource leveling.

By candlelight that night, I read a story which was about the “uneven” supply of power from renewable sources, such as wind, tide, and solar.

The article – from the Boston Globe – laments the failure of renewable energy to provide regular, “leveled” amounts of energy.  And yet, as I write this, the following day, it’s intensely sunny out.  Solar power would be very productive and reliable today.  The electricity provided by non-renewable sources, though, is unavailable, eliminated by the effect of  hundreds of downed tree limbs have taken out the “reliable” standard electrical power supply.

There’s a connection to Project Management here, and it’s multi-faceted.

Here are two of those facets: Opportunity, and a connection to Resource Leveling.

1. Opportunity knocks.

The article discusses several very interesting projects and developments around the effort to store energy from uneven sources (tide, solar, wind) so as to provide a steady-state supply.  So there are opportunities galore for project management.

Says the article: “The challenge for people developing renewable power projects is that you get a low price if you can only provide sporadic power,’’ explains Rob Day, an investor at Black Coral Capital in Boston who focuses on the energy industry. “If you can deliver a consistent load of power, you can get perhaps double the price, so developers might be willing to invest in additional equipment.’’

In New Hampshire, a start-up called SustainX is designing and testing compressed air storage systems. Founder Dax Kepshire says the technology could store power from any sort of generating facility. Electricity from the facility powers an electric motor that pulls air into a maze of pipes and compresses it to about 3,000 pounds per square inch. (A typical car tire is inflated to about 30 pounds per square inch.) “When you reverse the process, uncompressing the air drives the same electric motor, which functions as a generator,’’ Kepshire says.  Is there opportunity here?  Well, SustainX has raised $24 million in private financing, along with a $5.4 million grant from the Department of Energy.  That’s going to provide some work for project managers, for sure.

General Compression, a company from Newton, MA, has raised $75 million in funding. The company  plans to use “underground geologic formations’’ to store the compressed air.  They are – one could say – “caving in” to pressure.  Sorry.

Other companies in the Boston area, A123 Systems, Boston-Power, and 24M Technologies – are working on large-scale energy storage systems. “We’re still in the R&D phase,’’ says Throop Wilder, chief executive of Cambridge-based 24M, which received $10 million in venture capital funding last year. Like executives at SustainX, Wilder wonders whether his company will find interested buyers in Asia and Europe before the United States.“Even though the US doesn’t believe in climate change, the rest of the world does,’’ he says.

2. Resource Leveling

When you think of what’s going on here, whether it’s compressed air, batteries, or whatever, it should sound familiar.  Why? What these companies are doing is something with which we project managers are already quite familiar.  It’s resource leveling resource leveling.   What’s resource leveling?   From an IBM source, we have this nice explanation:

 Resource leveling is the project management function of resolving project resource over-allocation. By definition over-allocation means that a resource has been assigned more work than can be accomplished in the available time as dictated by the resource’s calendar definition.

In most scenarios, over-allocations can be remedied manually by extending tasks or moving them to accommodate the resource’s availability.

In other instances, however, schedules can be impacted not only by the resources’ assignments in the current project, but by planned and proposed assignments in other projects as managers compete for the most critical resources in an attempt to align them with the most critical initiatives.

As well, project constraint dates, estimate to complete forecasts that do not align with the constraints and dependencies can all play a role in whether a manager chooses to level or manually adjust the project schedule.

So in PM, we have a need for a resource (power) and not enough power to meet that need – at times – and too much power (for example when it’s very windy) when we don’t need it.
You want more?  More, more more?  We have resources – right on the level.

• You can read more about the energy technologies here.
• And you can read more about Resource Leveling in this nifty article from Penn State University here.

Keep tuned to EarthPM for more stories like this that are right at the intersection of sustainability and project management.

Project Managers: May the Force be with you.

Take a look at this document. (Click here).  Then come back here when you’re done.  We’ll wait…

Dum de dah….dee dee dum…dum…. OH, you’re back.  Good.

Okay, we know that many of you (you know who you are)  have not actually read the document, even though we told you it was short.  So (alas…) we’ll summarize it for you.  The “it” is a fine summary of how Sustainability is tied to innovation, and it’s provided well-respected consulting firm called Deloitte.  Perhaps you’ve heard of them.

“Sustainability helps drive innovation through design constraints – the need or desire to reduce or substitute resources used, such as energy, carbon, water, materials, and waste. This focus on reduction or substitution can create a powerful driver for developing  innovative products and operating models.

Examples of how Sustainability Strategy 2.0 thinking drives innovation include:

• Commodity and raw material availability and use. Can we procure all inputs for our production operations? How are environmental events affecting biological stocks? Is consumption depleting nonrenewable resources?

• Energy consumption and cost. Are significant fluctuations in the price of carbon-based fuels likely to continue? Can we reduce our energy intensity to maintain or increase production but use less energy?

• Emissions and waste. Will legislation cause us to account for the cost of greenhouse gas emission? How would the rollout of packaging or waste disposal taxes affect our business?

• Water availability and quality. Will increasing water scarcity affect our ability to use water in production and manufacturing? Will stricter regulations require us to rethink production?

• Demand for sustainable products. How much do consumers and our extended value chain care about the sustainability attributes of our products? Are they willing to pay more for “greener” offerings?”

The report ends with this – in gigantic font:

Conclusion: A broader view of sustainability leads to value creation.

We like this report.  It echos what a lot of leaders are saying.  We just blogged about Ford’s leadership, and prior to that we have quoted Marvin Odom of Shell, in an excellent report from Sloan MIT, in which the Shell Oil President says that sustainability is a major engine of innovation for his company.

And here’s where the Force comes in.

Think about it.  If you’re in electronics, as a project manager, what did the transistor, the chip, the processor do for your career?  How many tens of thousands of projects were launched only because of those innovations?  If you’re in IT, think about the microprocessor.  Or Agile software development.  You know that these innovations have either launched or facilitated millions of projects.  And on and on, with the laser, new developments in pharmaceuticals, materials… the list is nearly infinite.

So if you buy into the idea that we, as project managers, count on innovation as our lifeblood, you should look forward to new innovations coming from – you guessed it – sustainability thinking in organizations.  We preach that project managers need to pick up this form of thinking for the pure value it brings us as PMs.  But with this post we want you to recognize that it is also a driving force for the very projects that keep us employed in the first place.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Yoda is green….

Listen and watch.  The leaders get it.  Will the middle managers, and – closer to home – the project managers?

This post does not need a lot of words.  Just sit down and listen to the great-grandson of Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone as he talks about vehicles, gridlock, and the environment.  Listen also for all of the new project management work that is implied by this excellent TED talk.

Click on the image below to watch this video.  It’s worth it.

 Click here in case clicking on the image above doesn’t work.

At EarthPM we are focused on sustainability.  And projects.  And where they insect — er, we mean intersect.

But it’s not always about wind farms and biofuel factories and  pollution.  Nor is it always purely about economics.

When it comes to sustainability, we have to always remember that at its root, the word itself is about sustenance.  And one of the most basic things most of us take for granted is drinking water.  Drinking water is liquid sustenance.  And many people do not have access to it.

You can learn more about this problem here:

http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/

In a recent edition of The Economist, we came across a very inspirational little beetle – the Namib beetle (Stenocara gracilipes), which has evolved a unique mechanism to drink – it collects moisture from the early-morning fog that is produced when cool ocean wind from the Atlantic collide with the hot desert air.

The beetle’s wings have bumps made of a hydrophilic substance that attracts water droplets. The droplets grow larger until their weight causes them to run off into troughs in the beetle’s wings. These troughs are covered with a waxy water-repelling substance which has the effect of rolling the droplets down the beetle’s inclined body towards its mouth. The insect then promptly drinks them.

Using this principle – and building on ideas that have been used for decades by organizations such as FogQuest, Shreerang Chhatre, an MIT graduate student has developed a simple and inexpensive way to produce drinking water.

Here is the connection to projects (this segment taken from the article):

The ideal locations for fog harvesting are mountainous and desert regions where fog is present but water sources are far away. Mr Chhatre is setting up a pilot project in South Africa that will use some of the new techniques, and he is trying to organise another in India. Using a coated aluminium mesh, he conservatively estimates that it is possible to collect about one litre of water daily from a mesh of one square metre. Under ideal conditions, he says, that could increase by a factor of ten, plucking plenty of water from thin air, as it were.

So there you have it: sustenance (water), and a means to solve an important problem for people in need, and a project as the means to do it.

That’s what it’s all about.

Take a look at the image at the top of this posting. Are those ‘flowers’ spinning?

C’mon. Look at them for a while, or glance at them while you read this.

Or, look back and forth for a moment.

Are they moving?

Sure looks that way.

We know that you think they are.
But they are not.  Well, at least we can say with absolute certainty that they  have not been animated in any way with software.  It is indeed a still image. You perceive motion due to the way your brain processes images.  So it’s about perception and reality. And you can see that you’ve had some trouble with this even though you are viewing solid, clear-cut shapes.

So if there’s trouble for the human brain when clear-cut shapes are involved, imagine the trouble we have with the squishy topic of sustainability.

Take this into account along with our most recent posts about translating ideas and strategy into operations – and the role of the project manager as the bridge between strategy and operations.  Combining these two ideas, you can see that it would be important for the project manager to understand the brand identity – the messaging – that their organization is trying to give their customers and stakeholders.  And it also is important for PMs to understand how that message is currently being perceived by those customers and stakeholders – and where gaps exist in that perception.

We’ve located a superb resource in this area.  It’s called the Sustainability Leadership Report, produced by Brandlogic and CRD Analogic.  This report looks at ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) factors amongst 100 prominent brands across a bunch of industries and across the globe.

In their own words, the goals of this study were to:

• Provide new insights on the opportunities and risks global corporations may face in the investment community, among supply chain partners and in the market for talent. These insights are based on:

––The degree of alignment or misalignment of perceived versus actual ESG performance.
––Perceived versus actual ESG performance relative to competitors and exemplars.

• Provide an objective basis for companies to take internal initiatives that address the highlighted opportunities and risks among key constituencies by identifying specific priority areas for potential investment and action.

• Establish a statistically valid approach and benchmark for measuring progress over time on both the actual and perceived dimensions of ESG performance.

To compare perception to reality, the study developed two “scores” or indexes, which they then compared to each other:

• SRS (Sustainability Reality Score): 175 metrics in environmental, social, and governance, (ESG) 5 key performance indicators in ESG, and 1,200 rated corporations
• SPS (Sustainability Perception Score): Over 16,000 company ratings, including 100 prominent global corporations, in 6 major countries (China, Germany, India, Japan, the UK, and the US).

Then, as most good consulting companies (including ours) do, they came up with a powerful 2×2 matrix which looks like this:

Challengers, Leaders, Laggards, and Promoters.  These are the four categories that fall out of the analysis.

Here is a summary of the results – we know it’s probably too small to read – that’s intentional because we want you to see the report in its full context (link below).

Where’s your company in this matrix?

What does it mean for the company?

What does it mean for your company’s customers?  Suppliers?  Contractors?  Partners?

What does it mean for its (your) projects?

What does it mean to YOU?

We’re here to tell you that it means alot.  Knowing your company’s ESG (or Triple Bottom Line, as we like to put it) goals and objectives is a source of power for you as a project manager, and knowing how well those goals and objectives are perceived and real in terms of your project’s customers and stakeholders is critical to you, your projects, and your enterprise.

This report provides you quite a bit of intelligence (read that as power) as a project manager.  Take advantage of this.

Here is a link to the full report. You can thank us later.

One of our very favorite planets has its own day today.

Earth.

Our rock – and home to all of our projects – and project managers.

Here on EarthPM we obviously are focused on environmental issues as they apply to project management, but remember – it’s all about the Quadruple Bottom Line™ – Planet, People, Profit, and Projects. Today we acknowledge the ultimate importance of the Planet - our planet – Earth.

Visit the Earth Day site for ideas on individual projects and initiatives:

http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2011

Happy Earth Day!

Dow Chemical, realizing the potential inventiveness and proximity to the process of their employees, has initiated a program to seed $100M worth of energy efficiency projects, fueled by employee ideas.

In this story posted yesterday at greenbiz.com, we find the following key bit: “Dow will split the $100 million among its business units and manufacturing sites that propose projects with the biggest energy and greenhouse gas reductions along with accelerated cost savings.  So not only is Dow looking to its employees for ways to be more efficient and conserve energy, it’s putting them in competition with one another, in a sense, to lure out the most promising projects.”

Note the prolific use of the word project - this is no coincidence. Should you – as a project manager – take note of this initiative?  No, absolutely not, unless you’d like to reap some of that seed money and find and/or keep a good paying job.

Of course you should ‘take note’.  More than that, you should be building your knowledge and vocabulary in sustainability and in sustainability project management  (and we would send you right here to do that).  Beyond any altruistic reasons (and there are also plenty of them) we argue that this is another example of the business reason to take notice, and even better, take action.  The leaders of your company get this.  So it’s simple: you need to get on board, too.

So…. aside from that, what do you think of our new, fresh web look?  Any comments?

One of the things that we assert is that as a Project Manager, you are the “business end” of business ends.

Let that soak for a minute.  Roll it around up there in your head.

If this will help you, here is the definition of the first use of the term business end, as an expression: “The part of a tool or other similar item, that is physically used for its operation, rather than the part which is held”. The second reference to a business end is that of a business objective.

So back to that first definition – the business end, like the hammerhead in this photo.  It’s the point of impact.  It’s where the rubber hits the road (or the hammerhead hits the nail).  It’s where sparks fly.  It’s where things get done.

And that’s you, Mr. Project Manager.  It’s you, Ms. Project Manager.

So if we are the business end of business ends – we had better know what those business ends are, hadn’t we?

It’s for that reason we direct your attention to the State of the Green Business Report (link below), which was released today.

It helps for us to increase our greenality – our vocabulary in all things green, about sustainability, and whether we like it or not, how our enterprises are showing their “earthy” face to the world.

Here are some examples from the report:

• Proctor & Gamble made a commitment to power all of their factories with renewable energy within the next ten years;
• FedEx committed to improve vehicle fuel efficiency by 20 percent by 2020;
• Walmart pledged to sell $1 billion of fresh produce sourced from 1000 small- and medium-sized farmers;
• Hasbro promised that 75 percent of its paperboard packaging will come from recycled materials in 2011

Of course – on top of the fact that knowing these tidbits helps you improve your knowledge of sustainable business, you also must, by now, recognize that any one of those bullets is the trigger for at least ONE program or project!

We’re not yet sophisticated enough to know our readers’ demographics, such as your age.  We do know that EarthPM is enjoying immense popularity, and that the visits are coming from all over the world and from diverse sources.  But we don’t know our visitors that well, other than you’re interested in project management, sustainability, and most likely, your careers.  We do remember Sputnik, because we are (now how do we put this?) well-seasoned PMs who have been in industry since the 1970s.  Old, in other words.

So, since we don’t know your age, we don’t know whether you remember Sputnik.  Ah yes, dear old Sputnik.  President Obama invoked its memory last night in his State of the Union address.  Here is the key extract:

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology — (applause) — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.”

Now, when the President says “especially clean energy technology”,  your ears should perk up – whether you work in America or not.  This is significant.  President Obama is issuing a challenge not unlike President Kennedy did when he promised to land a man on the moon.

How many NASA project managers did that employ?  How many government contracts were issued that, in turn, generated projects for project managers to manage for years to come?   We calculated the answer: it was 349,331 jobs.  Okay, so we made that up.  But it was a lot.

The President, as he is prone to do, gave a specific example:

“Already, we’re seeing the promise of renewable energy. Robert and Gary Allen are brothers who run a small Michigan roofing company. After September 11th, they volunteered their best roofers to help repair the Pentagon. But half of their factory went unused, and the recession hit them hard. Today, with the help of a government loan, that empty space is being used to manufacture solar shingles that are being sold all across the country. In Robert’s words, “We reinvented ourselves.”"

These “reinventions” will be happening to businesses large and small.  Even if you don’t reinvent yourself, you will likely be called on – as a project manager – to lend your talent to a reinvention.

Will you be ready?

You can find the entire transcript of President Obama’s State of the Union address here.

…and for you youngsters who know not of Sputnik, you can quench your curiosity here.