Well, here in the US, we just moved our clocks forward. We’re now in that gap in which Europe is a little closer to us for another week or so, until they move theirs forward also.
And that means that Spring is just around the corner.
And with Spring comes growth.
For EarthPM, LLC that growth has arrived in the form of some expanded opportunities. With this post, we’re very proud to announce that we have been contracted by APMG-International (the parent company of the entity that oversees the PRINCE2 Credential) to produce a manual for Foundational level qualification in Sustainability in Business. We’ve been recognized for our work in Sustainability in Project Management – this is solid affirmation that our value goes beyond projects and into the full scope of sustainability as applied to business in general. Our manual will be part of a training and qualification program which will yield a legitimate, vetted, testable qualification in the field of Sustainability in Business.
We’re of course, thrilled to tackle this new work.
Aside from the challenge (and accompanying revenue), this work strengthens our understanding of how projects, project management, and most importantly, project managers fit into the overall business picture.
We encourage you to stay tuned to our blog for more news on this and other projects that continue to fuel our growth.
I was reading through the recent issue of Fly Fisherman, surprise, surprise, and I beside a great article written by a good friend, I can across a short article in their “Newscasts” section entitled “New” Insects. It referred to an article in the journal of the American Entomology Society identifying 99 new insect species. This is result of a research project undertaken by the Lake Champlain Research Institute in New York’s Adirondack Park. The significance to sustainability comes under the heading biodiversity.
The new species, members of the mayfly, caddisfly, and stonefly families, are interesting because these insects are considered to be “the canary in the mine” or “indicators for ecosystem integrity.” “Certain mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies are intolerant of pollution.” Seeing these new species could be indicators that the ecosystem is either rebounding or holding its own against a barrage of environmental issues pressing in on the park. Not the least of which is the increase in population and the need for more land, habitat destruction and global climate change. It is also a study to establish a baseline so that in the future, effects of a storm like Tropical Storm Irene, or the effect of dredging of the Ausable River can be evaluated against that baseline. According to Luke Myers, chief investigator, the “study validates the land-use protections that are in place for the Adirondack Park.”
On the fly fisherman side of it (I have to add that), the researchers said “the data could be used by expert fly fishers who rely on imitations of aquatic insects to catch trout.” It means new fly patterns to tie. Myers said “We’ve got a more complete understanding of the fly fishing menu, so to speak, and also the times of year that these insects are emerging in these streams. We have good phrenology data from when these species emerge and how they emerge: If its synchronized or they spread out, if all the same species emerge over a long time in the summer months, and things like that.” Yeah, a plethora of different flies to tie, and yeah for biodiversity.
Nature is amazing. I remember one evening on Vermont’s Mettawee River, standing in a cloud of mayflies from the riffles at my feet. It was truly an incredible experience, one that I hope continues into the future.
We’d like to start you off here with some statistics about China. And H2O.
China accounts for 30% of the world’s population but has only 7% of the world’s freshwater supply.
Since 2008, China has added more than 50 million people. Stop for a moment and think about that.
That’s like adding two Australias. Or ten Greeces. In just a few years!
While China has been adding these people to its population, the freshwater resources available to this expanding population have dropped by over 11%. There’s a danger for China that their annual consumption of 600 billion cubic meters will leave a deficit of more than 200 million cubic meters by 2030. The government has taken note of this. According to a current article in China Daily, the government’s Ministry of Water Resources says that it will invest more than US$22B on water conservancy projects this year alone – and a stunning 1.8 trillion yuan (US$190 billion) by 2015 (again, in just a few years).
That’s a lot of projects – and loads of project managers, who are best off understanding sustainability issues from the ground (water) up.
Take desalination as an example. Another article in the same issue of China Daily says that current capacity for desalination in China is 660,000 cubic meters. By 2015, that number is planned to increase to 2.6 million cubic meters, nearly quadrupling their capability.
Opportunity abounds. Here is a snippet from the article:
Private equity and venture capital firms have been spearheading the “green gold” rush in China. PE and VC investment in China’s water sector has surged more than nine times to $406 million in 2011 from $44.16 million in 2010, according to consultancy firm China Venture.
“In terms of the water sector, China is not one of our company’s priorities in the world. It is our top priority,” says Jorge Mora, Asia CEO of Veolia Environmental Services.
“There is no country in the world that would have sustainable development without water. If you don’t have enough water, it affects every aspect of your life. Your GDP growth and your development can be challenged or even stopped due to a severe shortage of water,” Mora says.
The problem with water in China is exacerbated by the huge manufacturing industry there. Often, and as recently as January, 2012, water pollution incidents take place that don’t even make the news in the West.
For example:
According to China’s Ministry of Water Resources, as many as 300 million people in China’s rural areas lack access to safe drinking water. Ma Jun, whose environmental organization has been naming and shaming water polluters in China, says that about one-third of the water that is consumed in the urban areas are supplied by impure water sources in China. Ma says the number of companies that illegally emit wastewater in rivers and lakes in China has increased from 2,500 in 2006 to about 60,000.
The most recent case of water pollution: an estimated 20 metric tons of cadmium was discharged by a mining company in the Longjiang River in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region on Jan 15, with cadmium content 80 times higher than the prescribed safe limits.
Check out this video by futurist Patrick Dixon, who covers the China water problem and beyond.
Not good. Not good at all. On the other hand – it’s a big opportunity for growth.
And folks – this is just about China, whose water problems are obviously gigantic. But have a look at the map at the top of the posting. It’s not just China. Water resource problems are global.
The opportunity for project managers is immense – in line with the problems outlined above. Get smart about sustainability, project managers – within your own projects, and about sustainability in general. The demand, as does water, will seek its own level. And that level will be high.
Project managers often ask how they can contribute to the effort to reduce waste, improve efficiency and, if possible, reduce their impact on the environment, even if they’re not working in the energy or chemical business, for example. Workforce management is all about coordinating the logistics of a project through a single application or system. This will typically include the planning and tracking of schedule activities, milestones, resource allocation, capacity, costs and expected revenue.
Mobile workforce management means more accurate records and better communications for businesses, especially those which have staff who work from home or off-site.
In the past, workforce management tended to rely heavily on the use of static, and often printed spread sheets, but manual processes like these not only consume significant amounts of paper, they slow down workforce management and make it less efficient. Mobile workforce management applications allows for easier top level monitoring by managers, and means that project documents are instantly updated and always accurate. Streamlining these project processes can lead to better overall business efficiency and having this data in place means that if project managers change jobs or are absent for one reason or another, someone else can pick up the project and find a full and up-to-date account of goals, objectives, executed activities, planned activities, resource allocation and more.
Of course it’s essential that project staff within a business can properly account for the time they spend at work, but manually filling in forms can become repetitive and tedious, especially when paperwork needs to be duplicated for other departments or customers for example. Collecting this data digitally means it can be copied easily and instantly, and means that everyone can view or edit the most up to date version of the document at any given time. It makes progress reports more accurate and the data itself is more flexible and versatile than hard copies.
Mobile workforce management isn’t just about monitoring activities and resources; it’s also about improving project communications. Mobile workforce management tools can also be used to schedule workloads, report results, perform call checks to remote staff and by remote staff to report incidents or update progress. It means that remote project team members will have better access to current data, even when several people are working on a document at one time.
Aside from these great business justifications to switch to mobile project workforce management , there is the simple and straightforward reduction paper use (both its acquisition and disposal). It’s not just about the environment. Your current level of paperwork might be ok, but is your business scalable? If the size of the company and its activities doubled this year would your workforce management procedures be able to cope? These are pertinent questions, and if you want to enable your business to grow fast and take on new projects, you should ensure that paperless management systems are in place.
Alan Cairns writes on a number of subjects including mobile workforce management and mobile facilities management.
Here we take a detour from our focus on the pure intersection of sustainability and project management.
Or do we? You be the judge.
When I was in University a long, long, long time ago, I had a course in “Music Appreciation”. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. We had to learn the characteristics of music as it developed from the 1500s through the 1900s. For our quizzes and exams, the professor would play a piece of music (only a few seconds) and we would have to determine the composer, the year, the style, and so forth. It was a memorable course and I still (all these years later) can usually tag a piece of music to within 50 years or so after hearing only a few notes.
In any case, during this class, near the start, if I remember correctly, the professor played a piece of music, asking us after playing it, to raise our hands if we really enjoyed it. He then asked us to leave our hands up if we were studying engineering or science. The correlation was amazing. The piece, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, was particularly favored by the technically-minded people.
He explained that this was due (at least in part) to the way the piece was constructed. Overall, it has a very basic pattern that is repeated in music all the time – A-B-A form. It introduces a theme – very simply – then embellishes and elaborates on it, reaching a crescendo, and then relaxes, simplifies, and returns to the original introductory theme. So logical, so symmetrical. The left-brainers love it. Not only the left-brainers, but indeed the left-brainers do love it. So you will catch at least that audience if you compose music in this way.
So what-the-baroque does this have to do with project management?
Bear with me.
Projects are run by project managers. Project managers often do not have direct authority over the people working on their team. Right? So they often have to “sell” the project to their team. They also often have to “sell” the project to their managers, and they have to “sell” their customers and clients on the need to control scope and properly manage change. And if you believe EarthPM, they have to sell a variety of stakeholders on the long-term operation of the project and the relation of that long-term to the planning and execution of the project.
So you get the idea – like it or not there is selling in project management.
Okay, you say, I still don’t get the connection. I know…be patient.
So one one hand we have this Project Manager with a need to “sell”, which is a form of communication, I hope you’d agree. And creating a PowerPoint presentation (today’s most common way of “selling” ideas) is not totally unlike composing music.
And on the other hand we have Pachelbel who ha created this piece of music with a very alluring format for technical folks.
So (and here is the connection), if we need to sell to technical people, we may want to consider the format of Pachelbel’s Canon in D for the presentation.
Introduce the theme, clearly, crisply, simply.
Grow it, embellish it, provide just enough detail for the intent of the presentation and for the particular audience. Then bring the detail level down, repeat the original theme (message) reinforcing it as a takeaway message.
So we’d like to send you off to the YouTube video below, have you listen carefully, and then go create a powerful PowerPoint presentation about how project managers must take sustainability into consideration when they manage their projects. See? I told you we could eventually make the full connection!
Is Sustainability Bugging You?
The new species, members of the mayfly, caddisfly, and stonefly families, are interesting because these insects are considered to be “the canary in the mine” or “indicators for ecosystem integrity.” “Certain mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies are intolerant of pollution.” Seeing these new species could be indicators that the ecosystem is either rebounding or holding its own against a barrage of environmental issues pressing in on the park. Not the least of which is the increase in population and the need for more land, habitat destruction and global climate change. It is also a study to establish a baseline so that in the future, effects of a storm like Tropical Storm Irene, or the effect of dredging of the Ausable River can be evaluated against that baseline. According to Luke Myers, chief investigator, the “study validates the land-use protections that are in place for the Adirondack Park.”
On the fly fisherman side of it (I have to add that), the researchers said “the data could be used by expert fly fishers who rely on imitations of aquatic insects to catch trout.” It means new fly patterns to tie. Myers said “We’ve got a more complete understanding of the fly fishing menu, so to speak, and also the times of year that these insects are emerging in these streams. We have good phrenology data from when these species emerge and how they emerge: If its synchronized or they spread out, if all the same species emerge over a long time in the summer months, and things like that.” Yeah, a plethora of different flies to tie, and yeah for biodiversity.
Nature is amazing. I remember one evening on Vermont’s Mettawee River, standing in a cloud of mayflies from the riffles at my feet. It was truly an incredible experience, one that I hope continues into the future.