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Tag Archive: carbon


 

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.

 

 

 

 

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See below for a short but fairly powerful video about one telecom company’s journey to reducing its carbon footprint.  Here, Richard Goode, Alcatel-Lucent’s Senior Director of Sustainability, talks to an interviewer about this subject.

We would like to challenge you with two assignments as you watch this short video.

1. Note the number of possibilities of NEW projects and NEW programs (and thus opportunities for Project Managers!) as Richard speaks.

2. Consider the aspects of sustainability in operations that Richard mentions – and how they could be applied (should be, we would assert) to projects.

Comments?

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waiters

At last week’s PMI North America Congress, we were lucky enough to be at sponsor DeVry (Keller) University’s booth signing our new book and getting to chat with many project managers about Green Project Management.  Between that experience, getting to meet many of the really outstanding contributors – you know who you are – with whom we had only previously communicated electronically, and having President Bill Clinton not only address us as Project Managers, but to specifically challenge PMs to take on climate change, it was a fantastic week.

In conversations during the book signing, many of you reflected on situations in which you work in IT and so, you say, have “no effect” on the environment.  Also many of you said that there was nothing besides ‘altruistic’ reasons for trying to change your projects and your companies to do more to work towards sustainability.

We beg to differ.  On both counts.

And lo, upon our return, we were greeted with a great feature in Thursday’s Boston Globe business section called, “Taking a Different Measure”, a story about Akamai Technologies’ command center.  In the article is a great quote from Akamai’s chief executive, Paul Sagan, when asked:

“I’d say half of my rationale was altruistic, but I was also thinking that the day was going to come when our customers were going to expect us to report our carbon footprint, and their carbon footprint, on our network.’’

That’s funny because we responded to some of you with a very similar answer.  We said that half our rationale to create this site and write the book was altruistic, but we also know that this is an area that needs and deserves attention and we want to be there to (successfully) serve the needs of this market.  That’s precisely – almost to the word – what Paul Sagan is saying.  And the irony is that he really knows serving – after all, Akamai operates about 70,000 servers.  Their servers handle peak internet traffic for big name companies – such as Best Buy and ESPN.

The article features a description of how Akamai now includes carbon emissions as a core part of how they measure their performance.  And they are actively reporting to the Carbon Disclosure Project – which maintains corporate climate change information.

We suggest you read the article, and think again about how you can serve this cause – even if only for 50% altruistic reasons.  That’s the reason our book has a tree on the cover – a tree sprouting money.  As we assert – it’s the right thing to do, and it will help you do things right.

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carbonbathtub

Here’s an interesting and educational simulation to learn how the reduction of carbon really affects climate change.

The sim was created by a multi-organization collaboration (see below the line to understand the depth of that collaboration) and is copyrighted by Schlumberger Ltd.

In and of itself, the simulation is a project.  From our perspective, though, it’s an example of the Green Wave and how project managers must keep themselves focused on sustainability to increase their own marketability, even if you’re a cynic about climate change.

We suggest that you watch the video first, and then try the simulation.

Click here for the simulation page or copy and paste the following link into your browser.

http://climateinteractive.org/simulations/bathtub

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The mathematical model underneath the animation is a System Dynamics model built by Dr. Thomas Fiddaman as part of his 1997 PHD thesis at MIT.

A portion of the model was distilled into a simplified stock-and-flow framework by Dr. Fiddaman’s thesis advisor, Dr. John Sterman of the System Dynamics Group at MIT and tested with a range of groups for its effectiveness at teaching the dynamics insights.

Dr. Sterman and Dr. Linda Booth Sweeney, then a graduate student in education, used the stock-and-flow framework to research the public misunderstanding of climate change dynamics, confirming the need for new tools to improve public understanding. They published their findings in the journal, Climatic Change.

Andrew Jones and Don Seville wrote an article on these findings and identified the need for better learning tools.

Sterman and his team at MIT constructed an online interactive simulator to teach the principles.

SEED, the community development program of Schlumberger Ltd, led by Michael Tempel and Simone Amber, and Linda Booth Sweeney then convened the collaborators named above plus Dr. Peter Senge of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and MIT to create the “Climate Bathtub Sim.” They engaged Dr. Idit Caperton and MaMaMedia to create the interactive simulation with children and youth in mind. Sustainability Institute, supported by IT at Citigroup and Nike, joined to bridge the science and model with the communications and Sim design. The Bathtub Sim is copyrighted by Schlumberger Ltd and is one of many simulations on science, climate, and systems thinking.

Morgan Stanley’s Office of the Environment then produced a video of SI’s Andrew Jones talking the viewer through the key insights of the Sim.

Beth Sawin, Phil Rice, and others at SI’s Our Climate Ourselves program are developing approaches to support action on climate change that complement the Bathtub Sim.

Various members of the team are now engaged in developing further simulations similar to the Climate Bathtub Sim.

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bitumen imageProject managers who want to transition into practice areas such as energy should (must?) learn to be conversant in their new practice areas.  If for no other reason, they need this familiarity to be able to command the respect of their project team.

In this post we provide a means to learn about the efforts to extract bitumen from beneath the ground in Canada (and elsewhere).

Mainly, this posting is a resource pointing to rich sources of information in which you can get yourself smartened up on the subject, and understand the types of projects taking place.

The basis of the info came from a Public Radio story broadcast today on a show called Marketplace.  We suggest you start by going to this site and listening to the broadcast.  And, oh, by the way, that’s a great show to listen to as a project manager needs to keep up with the latest and most interesting business trends.  As we say in our book – project managers are indeed the “business end” of business ends.

We’d be interested in hearing from EarthPM readers to know if this type of posting is helpful to you.  Please comment directly to this post!  Thanks!

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