We’ve tend to stay neutral when it comes to the global climate change debate, although we have tried to arm you with the information we believed you, as project managers, need to make sure you can take advantage of any projects that may arise as a result of any mitigation strategies.  Today, we heard about a couple of disturbing reports due out over the next several months.  Their titles were pretty ominous so we decided to dig a little deeper.

Take a look at some of these headlines and reports to be released and see if you don’t agree that they are unnerving;

NOAA: Past Decade Warmest on Record According to Scientists in 48 Countries 

Earth has been growing warmer for more than 50 years.

And this one a report that is indicative of what is to come.

The Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

The title says that those extreme events we have been experiencing, a major snow storm in the northeast in October 2011 for instance, are going to continue and we need a risk mitigation process to address them.  Further, we will need to “adapt” to these changes.

Another report coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);

Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation

And finally, an interview from a scientist who has not only been one of the questioners of global climate change, but also his study was partially funded by an organization made up of climate change skeptics.  Dr. Richard Muller, professor of physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature Foundation, undertook an independent two year study of global climate change.

It was not that he himself was a sceptic, he just didn’t believe the likes of Tom Friedman and Al Gore because Dr. Muller believes their contentions were not truly science based.  Here is part of the interview between Dr. Muller and Eleanor Hall with Bronwyn Herbert from the Australian Broadcast Network (ABC).  You can hear the entire interview here.

BRONWYN HERBERT: Richard Muller says he wasn’t convinced the earth was warming, and set out two years ago to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong.

RICHARD MULLER: Sceptics had raised legitimate questions. Many of the thermometers were of very poor quality and poorly placed. There were  djustments being made to discontinuities in the data. There was perhaps undue influence from warming of cities, which was warm, but that’s not global warming.

BRONWYN HERBERT: He says he was particularly surprised that his results so closely correlated with previously published data from other teams in the US and the UK.

RICHARD MULLER: Somewhat to my amazement, none of the effects changed the answer. We wound up getting the same answer that the other groups had previously gotten for the amount of warming. It’s about 0.9 degrees Celsius over the last 50 years. The poor temperature quality data, even though it was at bad locations, the change in temperature I recorded was accurate. The urban heat island, just not that much area of the earth is urban. The temperature adjustments that people made, well those adjustments were made with more care than we could know, and in the end the adjustments didn’t bias the data. We picked five times as many stations as they did. Their selection of stations was sufficiently representative that it didn’t change the answer. So, in the end, the amount of global warming is what they said it was.

BRONWYN HERBERT: So do you now believe that global warming on earth is occurring?

RICHARD MULLER: Oh yes. I certainly believe that now.

And finally, from a report Agence France-Presse (AFP) states that a draft UN report three years in the making concludes that man-made climate change has boosted the frequency or intensity of heat waves, wildfires, floods and cyclones and that such disasters are likely to increase in the future.

“The document being discussed by the world’s Nobel-winning panel of climate scientists says the severity of the impacts vary, and some regions are more vulnerable than others. Hundreds of scientists working under the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) will vet the phonebook-sized draft at a meeting in Kampala of the 194-nation body later this month.

“This is the largest effort that has even been made to assess how extremes are changing,” said Neville Nicholls, a professor at Monash University in  Melbourne, Australia, and a coordinating lead author of one of the review’s key chapters. Mindful of an outcry by climate skeptics over flaws in an earlier IPCC text, those working on the document stress that the level of “confidence” in the findings depends on the quantity and quality of data available.

But the overall picture that emerges is one of enhanced volatility and frequency of dangerous weather, leading in turn to a sharply increased risk for large swathes of humanity in coming decades.”

“Its publication coincides with a series of natural catastrophes around the world that have boosted the need to determine whether such events are freaks of the weather or part of a long-term shift in climate. In 2010, record temperatures fuelled devastating forest fires across Siberia, while parts of Pakistan and India reeled from unprecedented flooding. This year, the United States has suffered from a record number of billion-dollar disasters ranging from flooding in the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Hurricane Irene to the ongoing Texas drought. Large swathes of China are suffering from intense drought as well, even as central America and Thailand count their dead from recent diluvian rains.

Most of these events match predicted impacts of manmade global warming, which has raised temperatures, increased the amount of water in the atmosphere and warmed ocean surface temperatures — all drivers of extreme weather.

- It is “virtually certain” — 99-100% sure — that the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes will increase over the 21st century on a global scale;

- It is “very likely” (90-100% certainty) that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, including heat waves, will continue to increase over most land areas;

- Peak temperatures are “likely” (66-100% certainty) to increase — compared to the late 20th century — up to 3.0 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050, and 5.0 C (9.0 F) by 2100;

- Heavy rain and snowfall is likely to increase over the next century over many regions, especially in the tropics and at high latitudes;

- At the same time, droughts will likely intensify in other areas, notably the Mediterranean region, central Europe, North America, northeastern Brazil and southern Africa.” © 2011 AFP

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that there is more to life than just work, work, work.  In 1890, Yosemite National Park was created.  It’s not that a beautiful place did not exist prior to 1890, it did as shown in the 1878 watercolor of the Digger Indians by Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming en, Indian Life at Mirror Lake.  National parks are great stress relievers.  No matter what your preference, camping, fishing, hiking, birding, photography and more, you can do any or all of it in the myriad of state and national parks scattered across our country.

Although, we certainly can’t get away from projects no matter where we go.  Not only is the designating of a state, local or national park a project, especially for those directly involved in a project like Yosemite, like Galen Clark and John Muir, or the president at the time Benjamin Harrison, but it will create more projects.  Fast forward to present day and the jobs initiative.  While we have not read all of the text of the proposed jobs initiatives, we haven’t seen anything on improving the infrastructure of our national parks.  While it may be that it is buried in there someplace, it probably isn’t.  Maybe it is because it only affects a specific, and small, group of people who use the parks.  We have a feeling that the number may be larger than we think.  According to the latest (2010) figures, more than 281,300,000 people visited our national parks.  Just like this website, however, they may not be all “unique” visits.  But still, 281+ million people per year is nothing to sneeze at, since the total population of the US in 2009 was approximately 307 million people.

But let’s not lose sight of the real issue here.  The question is, if there were infrastructure projects instituted as part of a jobs initiative, what is the economic, social and environmental ripple effects.  Just to give one example:  how many people would be employed during the infrastructure improvement?  If there are improvements, how many additional people would use the facilities?  How many people depend on the visitors themselves; e.g. restaurants, camping/rv suppliers and hotels surrounding the parks?  What are the effects on the environment?  Most importantly to us, these projects will need to be managed.  The different projects will lie along the green spectrum, from green by definition to green in general.

Let’s keep an eye on any jobs initiatives.  They will create projects! 

One look at the huge ship (612 feet long) and you knew it was something special.  It was backed up to the middle bridge of the Piscataqua River and loomed over the roadway.  How to handle the ship and its cargo is a project.  The Port Director at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, considered the project as a new opportunity, and we considered it as spawned from a Green by Definition (GbD) project.  First a little about the GbD project.  Granite Reliable Power Park is a wind farm project in northern New Hampshire.  It consists of 33 Vesta V90 3 Mw wind turbines, only the second U.S. wind project to deploy these turbines.  It will generate 330,000 MWH, enough to power 40,000 homes and offset 332 million pounds of carbon dioxide.  In addition, the project will generate more that 200 jobs.

The port project itself; offload the cargo to be used for the wind farm from the Salmaagracht, a Swedish registered massive vessel docked at the State Pier in Portsmouth.  The cargo:

• 22 nacelles (gear housing) measuring 32 feet long and weighing 81 tons each, about the weight of two humpback whales.
• 69 fixed blades, each measuring 149 feet long or about the length of 4 school buses and weighing 17 tons.
• 22 hubs (part of the rotor assembly) and 22 spinners

What makes the ship special are the 3 huge cranes that can lift up to 120 tons.   Further logistics for the project included one tractor trailer for each blade, 80 workers, and 45 minutes to unload each blade.  It was a pretty amazing project that had never been done before in Portsmouth Harbor, unique, one time effort, consumes limited resources, has a fixed start and end date, you know, a project.  What we didn’t see is the greenality of the port project itself.  Yes, it was related to a GbD project, and we bet that by now, you know the questions to ask to evaluate the greenality of the project itself.  So here is the challenge.  Tell us the questions you might ask by commenting on the post.  We’ll start you out with one.  What kind of lighting do they have at the State Pier?

Often times we talk about the Green Spectrum, particularly with respect to projects that are green in general, or appear to have no sustainability aspect, when, in actuality, all projects have a sustainability element.  This time, we’ll look at a project that is Green by Definition, but is scrutinized through a sustainability lens.  And, it is a very,very interesting concept.

As part of the “Smart from the Start” (that sounds like a good phrase for sustainability in projects, too) initiative by Secretary of Interior Salazar, there is a proposal for a 200 mile-wide wind energy corridor stretching from Canada to the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

While we don’t know yet about the other sustainable aspects being considered, we do know, at this point, that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) will write an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).  “Wind energy is crucial to our nation’s future economic and environmental security. We will do our part to facilitate development of wind energy resources, while ensuring that they are sited and designed in ways that minimize and avoid negative impacts to fish and wildlife,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe. “This EIS process gives us an opportunity to evaluate impacts to dozens of imperiled species at a landscape level to ensure that wind energy development occurs in the right places in the right way.”

The reasoning behind the EIS is that in order to accomplish the project, an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) needs to be granted.  Section 9 of the Endangered Species Act and its implementing regulations “prohibit the take of animal species listed as endangered or threatened.”  It doesn’t allow the harassment, harm, pursuit, hunting, shooting, wounding, trapping, capturing, or collecting or, an attempt to engage in those practices when it comes to endangered or threatened species.  However, Under Section 10 of the Act, it allows for people to obtain an ITP as long as they are pursuing otherwise legal activities.  The permittee is then provided “incidental take” authorization.

The applicant must submit a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) containing the measures that it will take to minimize, avoid, or mitigate incidental take.  The Service will then review the HCP and issue an EIS that considers the impacts.  The Service will also identify “potentially significant impacts on biological resources, land use, air quality, water quality, water resources, economics, and other environmental/historical resources that may occur directly or indirectly as a result of implementing the proposed action or any of the alternatives. Various strategies for avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating the impacts of incidental take will also be considered.  Sounds like risk management to me!

“The proposed Permit Area is defined as a 200-mile wide corridor determined by defining the center line of the whooping crane migration based on the database of confirmed whooping crane observations from the Cooperative Whooping Crane Tracking Program and buffering that line by 100 miles on either side. This corridor spans the Gulf Coast of Texas north to the Canadian border and encompasses such cities as Houston, TX; Oklahoma City, OK; Wichita, KS; Bismarck, ND; Grand Island, NE; and Aberdeen, SD. In addition, the permit area includes the current and a large part of the historic range of the lesser prairie-chicken which extends the covered area beyond the 200-mile wide whooping crane migration corridor to include parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.”

“Species currently considered for inclusion under the permit include the following: the endangered whooping crane (Grus americana); endangered interior least tern (Sterna antillarum athalassos); endangered piping plover (Charadrius melodus); and lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), a candidate species.”

There are two important points here for a project manager.  The first is that this will be one heck of a program, involving a huge amount of projects, wind energy projects including; the wind power generators themselves, transmission, distribution, support facilities, etc.  Secondly, it involves looking at the project through a sustainability lens.  In above case, a very narrow view because of regulatory issues (specifically the Endangered Species Act) one of the “drivers” in our book.  There will be more and more of these opportunities for the project manager who is not only aware of sustainability issues, vocabulary, and problems and drivers, but also uses that knowledge and considers greenality* when approaching any project.

* The degree to which an organization (project manager) has considered environmental (sustainable) factors that affect its projects during the entire project life cycle and beyond.

Bridge to Nowhere, Bridge to Somewhere

Our local project is certainly not a bridge to nowhere.  Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the seacoast area are popular commuter destinations.  However, Portsmouth is a very expensive area to live.  As a result, most commuters live to the west of Portsmouth.  Between the town and the suburbs is a major river and an estuary.  There is an old, narrow, four-lane bridge located about at the junction of the estuary, Little Bay, and the river, the Piscataqua, although it is really on the upstream side of the drainage from Little Bay.  The bridge has out lived its usefulness.

The bridge to the left is the old bridge.  The bridge to the right is the old, old bridge.  This is an extremely environmentally sensitive area.  To the right is Little Bay and if you travel far enough up the channel in Little Bay, you reach Great Bay http://www.armofthesea.info/.  There are also 7 major rivers that feed Great Bay, Lamprey, Squamscott, Cocheco, Bellamy, Salmon Falls, Oyster, and Winnicut Rivers.  It is a significant drainage area.  American Shad and Alewives head up those rivers to spawn.  Striped bass, bluefish and others transit through these bridges on their way into Great Bay.  All that said, let’s look at the bridges.

Ultimately, the new bridge combined with the rehab of the old bridge will carry 8 lanes of traffic (4 and 4).  So a new 4 lane bridge will be constructed between the old bridge and the old, old bridge.  The old bridge will be rehab to provide the added four lanes, and the old, old bridge will be rehabbed for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.  Whew that is a mouthful!

This is a rendering of the new and rehabbed bridges all together.  So what does that mean to sustainable project management?  We are not part of the management team for this bridge,  so we don’t know if the project will be management in a sustainable way, but we can hope.  What we can tell you from our research is that we applaud the efforts for a sustainable product of the project.  How can we tell, you might ask?  Well, by rehabbing the old and the old, old bridge, the thinking to us is life cycle assessment.  What will we do with the product of the project once it has outlived its usefulness?  In this case it is redesign, reuse, and recycle.

Again, we don’t know how the project manager will run his or her team, for instance will they minimize the use of paper, will the team be efficient with their energy use, cloud computing, laptops, etc.  But we can see that they are conducting environmental risk assessment in a reasonable way, “many design alternatives were evaluated to achieve the transportation purpose and need of the project.  The environmental impacts for those alternatives were evaluated to balance the transportation needs and the impacts to the environmental resources.”  As we’ve said many times, you may not necessarily go with the most environmentally friendly solution, but those solutions should at the least be evaluated.  There was wetland mitigation, stream restoration, and methods to reduce vehicle idling time, hard acceleration, and stopping time.  Also, consideration was given to the reduction of the overall footprint of the roadway crossing.  Additionally, there was lots of consideration of the human aspect of the effects of the project, keeping one bridge open while the other is constructed, shifting to the newly constructed bridge, a “Traffic and Incident Management Plan.”  I would have liked to see the “incident management plan” for BP, wouldn’t you?

So what are we missing?  A few of the questions we would ask is, how green is your project being run, for one?  The next questions would be about the product of the project like; what kind of surface material are you using? Is it from recycled material?  Is it designed to provide a minimum of drag on vehicle tires?  Is there a mitigation plan for the runoff from cars that are leaking fluids?  You can probably think of another hundred questions about the sustainability of the product of the project, but you get the gist!  I am sure that a lot of our questions could be answered by New Hampshire DOT and the Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc.’s Design Team. What we assert is that there is a lot to sustainable management including the product of the project and the process and that the project management team considers the breath of sustainability.

There are lots of things we could talk about one year later, but for this post we’d like to focus on the suit filed today by BP against Transocean, the rig’s owners, and Cameron International, the supplier of the  blow-out preventer, for $40 billion.  From AP (article), guardian.co.uk,  ”The Deepwater Horizon BOP was unreasonably dangerous, and has caused and continues to cause harm, loss, injuries, and damages to BP (and others) stemming from the blowout of Macondo well, the resulting explosion and fire onboard the Deepwater Horizon, the efforts to regain control of the Macondo well, and the oil spill that ensued before control of the Macondo well could be regained,” BP said in the lawsuit against Cameron.  BP is also suing Halliburton, the company responsible for pouring the cement.

The reason we are focusing on this aspect is because, when we look at the benefits of Green Project Management, we see that green thinking should be a part of all the project’s processes, including the procurement process (just one of the processes outlined in our book).  In this case, if the questions were not asked, we would have asked about the greenality of BP’s “vendors”.  There would have been questions like:  What did Transocean consider for their environmental impact?  What safe guards were in place in case of an issue like a spill or blowout preventer failure?  Were those scenarios even considered?  Driving back into their processes, we could have asked to see the invitation to bid, to examine whether Transocean considered the greenality of their vendors.  This is just a sampling of questions to ask.  On a project this large like this, with the potential for devastation it has, the questioning would have been extensive and rigorous.

We advocate a “greenality clauses”.  We believe that if we choose a company, considering their green efforts as part of the decision making process, that they should be held accountable for those green efforts, as well as capturing that criteria in the contract.   Again, we like to give the obligatory caveat that we were not in the room when the decision was made by BP to go ahead and lease the rig from Transocean, so we don’t know exactly what went on.  But from our point of view, the project did not consider all of the green aspects it should have and that green project management would have helped in that process.

This is an interesting question we’ve paraphrased from a great article by Peter Singer in a recent Wall Street Journal.  Peter considers that we will not hurt the world’s poor as long as industrialized nations are willing to make sacrifices.  Bjørn Lomborg answers that we will harm the poor if we listen to the “green extremists”.  Who has the best argument?

This, to us, is a potential conflict with one of The Natural Step’s sustainability principles.  Principal Four states “eliminate our contribution to conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.”  While “eliminating our contributions to progressive buildup of substances extracted, and chemicals produced, and physical degradation” are we depressing people’s ability to make a living?  That is the dilemma.  Can we stimulate those economies while trying to green the world?

The answer may truly lie with our ability to do both, and that we must.  It will be a vicious cycle if we don’t do both.  According to the article, industrialized nations must make sacrifices to lift the world’s poor.  If they don’t, then all of the issues that make things worse for the environment will continue.  The premise is that the poorer nations are the ones that have the most significant population growth, which put more pressure on the environment.  We pointed that out in our book as one of the “problem drivers and indicators” of the green wave, along with rapidly developing nations and resource degradation and loss of biodiversity.  These are all related.  Rapidly developing countries are where the poorer people are, and the pressure to harvest rain forests, for instance, to provide firewood, income, and farmland, is felt the most.  SO according to Peter, the easy answer is to reduce poverty.  The difficult question is how.

If we stimulate growth and we stimulate employment, we create projects that may be in conflict with environmental concerns.  If we build schools and housing, we take away land; maybe wetlands, old growth forests, and critical habitat.  If we stimulate farming to help people feed themselves, again, we potentially can destroy entire ecosystems.  Peter points out that “…there is no single currency by which we can measure the benefit of saving human lives against the cost of destroying forests that provide the last remaining refuges for free-living chimpanzees, orangutans, and Sumatran tigers.”

We can see that here is a bitter pill, here, to be swallowed universally, wherever you are on what we like to call the “Hugger-Hummer” spectrum.  Less is what we need to strive for, “less energy from fossil fuels, use less air conditioning and less heat, fly and drive less, and eat less meat.”  When we say universally, we mean the developing countries may need to compromise on what they are striving to do, too.  It is a global issue and needs to be dealt with, globally.  Green projects, or greening of projects if you will, go a long way to helping.  By leading the efforts to increase a project’s greenality, green project managers will increase efficiencies and reduce the use of those scarce resources we talk about in our book.  Remember, it is not just projects that are green by definition, developing alternate energy sources, as an example, all projects can benefit by viewing it through the green project manager’s environmental lens.

More about Bjørn Lomborg response in a future post.

When the going gets tough, the first target that gets shot at seems to be the environment.  Aren’t we really cutting it close, shaving away sustainability.    The new governor of Maine, my governor, Paul LePage, is a “Lightning Rod for Critics” as headlined recently by Jenna Russell in Boston Globe.   And among other things, “…the new governor has offered up a more substantive cause for controversy: a plan to streamline state environmental protections, eliminating or reducing more than 60 regulations on pollution and development.”

I’m not going to get into a political debate, here, and whether or not you are a “tree hugger”, doesn’t really make a difference.  Is this true?  “The governor is not suggesting we turn our backs on what makes Maine great,’’ said Demeritt. “It’s about finding middle ground and the right protections, and why it takes a million dollars to get a project approved.’’ I hope so, but there are some concerns.

“It’s a wholesale retreat from the values Maine people hold dear,’’ Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center, a statewide public health organization, said of LePage’s proposal. “Everyone knows the essence of Maine is the quality of its environment. It resonates deeply in the psyche of Maine people, and it’s the backbone of the economy, drawing tourists from all over the world.’’ You have to realize that Maine benefits from tourism to the tune of $15 billion per year, which makes it a leading industry in Maine.  Do we want to jeopardize that?  It’s not tree hugging it’s dollar hugging.

Now I’m all for reducing redundancy within the governmental departments.  I believe there probably is quite a bit of that.  Depending on what statistics you use,  between 34% and 45% of those employed in Maine work for some sort of federal, state, or local government.

There is some precedent for this scrutiny according to Ms. Russell. “In New Jersey, to similar outrage from environmentalists, Governor Chris Christie previously introduced many of the same proposals put forth by LePage: establishing a fast track to approval for development proposals, shifting authority from environmental boards to administrative judges, and prohibiting state standards that are stricter than federal regulations, as well as reducing governmental job redundancy.

Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, used his recent budget recommendations to eliminate funding for the state’s land conservation program, Florida Forever, and to drastically downsize the state agency in charge of managing sprawl, the Department of Community Affairs, by slashing its budget from $779 million to $110 million, according to Sarah Bucci, a field associate with the advocacy group Environment Florida.”  One size does not necessarily fit everyone.  What one state does doesn’t necessarily meant it is relevant to another.

One of the more controversial remarks from LePage, couched as a “joke gone awry” by the governor’s office, was linked to the “proposal that has received the most attention would suspend the Kid-Safe Products Act, a law overwhelmingly approved by legislators in 2008. The law, which has yet to take effect, would ban the sale of baby bottles and other products containing biphenyl A, or BPA, a chemical compound linked to health concerns in animal studies. Supporters of the law say LePage is catering to out-of-state corporations who helped fund his campaign. Demeritt said the governor simply wants “sound science’’ to be the standard for state regulations, and with BPA, “the science is not there.’’  The worst side effect of exposure to it, he (LePage) asserted at a press conference, might be women growing “little beards.”

“State Senator Peter Mills, who ran against LePage in a seven-way Republican primary last year, said the governor’s deregulation plan contains important, necessary changes at its core, some of which are likely to be approved. But he criticized LePage for taking a “slash and burn’’ approach instead of focusing strategically on key reforms.”  We need to use a pair of scissors, not a straight razor to make cuts.

“You need to get people used to your perspective, instead of throwing everything against the wall,’’ said Mills. “It creates huge resistance and doesn’t get it done. . . . All he did was get environmentalists fired up.’’

We, as project managers, know that change is difficult, but something that is constant, and the primary reason we exist.  Everything we do involves change of some sort.  There is a right way to manage change and a wrong way.  We agreed with Senator Mills, your need to find a way to minimize resistance, not galvanize it.  Perhaps, as John Greenleaf Whittier, a poet who hailed from an almost neighbor of ours, Massachusetts said; “Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.”  Let’s keep our traditions and continue to woo sustainability.

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 just learned that EarthPM has been named as one of the “50 Resources for Students Attending Online Project Management Courses” by Online Schools a “premier portal for online education on the web.”  According to their website , ” Our goal is not to revolutionize the concept of education, but rather to help bring people into the 21st century in terms of the way they perceive learning. Education is no longer simply about teachers and textbooks. In today’s Internet age, education is now about infographics, blogs, e-books, web articles, youtube, wikipedia, and so much more. Thus, we at Online Schools do not propose to revolutionize education itself, but rather, we strive to revolutionize the way people think about and approach education.
That said, first and foremost, we do believe that all individuals should have a strong foundation in traditional learning, evidenced by our emphasis on providing honest, up-to-date and readily available information on accredited online schools.”

We are the first listing (#13) under “UNUSUAL PERSPECTIVES ON PROJECT MANAGEMENT.”  We couldn’t say it better than they do. “It’s important for prospective project managers to stay fresh. There are new and different aspects of the industry to consider. A little humor or thinking outside the box about the project management process is a good way to sharpen skills and define goals.”  And, our goal is to bring Green Project Management into the mainstream, keeping the humor and thinking outside the box, and make it part of the way we do business.  We are joined on the list by wonderful resources like our friends Elizabeth Harrin, A Girl’s Guide to Project Management and Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager.  Check us all out!  With all of the sites out there, we’re proud to be included in this exclusive list.