This sounds like a joke, but it isn’t:

What’s 10 stories high, a football field wide, almost 4 football fields long, cruises the oceans, and can suck in 21 million gallons of seawater a day?

The answer: A Whale.

No, not the mammal, but a Taiwanese-flagged vessel called “A Whale” which is the latest in the series of project “workarounds” for the Gulf /Deepwater Horizon/BP oil disaster.

“In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart,” Bob Grantham, a spokesman for TMT Shipping, told the Associated Press news agency.

This story from BBC has a nice video with some of the details.

From a project management perspective, this continues to illustrate the magnitude of the workarounds – actually we could say families of workarounds that BP has used to deal with the triggered risk of the Deepwater Horizon.

We know about the planned risk responses (for example, the blowout preventer) and the series of other risk responses (top hat, junk shot), and the long -term workaround (the relief well), and the Ocean Therapy boats, but this one is a BIG one.  Testing is taking place as this blog post is being written.

It will be interesting – and important – to see whether this will work, although this, like most of the responses are going after the impact of the threat (the spilled oil), not the probability of the spill in the first place (as a relief well would).

Given the magnitude of this disaster – it’s not surprising to see gigantic workarounds like this!

UPDATE: for those who would like an excellent animated ‘history’ of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, click HERE to see a 22-slide slideshow which is a very well-produced summary of how it happened and what actions have been taken to date.

I wonder if you can guess how much London cabbies spend each day on diesel fuel?

Probably not.

Well – since you asked… that number is more than a half-million dollars.  Collectively, the owners of the iconic black cabs of London spend over $600,000 on fuel, mostly diesel – each day.  And with that expense is a commensurate use of fossil-based fuels.  But now, they – and others – are switching to something else in what is turning out to be a series of large projects meant to save costs, to meet EU laws, and green up the city.

Which leads us to our second trivia question: what percentage of potatoes in Britain are consumed as ‘chips’ (what we in the US call French Fries)?

And the answer is: 1 in 4 of all British potatoes consumed in Britain are eaten as chips and the UK’s 8,500 fish and chip shops sell over 277 million portions of chips per year, all cooked in some form of vegetable oil.

A London company called Uptown Oil refines the waste oil and sells it at about $1.50 per liter, whereas diesel fuel costs about $1.75.  So people do not have to make a choice to spend more to get off of fossil fuels – they spend less and also make a more sustainable choice.  The oil is collected from rapeseed, sunflower, and soya oils, is filtered and distilled, and added to methanol.  The resultant fuel produces much less in the way of smoke fumes.  You can actually read direct comments by the London cab drivers (listed by actual license plate numbers) here.

And it’s not just the cabs. The EU’s new laws on new buildings require the near elimination of fossil fuels by 2020.  So companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers, along with the cabbies, are (through companies like Uptown) searching for waste oil from about 750 restaurants, pubs and other sources in the London area.  In the case of PwC, which advises clients on a consulting basis to reduce their carbon footprint, it’s a matter of believability – PwC is practicing what they preach.  As you saw in our last posting, this is something important to us.

Much of the information from this posting came from this Boston Globe article.

So here’s our summertime tip.  To learn more about green project management, perhaps settle down with a good book, a nice stout or porter, and a healthy side of ‘chips’.

This is disgusting.

Here you will find a report posted today by the US Government to the web and which we bring you in the spirit of helping to understand the ‘monitor and control‘ part of project management, or really, business in general.  In fact, the people in this report behave as if they were Charlie Sheen’s character (or perhaps his brother or nephew) on the US television program Two and a Half Men.  And thus the post’s title.

The MMS, (Minerals Management Service) is the US Federal oversight agency responsible for controlling the oil industry.  They are the ones who ‘bless’ the drilling platforms in the Gulf, for example.

It’s clear from this report (you only need to read the cover letter to get this) that governance was not properly in place.

Rather than laboring over all of the things that we need to learn from this, I would just suggest that you have a look and realize that in your projects (and in life) you must know that measurements are polluted (excuse the pun) if the people in charge of measuring are under the influence of those that they measure.  This is expressed in PMI’s Code of Conduct and Professional Responsibility.

Is it any wonder that we have the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, and even (although small in comparison) today’s other spill in Alaska?

We all can do better than this.

We’ve blogged a lot about the Climate Bill, and why it was delayed, and how it could possibly be revived.  And today, US Senators Kerry and Lieberman did revive the bill…

From Newsweek magazine, 12-May:

There’s a lot in there, packed in tight. Nuclear proponents get the green light for new plants and research with $54 billion in federal loan guarantees. Renewable energy folks also get a boost with extended subsidies. There’s a directive to increase research on carbon capture and sequestration (a.k.a. clean coal), an intricate system to reduce greenhouse gases, and a full plan to integrate job creation at every step. Plus, about 15 pages in the 987-page bill address the hot-potato topic du jour: oil drilling, which will increase. But the difference is that states will be allowed to veto drilling projects within 75 miles of their coastline. And if that’s not enough, a revenue-sharing process will compensate coastal states for stomaching the risks.

But instead of repeating what’s in the bill, we’d like to answer some critics’ valid question about the bill:

Why should project managers care about this?  Let’s forget the element of project managers being residents of Earth and that whole altruistic aspect.  Throw that away*.  Now.  With that disposed of, say the critics, why would project managers care at all about this bill?

We have a very simple mathematical formula for you.

The bill has 987 pages.  The word “project” shows up 573 times.

Yes.  Go back and read that again.

There are 573 occurrences of the word project, in a document that is 987 pages long.  Averaged out, that means that almost 60% of the pages have a reference to projects.  That’s why you should care, if for no other reason.  This is a bill that will increase the demand for your very discipline.  Oh, wait.  You’re a program manager?  Well, the word program occurs 563 times.

Think we’re kidding?

We provide you below with links to the full Newsweek article and also the summary and full text of the American Power Act.

Short summary

Full American Power Act text (PDF)

Newsweek article

So we humbly suggest that you may want to care about the bill…

* “we design products to be thrown ‘away’ when, in fact, there is no ‘away’”

-William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle

As instructors in PM we are often asked to help students distinguish between Secondary and Residual Risk.

Let’s learn a little from the (ongoing) Deepwater Horizon oil situation.

As you know, the current efforts (risk responses or treatments) are all about surrounding the oil slick, attempting to shut off, or capture the flow of oil, and to disperse the oil with chemicals called dispersants.  This is to break up the oil into smaller globules and to give it the freedom to spread not only out, but down as well.  As it turns out, however, the chemicals used to do this may be at least as dangerous as the oil itself.

This is covered very well in the following article from Propublica.

Read the article, then come back here.

Welcome back.  You did read it, right?  If not, we’ll give you one more chance.

OK…really now, welcome back!

The treatment or response to the risk has caused a new risk.  This a textbook example of secondary risk.

It’s different from residual risk.  Residual risk would be the oil (or residue) that remains even after treatment.  Actually it’s a pretty good mnemonic .  Residue–> Residual.

Our sister site has blogged on this subject as well, in a posting which uses – of all things – falling out of an airplane – as an analogy.  It’s called “oh chute!”.  Check that out, too.