PM Network magazine is the monthly publication of the Project Management Institute, or PMI.  Its circulation is somewhere above 320,000 – and rising.

This month, they published their Fourth Annual “Trend Report”.  These trends, says the article, are “forcing companies to look at projects in radical and revolutionary ways”.  In fact, the subtitle of the cover story is, “The trends jolting the new business landscape”.

There are 5 trends identified and two of them fall squarely right here – at the intersection of green and project management.

The trends are:

• The New New World Order
• Practical Innovation
• Truly Sustainable Sustainability
• Complete Connectivity
• Perpetually Lean

Strangely, zebra boots are missing from the list.  But we got your attention, so they served their purpose.

The two trends we’re talking about as being here at EarthPM, you can probably guess, are Truly Sustainable Sustainability and Perpetually Lean.  In fact, these are two major threaded themes of our upcoming book.

In fact, really these two trends summarize EarthPM’s First Assertion: “A project run with green intent is the right thing to do, but it also will help the project team do things right.”

One could also argue that the other three are aspects of green PM, and in fact themes from the areas of the flattened world, innovation in process and product, and improvements in the way project teams can connect also are woven into our book.

So, we feel a sort of affirmation in seeing that our book has, for the lack of other words, a certain trendiness to it.  We’re honest, we don’t mind being a little trendy.

Have a look at the new PM Network magazine, linked here.

So what do we mean by that?

What do we mean when we say that conserving resources is already in the “DNA” of project managers?

Well, if you really want to find out we’d have to say “read our upcoming book“.  But since [A] it’s not yet available, and [B] that’s not directly helpful, we thought we’d instead point out some examples via a posting we found on Bright Hub.

The posting, by Ronda Levine, can be found here.  We actually suggest that you read this brief article now and then come back to this entry.

We’ll wait.

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Welcome back.

OK, you read it, right?  Or at least – you skimmed it…?  We hope so.

In the article, Ronda reviews the “top 10 tools for managing project resources”.  Interestingly (and we had nothing to do with this) she uses a wind farm as the intro graphic for the article.

The listing includes: PM Software, Resource Plan, Resource Breakdown Structure, Resource Histogram, the Resource Assignment Matrix, Collaboration Software, The PMBOK® Guide, Resource Leveling, Conflict Management, and Issue Logs.

All of these tools are used to conserve wasted energy on the project.  For example, a Resource Assignment Matrix (RAM) is one of the most powerful tools at the disposal (excuse the pun) of a project manager, in terms of preventing two or more team members from working on the same task – or even worse, having those two or more people assuming that ‘the other guy’ was working it, so nobody gets it done.

How does this relate to green?  Let’s go for the obvious example – two engineers both drive out to a job site 100 miles/km away, not realizing that the other was doing so.  We’re talking about project resources, yes, but we are also talking about the impact of this waste in the larger sense.  Multiply this by the number of times this sort of thing happens – and you get the idea.

Let’s look at the software pieces of Ronda’s list.  PM Software and Collaboration Software.  Both of these (read the book for the details) contribute greatly to savings for your project in terms of concise and clear communication (and thus fewer mistakes, and a greater chance of meeting your customers’ expectations), and they have an environmental aspect as well in terms of their reducing the number of times that folks have to fly or drive to different offices when that really isn’t necessary.

All of these tools – used properly – do contribute to project success, of course.  They also make your project more efficient and thus consume fewer resources.

That’s an example of the intersection of Green and Project Management.  We’re glad you decided to spend some time at this crossroads.  Please, spend some time looking around.

On Monday Stuart Varney interviewed State Senator Peter Shumlin (D) Vermont, about the power plant license renewal.  A question asked by Mr. Varney was about what Vermont was going to do when the power plant was shutdown in 2012.  Where were they going to get their power?  Senator Shumlin’s answer was a little vague saying that they would buy some from Canada and encourage more renewable energy like solar, after all, “Germany was getting 30% of their power from solar energy”.

Well, after some research by Mr. Varney, and shared on Tuesday’s show, it was discovered that Germany’s solar power provides less than 1% of its power requirement, quite a difference, don’t you think.  Solar energy can help, but using it on a large scale is still quite a ways off, especially to replace 1/3 of the power requirements for Vermont now provided by the Vermont Yankee plant.  This kind of misstatement really hurts our cause and the lack of knowledge by people who are making these decisions is disconcerting to say the least.

I wish that politicians would concentrate on getting us a good, fair, and balanced energy policy, that will protect as well as efficiently utilize our resources and provide for alternative energies.  I want them to think, yes think hard about alternatives and consequences before they make a decision.  Maybe there should be more project managers running the country.  Risk management and contingency planning are part of our DNA.

In American English, “book it” can mean to accelerate or get going faster.

That’s the name we’ve chosen for this posting, although it has a double meaning here, connected with our actual upcoming book.

Well, it looks like our book, tentatively titled Green Project Management, has been formally announced by our publisher.  It’s got an ISBN number: 9781439830017, and you can find it at several sites such as CRC’s own site.

Talk about a keeping the project team motivated!  There’s nothing like seeing the end product already being promoted to drive the project team (the two of us writing the book) forward with vim, vigor, and vitality!

Actually, the reality of it all does indeed become a driver and we are finding many rich sources of information and potential partners the more we look into this subject.

We’re into it!  And we hope that you will be just as “into it” as the young reader above…

Rich and Dave

This is a whole feature on Project Management and the “Green Sector”.  Very good and recommended reading whether you’re interested in our interview or not!

Check it out HERE.