Maybe it’s because here in the Northern Hemisphere the warmer weather has arrived (it was over 90 degrees F in Boston last week) and the feeling that Summer is not too far away. Maybe it’s from being a bit tired after presenting at the PMI’s MassBay Professional Development Day. No, that’s not it – because that presentation actually energized us. We loved it! Alas, for whatever reason, today’s theme is laziness.
Recalling that we sit here, squarely at the intersection of green and Project Management, we found two resources that tie serendipitously into this theme.
The first is a site that focuses on how you can personally become more ‘green’ without spending significant amounts of time, energy, or cash. It’s called simply, “The Lazy Environmentalist”, and you can reach it right here. You can find a video introduction by the host Josh Dorfman, right here. Josh has a TV show on the Sundance Channel. You can obviously learn much more about that by tuning in.
Lazily moving on, we turn to our friend Peter Taylor, aka The Lazy Project Manager, who has a new program in PM training that looks to be all about “Productive Laziness”, in other words, being more efficient and effective as a project manager so that you get to look like the person in our picture above, although perhaps with nicer-looking feet. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Peter’s Lazy Project Manager course:
Welcome to the world of productive laziness.
By advocating being a ‘lazy’ project manager The Lazy Project Manager doesn’t intend that we should all do absolutely nothing. He is not saying we should all sit around drinking coffee, reading a good book (such as The Lazy Project Manager) and engaging in idle gossip whilst watching the project hours go by and the non-delivered project milestones disappear over the horizon. That would obviously be plain stupid and would result in an extremely short career in project management, in fact probably a very short career full stop!
Lazy does not mean Stupid.
No he really means that we should all adopt a more focused approach to project management and to exercise our efforts where it really matters, rather than rushing around like busy, busy bees involving ourselves in unimportant, non- critical activities that others can better address, or indeed that do not need addressing at all in some cases.
Welcome to the home of ‘Productive Laziness’; in this first program of The Lazy Project Manager’s eLearning experience you will learn all about The Science of Laziness; The Intelligence of Laziness; and the Focus of Laziness. With the aid of an Italian economist, a Prussian Fieldmarshal, and a dinosaur you will appreciate the benefits of working smarter and not harder.
You can find a video of Peter discussing his program on this site… We know Peter because we read and really enjoyed his book.
Later, he was generous enough to review our book and give it a nice ‘thumbs up’.
So what’s common about these two resources? They both help you do less with more, and they both show that whether your project is green or gold or red or blue, you can do it more effectively and efficiently. So what are you waiting for? Put some energy into getting lazy!
Trendy
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:
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.