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.
We just learned that EarthPM has been named as one of the “50 Resources for Students Attending Online Project Management Courses” by 
When you think is it safe to go back in the water, the sharks show up. The cost of greenality keeps going up for the principles involved in the Gulf Oil Spill. The Department of Justice announced today that it would join in the civil suit being filed against such companies as BP, Anadarko, and Transocean. Adding the cost of the spill paid out so far, the losses of life, and the $20 billion fund, what will the final price tag be? We’re not saying that the tragedy could have been avoided, or the damage could have been minimized if the companies involved had paid more attention to the project’s environmental risks involved with the Deep Water Horizon. But then again, why take the risks without fully investigating ALL project risks, especially with the potential environmental damage that could occur. Again, we were not in the room when these decisions were made (perhaps we should have been and then we’d know), but it makes sense to us that if all of the risks were not considered, it certainly would have been cheaper, by orders of magnitude, to cover all the bases. That’s what we think. For more information on managing projects with greenality, see our 
UN Global Compact CEO study
We know this is a radical, radical departure from our last two postings, which involved river nudity and toilet seat positions (!!!). How is this post different? For one thing, the photo involves an image with someone who is fully clothed. For another it has nothing to do with toilet seats…
But (ahem) now to today’s post.
By the way: we know we lost some of you at that introduction, and you’ve already dallied back to look for the river nudity. Welcome, er, back.
Here are some interesting statistics:
93% of CEOs believe that sustainability issues will be critical to the future success of their business.
72% of CEOs cite “brand, trust and reputation” as one of the top three
factors driving them to take action on sustainability issues. Revenue growth
and cost reduction is second with 44%.
72% of CEOs see education as the global development issue most critical to
address for the future success of their business. Climate change is second
with 66%.
58% of CEOs identify consumers as the most important stakeholder group
that will impact the way they manage societal expectations. Employees were
second with 45%.
91% of CEOs report that their company will employ new technologies
(e.g., renewable energy, energy efficiency, information and communication
technologies) to address sustainability issues over the next five years.
96% of CEOs believe that sustainability issues should be fully integrated into
the strategy and operations of a company (up from 72% in 2007).
49% of CEOs cite complexity of implementation across functions as the most
significant barrier to implementing an integrated, company-wide approach to
sustainability. Competing strategic priorities is second with 48%.
88% of CEOs believe that they should be integrating sustainability through
their supply chain. Only 54% believe that this has been achieved within their
company. An almost identical performance gap is seen for subsidiaries.
86% of CEOs see “accurate valuation by investors of sustainability in longterm
investments” as important to reaching a tipping point in sustainability.
64% of CEOs see the most important role of the UN Global Compact as
sharing examples of best and emerging practices on sustainability. Guidance
on implementation is second with 51%.
This information comes from a very revealing (really? are you still focused on THAT?) report issued by the UN regarding how CEOs feel about sustainability.
The survey, conducted by Accenture, is based on more than 100 in-depth interviews with global leaders. This included 50 CEOs, chairpersons and presidents of UN Global Compact member companies, across 27 countries and representing a broad spectrum of cross industry perspectives.
The report is called, “A New Era of Sustainability” and has this subtitle: “CEO reflections on progress to date, challenges ahead and the impact of the journey toward a
sustainable economy.” Don’t worry, we provide a link at the end of the posting.
We’d especially like to draw your attention to the highest-percentage agreement area, and have you as a project manager remember that the CEO is a rather important stakeholder. Let’s look again at that statement (remembering again that 96% of CEOs agreed):
“Sustainability issues should be fully integrated into the strategy and operations of a company”.
Not just any company – their company. And note the change, just from 4 years ago – 2007 – this attribute is up a whopping 24!
In any case, here’s the most substantive point, in our opinion, which we’ll illustrate with an extract:
“CEOs believe that execution is now the real challenge to bringing about the new era of sustainability. Confidence among business leaders about their progress toward this new era is strong, and their companies are taking concrete steps toward embedded sustainability. Eighty-one percent of CEOs—compared to just 50 percent in 2007—stated that sustainability issues are now fully embedded into the strategy and operations of their company. For example, we saw cases of companies beginning to integrate sustainability issues into their executive compensation packages, as well as design and innovation functions, more than in 2007.”
It’s only a matter of time – we hope – until the connection with project management will be more cemented in place. See our other blog postings which make this point, here, and here, and here.
A New Era of Sustainability – download PDF here.