We’re big fans of Project Shrink – Bas de Baar’s nifty and creative blog which focuses on some of the so-called soft-skills required by project managers.  Bas comes to the table (or the couch?) with great credentials.

He is author of the book “Surprise! Now You’re a Software Project Manager” and is a member of The PMI New Media Council. This council brings together industry bloggers, webcasters and podcasters to help PMI advance the profession, to promote the exchange of ideas and knowledge and to make the best use of new social media channels.

And now we are not only fans, we’re interviewees.

Watch Bas’ interview with Dave Shirley by clicking here.

In it, you’ll see Dave and Bas discuss some of the basics of the intersection of green and project management.

Enjoy!

As we often do here on EarthPM, we are going to combine a couple of pertinent and important themes to hopefully strengthen some points that are key to each of them.

The two themes we relate here are:

• Electric Smart Grids for effective power transmission and reduced carbon footprint
• High-powered Grids of Smart PMs to gain a bigger collective and personal footprint

Smart-grids for power

PM Network magazine, the monthly instrument of PMI, this month (June) features a couple of really good articles on Smart Grid projects.  If you do nothing else as a result of this posting, plunk yourself down and read “Intelligent Design” and  “A Closer Look”, on pages 36 and 43, respectively.  Both articles speak to the number and increasing importance of these projects and the ways in which project managers are making a big difference in deploying these systems.

Some highlights:

• China will be spending, in 2010 alone, over US$ 7 billion in smart-grid technology.  Their first smart-grid project has already begun, in the city of Tianjin, under the auspices of State Grid corporation.
• In Ontario, Canada, every single home and small business will have a smart meter installed by the end of the year.  That’s a project worth CA$ 1 billion.
• In the US, 100 grants that total over US$ 3 billion were announced last October
• Similar projects and grants are planned for the European Union.

If any of this intrigues you, either technically, or as a project manager, have a look at this nifty interactive package put together by the US Department of Energy.

If you don’t think it’s smart to get smart about smart grids, how about this quote, taken directly from the above US DOE document:

“Time is of the essence: We literally cannot afford the grid as it stands.
The costs of new generation and delivery infrastructure are climbing sharply. According to The Brattle Group – a consulting group that specializes in economics, finance, and regulation – investments totaling approximately $1.5 trillion will be required over the next 20 years to pay for the infrastructure alone.”

So one can tell that opportunities will abound for those project managers who learn about this technology and get smart about it themselves.

Networking power (smart-grids) for PMs

I cannot begin this section without a shoutout to Bas de Bar, my favorite source for Social Networking intelligence and its power for project managers.  You literally do yourself a disservice by not staying in touch, at least periodically, with his site: Project Shrink.  But we would also encourage you to take action.  And you can do that.  Now.

If you are not on LinkedIn, get on.  Today.  Why are you putting that off?  With newly-tweaked groups and group discussions, there are numerous ways to find a special interest group for yourself, even within our fairly specific world of project management.  For example, one of the EarthPM founders started a group on LinkedIn strictly for people who blog on project management.  He expected maybe 10 or 12 people to join and to have a healthy discussion on that very specific topic.  That group, PM Bloggers, was started less than two  years ago.  It now is approaching 800 (yes, eight hundred) members.  Some of the groups we suggest below have hundreds of thousands of members.  Taken together, we’re talking about literally millions of years of PM experience.  Is that power, or what?

As for green project management, there are several groups that we encourage you to join today and to subscribe to the discussions.  You can also choose, as we have here at EarthPM, to join general groups that focus on green business or sustainability, because as above – the opportunites to be aware of are in general industry and it pays to be aware of what general industry is doing – that’s where the projects come from, after all.  Below is a list of LinkedIn groups we suggest you explore.  Of course, you have to join LinkedIn first – which is free and has had no ill side effects on anyone we know.  It’s not a virus.  It’s not yichhy.  It’s power, plain and simple – network power.  Just have a look at the jobs posted there.  In fact, we did that for you today – keeping our combined theme in mind – and ran a search for “grid project” and came up with 4 pages full of jobs, including this one for a project manager in California that looks pretty interesting.  That’s just a sample of the power of LinkedIn – and LinkedIn is only one of many social networking opportunities which bring power to project managers individually and collectively.  Elizabeth Harrin, author and creator of PM for Girls, has a survey that captures some of that data around this power at her blog, here.

List of LinkedIn Groups

• PM Bloggers
• EarthPM
• Project Manager Networking Group
• PMI Credentialed PMPs
• PMLink
• PMLink Green (a subgroup of PMLink)
• Sustainability Professionals
• GreenBiz
• Green

Hope this post has been helpful to you – it’s one that allows you to take action today to make yourself and your profession more powerful.