You’d think we would be in favor of unplugging. That is, saving energy, preventing waste…you know, being “green”.
And we are in favor of unplugging.
But there’s an exception - a big one.
That exception has to do with a huge source of power for Project Managers, a renewable source of endless project energy that often, as shown in the sophisticated schematic diagram on the right, goes untapped. What is this power of which we speak?
It’s simple – it’s the power of your own organization. And it’s right there ‘above’ and ‘below’ you.
Let’s start at the top. We refer to the power in your organization’s Purpose, Identity, and Long-term Intentions. These are the Top Leadership ideals that are often publicly stated, and always should be communicated to shareholders and employees. They give “ideation” to your organization.
Now let’s jump down to the bottom. Your organization’s heartbeat, its flow, is its operations. This is the day-to-day reality of your business.
And where are we, the project, program, and portfolio managers of the world? We, dear friends, are where the rubber (the strategy that comes from Ideation) meets the road (the operations).
Below you see the Strategic Execution Framework or SEF (courtesy and copyright of IPS), which is used as the basis of Stanford University’s Center for Professional Development’s Certificate in Advanced Project Management. We were lucky enough to attend one of their courses where this was presented. It struck a chord with us because we have always preached that project managers can gain power by aligning with the organization’s strategy, and often overlook this. Furthermore we have insisted that project managers often put on blinders when it comes to the “end” of their project, failing to connect with (or plug in to) the operations of the company. Why? We’re programmed to consider a project as having a definitive beginning and end – and that end occurs when we hand over the final deliverable.
Only “final” is not so final, after all. When a project, say a bridge, is “done”, that only means that it can BEGIN sending pedestrians and/or vehicles over a river. Does this mean we, as project managers, have to continue monitoring each car as it goes over the bridge? Of course not. But it DOES mean that we should think about the long-term disposition of the bridge in the steady state. It will help us identify risk, connect with stakeholders that we mightn’t have thought of, and in general do a better job of creating sustainable projects. In the bridge example, we assert that the project manager should consider the paving material, not just for its ability to provide improved mileage for vehicles, but also for its ability to withstand heating and cooling without breaking up and requiring repaving every year. At least ask these questions. It will help you connect to the operations ‘below’ and the ‘long term initiatives’ above.
Take a look at the SEF (you forgot already? It stands for Strategic Execution Framework) below. See how important it is for an organization to plug together all of the pieces if they want to get to a sustainable steady-state. And guess who is at the center of it all? You. The well-connected project, program, and/or portfolio manager.
What we expound here are great general PM principles and practices, and by no coincidence, are great green (or better-stated) sustainable PM principles. Even Stanford’s naming of the areas is important. Notice “Long-term Intentions”. Long-term. Smacks of the word “sustainable”, doesn’t it? How about “operations”? Hmm, that word also implies ongoing, enduring…. yes, there it is – sustainability, again.
So why wouldn’t the middle portion of this flowchart (where we PMs live) not ALSO think sustainably? We should! We need to plug in!
- Connect upwards: You don’t have to be a top corporate HQ leader or CEO to know and live the organizations’ strategies.
- Read and re-read your organization’s mission, vision and values. Check messaging from company leaders. Of course we would steer you to messages on sustainability and the environment, but you can derive power for your projects’ charters from any of the messages at the top of the SEF.
- Connect downwards: You can, and should, consider our discipline of PM as distinct from operations. But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore them.
- Get to know the people who will operate the product of your project
- Understand the set of users as a stakeholder group and drink in their requirements and expectations as fodder for risk identification
- Think life-cycle. What happens to the final product of the operations of your product in the long term? Can you learn anything with that mindset? We assert that you absolutely can.
- PLUG IN! Peers in both directions are working towards sustainability, both economic and ecological. We need to pair with these colleagues and learn from both.
Have a look at the SEF, we provide a large version below.
And think, really THINK about whether you are unplugged – and losing a precious source of project power.
So – are you unplugged?
Get connected.
Read our book – it has several chapters on these subjects.
With all due respect to the musical South Pacific, we were reading the Boston Globe the other day and saw an article on a technology that makes a lot of sense. Why not get rid of the problem before it becomes a problem. It would seem easier than trying to get rid of it after. It’s like we say about 
Do Our Green Projects Hurt the World’s Poor?
This is an interesting question we’ve paraphrased from a great article by Peter Singer in a recent Wall Street Journal. Peter considers that we will not hurt the world’s poor as long as industrialized nations are willing to make sacrifices. Bjørn Lomborg answers that we will harm the poor if we listen to the “green extremists”. Who has the best argument?
This, to us, is a potential conflict with one of The Natural Step’s sustainability principles. Principal Four states “eliminate our contribution to conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.” While “eliminating our contributions to progressive buildup of substances extracted, and chemicals produced, and physical degradation” are we depressing people’s ability to make a living? That is the dilemma. Can we stimulate those economies while trying to green the world?
The answer may truly lie with our ability to do both, and that we must. It will be a vicious cycle if we don’t do both. According to the article, industrialized nations must make sacrifices to lift the world’s poor. If they don’t, then all of the issues that make things worse for the environment will continue. The premise is that the poorer nations are the ones that have the most significant population growth, which put more pressure on the environment. We pointed that out in our book as one of the “problem drivers and indicators” of the green wave, along with rapidly developing nations and resource degradation and loss of biodiversity. These are all related. Rapidly developing countries are where the poorer people are, and the pressure to harvest rain forests, for instance, to provide firewood, income, and farmland, is felt the most. SO according to Peter, the easy answer is to reduce poverty. The difficult question is how.
If we stimulate growth and we stimulate employment, we create projects that may be in conflict with environmental concerns. If we build schools and housing, we take away land; maybe wetlands, old growth forests, and critical habitat. If we stimulate farming to help people feed themselves, again, we potentially can destroy entire ecosystems. Peter points out that “…there is no single currency by which we can measure the benefit of saving human lives against the cost of destroying forests that provide the last remaining refuges for free-living chimpanzees, orangutans, and Sumatran tigers.”
We can see that here is a bitter pill, here, to be swallowed universally, wherever you are on what we like to call the “Hugger-Hummer” spectrum. Less is what we need to strive for, “less energy from fossil fuels, use less air conditioning and less heat, fly and drive less, and eat less meat.” When we say universally, we mean the developing countries may need to compromise on what they are striving to do, too. It is a global issue and needs to be dealt with, globally. Green projects, or greening of projects if you will, go a long way to helping. By leading the efforts to increase a project’s greenality, green project managers will increase efficiencies and reduce the use of those scarce resources we talk about in our book. Remember, it is not just projects that are green by definition, developing alternate energy sources, as an example, all projects can benefit by viewing it through the green project manager’s environmental lens.
More about Bjørn Lomborg response in a future post.