Check out next week's Green PM Seminar on the Presidio of San Francisco's Environmental Remediation Program

Eileen Fanelli, Remediation Program Manager at the Presidio Trust, will describe the complex project and program management involved in this 15-year remediation effort.

The Presidio of San Francisco was once the oldest continuously operating military post in the nation. It is now the largest national park in an urban area, covering 1,491 acres, with over 990 acres of open space supporting native habitat and several endangered and threatened species. The Presidio is also a National Historic Landmark with hundreds of historic buildings and features.

Key to the transformation of the Presidio from post to park is implementation of the Environmental Remediation Program, implementing the clean-up of numerous waste disposal and release sites; closing over 500 former above and below ground fuel storage tanks and miles of fuel distribution piping, and assessing lead-based paint in soil at over 800 buildings and structures throughout the Presidio.

This presentation will provide an introduction to the history and many resources of the Presidio. We will also discuss in detail how the $167 million Remediation Program has worked closely with multiple stakeholder groups to implement remedial solutions that support the cultural heritage and native habitat values of the Presidio, while addressing numerous project constraints imposed by multi-party agreements between state and federal agencies and third-party insurance providers. In particular we’ll discuss how implementation of program monitoring and change management processes have been successfully used to overcome significant schedule and resource challenges. From 1999, when work began, to May 2014, when remediation is scheduled to be substantially complete, the program will have transformed hundreds of acres of environmental liabilities to environmental and cultural assets, while maintaining a robust public communication and participation plan.

Powering the Cloud: Big Energy in Data Centers

Many of us rely on the cloud far more than we know, and the convenience of information on demand regardless of location or device is bewitching. Few have gotten a chance to see what really makes the cloud tick. In this month's Wired, Steven Levy writes about his rare opportunity to visit several of Google's data centers, and learn about how they've been driving cost and eenrgy waste out of their business. It's a great read about one of the giants in an industry that consumes 1.5% of the eberhy used throughout the entire planet.

Enjoy "Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center."
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/all/

The bottom line of green is still black!

We've been hearing more and more that, contrary to previous popular belief, adopting sustainability practices is good business. Now a Harvard Business Review blog post backs up that assertion. Because investors have increasingly demanded data, we have more to go by now than we did a decade ago, and the data present a clear picture:

"Resource efficient companies — those that use less energy and water and create less waste in generating a unit of revenue — tend to produce higher investment returns than their less resource-efficient rivals. ... Resource-efficient companies also display high levels of innovation and entrepreneurship, pushing core value metrics above the average large cap global business."

That sounds like a recipe for success!

Back in 1993, when I was in publishing, I worked on a book titled The Bottom Line of Green Is Black. Even then, a few people saw the benefits of going green, but it's taken a while for sustainability to spread on a larger scale. Now, it seems, more businesses are seeing that it actually makes sense financially -- and that they can do well by doing good.

So perhaps we can say now: Green is the new black!

Sustainability taking root in management agendas

A new MIT Sloan report brings good news for project managers interested in sustainability. The authors claim that sustainability is reaching a tipping point, where companies have made it a permanent part of their management agendas, as they find more and more that they profit from sustainable practices.

While there's still progress to be made in this direction, the trend is a positive one for our planet -- and, of course, for green project managers. With companies placing more emphasis on sustainability, it's a good time to incorporate it into your project management work. To learn more about how to do that, check out the online seminars being offered by Green Project Management.

And this new focus is also likely to result in more project management jobs related directly to sustainability. If you know of opportunities in this area, or have any thoughts on the subject, we'd love to hear from you -- enter your comments below!

Green PM online seminar

If you missed our last Green Project Management seminar, here's your chance to learn more about the subject, in the comfort of your own home. Green Project Management is offering a 3-hour online seminar, coming up soon!

Sustainability in Project Management Workshop 

Attend Live Online  | 3 Hours | Only $99Monday, September 10, 12 - 3:00PM EDT 

 Click here to register

Can't make it?  Workshops are also being held Monday October 8, 12-3:00PM EDT, 
Monday, November 12, 12-3:00PM EDT, and are also available on request.
Learn more at www.greenprojectmanagement.org

Until now, sustainability, project life cycles, and processes did not have a common convergence point, making it challenging to align them.  

By using PRiSM, a project methodology and toolset developed by GPM that incorporates ISO:14001 best practices and governance with project delivery, you will be able to weave sustainable methods into the fabric of projects, expanding your impact beyond scope and deliverables to five bottom lines that define the health of the organization as a whole. At the end of this workshop you have the knowledge to make a direct impact on your projects and ultimately on your organization.

At the end of this workshop you will be able to:

• Define Sustainability in Project Management or "Green Project Management" 
• Define P5, the five bottom lines of sustainability and project management
• Define the differences between a green project and standard project management
• Define what it takes to be a GPM
• Understand how to develop a sustainability management plan
• Understand how to plan risk using PESTLE
• Understand the sustainability integrators to knowledge areas and process groups

Learn more on the Green PM site.

PRiSM: A methodology for green project management

When we began planning our Green Project Management seminar series, one question often arose: What is green project management?

We’ve had a number of great seminars in the series so far – yet we’ve never really answered that question. This month, we finally got an answer.

Joel Carboni of Green Project Management (GPM) and Mark Reeson of QA Limited explained to a packed room how to use their PRiSM methodology to make any project green – not just those in fields directly related to sustainability.

Why green project management?

There’s a growing demand to integrate sustainability with business practices, but a lack of a methodology to do so.  And sustainability and project management have for the most part remained separate. Green Project Management’s goal is to change that.

In 2008, International Project Management Association VP Mary McKinley said, “The further development of the project management profession requires project managers to take responsibility for sustainability.” GPM is taking this to the next level by making that more than just a statement. They’re not asking to change the way project managers work – instead, they’re adding to existing project management methodologies.

Why the emphasis on sustainability for project managers? Because we can be agents of change on a large scale. And to do so, we must have readily available and easily applicable tools.

The P5

That’s where GPM comes in. Their focus is not on the deliverable itself but on the method by which it is delivered.

GPM uses a new approach to sustainability, P5, which goes beyond the well-known triple bottom line to assess 5 measurable elements of sustainability -- each of which is measured individually and also together as a complete package:

1. Social sustainability: People. This relates to labor practices and decent work, human rights, society and customers, and behaving ethically. 
2. Environmental sustainability: Planet. This is the area concerned with transport, energy, water, waste, and materials and resources.
3. Economic sustainability: Profit. This area is already of interest to companies, since it’s all about return on investment and business agility.
4. Product sustainability: Product. What’s important here, from a sustainability perspective, is the lifespan and servicing of the product.
5. Process sustainability: Process. This key ingredient in sustainable project management involves looking at the maturity of processes, as well as their efficiency and fairness. 

The Sustainability Management Plan – green project management in action

How can we apply the P5 to a project? By using a Sustainability Management Plan (SMP), which assesses the impact of the project on all the P5 elements and gives each a score. A weighting score to shows how important each element is to the organization. And this results in an overall sustainability score.

The SMP details key performance indicators in each of the P5 areas and includes an environmental impact assessment, as well as a section on sustainability risk management.

The PRiSM methodology

The GPM methodology is known as PRiSM, or Projects Integrating Sustainable Methods. It incorporates not just the Sustainability Management Plan but also other helpful tools such as a Green Vendor Scorecard to rate each vendor in a number of areas, weighted depending on their importance to your project.

But what’s most important is that GPM encourages us to look at projects from a different angle, and shows how we can incorporate sustainability into any project, by considering how the project affects each of the P5 areas.

GPM aims to make sustainable project management simple, though it may not therefore be easy. They believe that sustainable project management can help us in these areas:

• Managing in an integrated manner for all stakeholders – which involves getting stakeholders on board with being green.
• Aligning social responsibility with corporate strategy.
• Rationalizing harmony with economy, compliance, and ethical responsibilities.
• Managing risks to brand and reputation.
• Integrating eco-design into product and service offerings.

How to get involved

The best way for you to make a difference is by working to incorporate green project management in your own projects. If you’re concerned about objections being raised to this, check out the whitepaper Handling Objections for ideas on how to deal with those.

Green Project Management is working to get sustainability included in the PMI body of knowledge. If you agree that’s a good idea, consider signing this petition.

And we encourage you to visit the Green Project Management site and get involved in their LinkedIn group. GPM welcomes your input and wants to share their method. Working together, we can all ensure that incorporating sustainability in project management becomes the norm.

How can we make the world a better place?

Oil use related to driving cars has led to profound economic, health, and environmental problems on our planet. One Bay Area company, Better Place, has a unique approach to helping solve those problems. At our May Green Project Management seminar, Peter Cooper of Better Place explained how the company is attempting to break oil’s monopoly on transportation -- by accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles.

The past year has brought more news about new electric cars, and early adopters now have several makes of cars to choose among. But most people aren’t early adopters. How do you convince those people to drive electric cars? Many concerns remain about price, battery range, and charging. Better Place is trying to take a situation that doesn’t currently serve most consumers and change it to something that does work.

The Better Place model

Currently, instead of going to the consumer, the electric vehicle (EV) universe is asking the consumer to come to it. Better Place is trying to shift this and to do something that doesn’t require consumers to change their behavior.

Their key is to separate the battery from the car, both physically and financially. This makes driving more affordable, convenient, and sustainable.

Batteries account for the high cost of EVs, but in Better Place’s model, the consumer buys the car and merely leases the battery. Better Place doesn’t produce cars but works with car manufacturers like Renault to produce cars that can all use the same battery. The price of these cars is now comparable to that of gas cars, and it’s expected to go down. Plus, since you're not buying the battery, you don’t have to deal with the car’s resale value decreasing when the battery degrades.

Range anxiety is eliminated with an infrastructure of charging stations that can also be used as battery-switch stations. Rather than having to wait for the battery to charge, drivers can switch their spent battery for a freshly charged one. In addition, the batteries are charged slowly in a cool environment, so they last longer to begin with (though drivers can charge the batteries at home, too). And as new batteries come on to the market, car owners get to upgrade to the better technology at no cost.

An important part of the Better Place infrastructure is their remote monitoring. A problem for EVs is that if the battery drains completely, it can be hard to keep it alive. The remote monitoring system monitors the battery power and allows for roadside assistance to be deployed if the battery is draining.

And the switching station knows when you’re coming and queues up a battery for you. So it takes about 5 minutes to go through a station, about a minute of which is the actual switch process.

As Better Place likes to explain it, in their model they are a service provider, like a cell phone company – and the consumer buys a plan to power their car as they would buy a cell phone plan.

The Better Place model is currently being implemented in several places around the world, including Australia and Hawaii. In Israel and Denmark, around 100,000 Renault cars are being deployed, with about 23 switch stations in Israel and 8 in Denmark.

You may be wondering when this will come to the Bay Area, where the company is headquartered. Better Place is looking at a pilot program for the area starting with some switch stations next year, and we might expect to see the cars here in a couple years. In the Bay Area, they’d need about 40 switch stations to support 100,000 cars.

Project management challenges and solutions

Change management is often a crucial part of project management, and implementing the Better Place model is no exception. Convincing people to make the change to their system requires a great deal of change management for both the industry and the consumer. People need to be convinced that the Better Place model works and will address the issues they now have with EVs – and that there’s even a reason to switch to EVs in the first place. In addition, governments need to be convinced there’s a benefit in adopting the model and supporting the necessary infrastructure.

The company has worked in areas where governments are willing to help with things like getting cheaper rent and good publicity. Then when they see that Better Place can execute, they are more willing to invest.

Each area has different needs, and therefore different motivations to promote EV adoption. Israel was motivated by the desire to decrease dependency on the oil that they get from their neighbors. Denmark, in contrast, is producing excess energy. Even Hawaii is producing excess wind energy at night, when demand is low. In places like this, the extra energy can be used at night for car charging, which avoids having to dump that energy.

Utilities in general can benefit from EVs storing intermittent energy. Car batteries can make up a virtual power plant, which can even be turned off when needed – another case where remote monitoring comes in handy.

In Australia, where gas prices are high – providing an excellent motivation to switch to EVs – Better Place worked to break the brand paradigm of people thinking their model works only in small countries or on islands. The right branding is a crucial element in adoption of the Better Place model.

To promote their brand in a way that will engage consumers, the company engages car companies, the media, construction, and big brands that touch lots of consumers. Engaging the consumers directly comes closer to launch, in the last year.

The adoption curve begins with technophiles, and then sustainability advocates. Then there’s a “chasm” – getting from early adopters into the first major segment of consumers. So they need to identify who those people are, and turn early adopters into advocates who can communicate with others and convince them to move to EVs. One example of a segment they would target is socially conscious, upwardly mobile, professional couples with children.

Of course, all of us can benefit from electric cars. Even those who don’t drive them will benefit from the cleaner air they make possible. But Better Place is doing a lot to make EVs more accessible to the general public so more of us can drive them – and I, for one, have been convinced by their excellent communication and change management. I look forward to the day when their cars and infrastructure are available in the Bay Area.