Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Green Project Management?

 I was reviewing some old files and found this series of articles on "Green Project Management". Now with all the media focus on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, I thought it may be timely to take a look at this topic.

Basically, the proponents of "GreenPM" suggest it is the support of an organization's environmental policy through its project management process. It is an interesting idea, but I view it a little differently, making the environment a stakeholder, as is often the case on a construction project, achieves much the same results during the execution phase. Environmental protection is often strongly enforced during these phases in any case...

Where "GreenPM" perhaps offers more change to the process is in the softer skill areas and supply chains, where people may not be so frontline in thinking of the environment, or in execution of IT or office based projects for example. The point is not to make every decision in favour of the most environmentally friendly in a blanket approach, but that the environment is added as one of the key evaluation criteria throughout all the decisions.

I also recently found this article which asks if the scenario of the Gulf oil spill could happen in mining. It is worth a read as it basically contends, yes, the same scenario with such pressured decision making could certainly occur in the mining industry. I would also liken this to the many reports about poor organizational communications (internal and external) and "groupthink" that are oft cited as prime factors in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster, see here and here for more background, plus a short video. If this report is to be believed, there was much organizational chaos onboard the rig and during the aftermath, with legislators playing a significant part with exceptions granted and slow decisions.

And whilst the environmental impacts and economic damage may be tremendous and felt for years to come in the affected regions, let us not forget that eleven workers died in the initial blaze. If the current rhetoric can be believed and this disaster could be the clarion call for mainstream support of renewables and alternative energy sources, the environment will ultimately benefit from this situation, the workers are, however, lost forever.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

A typical project experience?

I recently was involved in a construction project that whilst ultimately judged a success, there goes any suspense I may be able to build up, struggled through a few issues along the way. See if these sound familiar...

The project was initiated due to a legal / insurance requirement, it HAD to go ahead and it HAD to be finished by a certain date for compliance, no schedule extensions would be allowed.

It was a struggle to get the project kicked off properly as the resources were difficult to co-ordinate. Then, two days before the project was due to start the execution phase, a conflicting project called priority on a key resource and the project execution start was delayed two days, which used up all the available slack. In fact risk mitigation measures were used to extend the availability of the key resource to ensure the completion date could be met.

A just in time approach was used for the engineering design. Unfortunately this meant that initial budgets were not very accurate, although luckily they were higher than actuals, based mainly upon the lower unit cost than estimated of materials. The materials quantity takeoff proved to be very accurate with little wastage. 
Stakeholder management was an important part of this project and the stakeholder who was identified as being primary was included in design reviews. This worked very well for the approvals process during design. With regular inspections of the work by the primary stakeholder, the only problem encountered was that certain parts of the design had not been fully explained to the stakeholder, who insisted upon a mid-execution design amendment. This was not a major change to the design and was more related to finishing works, but did result in some additional material costs, the effect on the schedule was negligible.

The project also had a secondary benefit in that equipment purchased for the project was able to be written off on the project, so remains a cheap asset for future projects.
Lessons learned? If you are familiar with the type of work, then just in time design can be an effective approach, but make sure you fully brief the stakeholders and address their concerns in balance with other stakeholders.

What was the project? Just some steps I had to re-build at home...

Before:















During and design:















Note the clear primary stakeholder (my wife) decision for how the steps are to be configured marked by "X" and ""...

Project completion: