A Green PM

by Doug Berube

A meme for the 21^st century is “a green building” or “green thinking”. A green building, also known as green construction or sustainable building, applies to a structure and using process standards that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building life cycle. Resource-efficiency is accomplished by using local, products and manufactures as a required percentage of the building project. These new green requirements are a paradigm shift for project management. The paradigm shift has happened and the new PM skill set must include knowledge of efficient use of energy, water, other resources, protecting occupant health, reducing waste, pollution, and environmental degradation.

Project managers are should think green because of mandated project environmental impacts need to reduced. Green thinking is about reducing the human pressure on the environment that incurres during the construction process and building usage. The project management standards and processes will not change when following these guidelines and while using “greenthink”. The key project management processes are still the same for green project managers, the green applications will have to be integrated into those processes below.

1.    Planning/Design

2.    Phase Management

3.    Control/Risk Management

4.    Team Management

5.    Communication

6.    Procurement

7.    Integration

8.    Change Management

9.    Closeout

The project manager’s main responsibility of cost control hasn’t changed, but this green mandate does create a risk to a project because the new requirements can increase material and labor cost to a project.

Risk management has the same importance on a green project, as it did on a non-mandated project. The PM and management team still uses the same monitoring tools to ensure the project is within the planned process perimeters. Managing a project always requires scope control because it doesn’t take much time for a project to grow beyond its boundaries by too many changes to the scope. The management team still has to anticipate as many potential changes as possible and now the PM must also anticipate environmental impacts. The environment doesn’t have to be in every decision made about a project, it’s about awareness. The point is not to ignore the environment and that your procedures should be green friendly.

Green project management is not limited to the construction of a building; it can be applied to technology. The development of new technologies can affect the environment during the development, manufacturing, and transportation phases of a product. Considering the environment during the initial risk assessment to determine impact on resource is a good policy to implement. All stakeholders need to be involved and have a total understanding of all the objectives and a project charter would be an appropriate tool to achieve the desired project success. Writing a project charter forces the team to focus on the whole project, including the use of green technology. The charter will include all the stakeholders as a way of ensuring that everyone understands the project’s requirements. Green thinking is about awareness of the environment, how we can be better stewards of our resources, and make a difference by not being wasteful.

The government can implement mandates and owners can implement environmental policies for their companies, but it takes everyone to become better stewards for the policies to work. A green PM is someone who has evaluated the work environment and made a cognitive decision to work with the client, local jurisdictions, and organizations to complete the paradigm shift. Awareness of our environment and how we impact where we live is to complete the paradigm shift. That sounds pretty easy, but it is very difficult to achieve that goal because it takes awareness from everyone involved and because of different belief systems, the task is not always easy. As project managers we can think green and make a difference.

Thinking Critically

by Doug Berube

Should critical thinking be an educational priority and part of our basic education? How often do people think about how and why they are thinking the way they do?

“…intelligence…is in plentiful supply…the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking.” – Carl Sagan

I think it is apparent by the stratification of beliefs in how Americans view America and how it should run and function. Even the professional thinking process today makes decisions by way of confirmation bias. This thinking bias causes coalescing of like thinking, which is the cause of tribal thinking.

How do we become critical thinkers and how to question our own thoughts? First a disclaimer, critical thinking doesn’t mean that we all think the same way. It means critical thinking is a process of using self-regulated, self-aware reason as a tool of high quality fair-mindedness. People who critically think consistently by questioning their logic using reasonable open-mindedness and empathic awareness will have a live in tune their mental health.

“Be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.” – Jacob Needleman

Mind Tools: (www.mindtools.com) has a list of critical thinking cognitive skills:

·         Analyze Cause and Effect: separate the motive of reason for an action from the result or outcome

·         Classify and Sequence: group items or sort them according to similar characteristics.

·         Compare and Contrast: determine how things are similar and how they are different.

·         Inference: skilled in reasoning and extending logic to come up with plausible options or outcomes.

·         Evaluate: able to determine sound criteria for making choices and decisions.

·         Observe: skilled in attending to the details of what actually happened.

·         Predict: able to finding and analyze trends, and extend these to make sensible predictions about the future.

·         Rationalize: able to apply the laws of reason (induction, deduction, analogy) in to judge and argument and determine its merits.

·         Prioritize: able to determine the importance of an event or situation and put it in the correct perspective.

·         Summarize: able to distill a brief report of what happened or what you have learned.

·         Synthesize: able to identify new possible outcome by using pieces of information you already know.

This list of cognitive skills, if used consistently, will clarify our thinking and help us become a critic of our own thinking. Developing these skills will create successful thinking.

Critical thinking will help process all the daily information we digest. We are bombarded with information from every form of media that can be used to transfer ideas. When I was growing up we only had 4 major forms of information media; books, newspapers, television, and radio (for us nerds, we included comic books). Today we have those four and a new plethora of information media only hindered by our imagination. The personal computer was the founding device that connected us to a pathway of information that is expanding exponentially about every two years at a time. This leads to an overwhelmed feeling of information overload. But, Clay Johnson mentions in his book The Information Diet, it is really not about information overload, it is about a healthy consumption of information. Just like we are what we eat, we are also the productions of how we consume information. Critical thinking is the proper tool to use in controlling and processing the information consumed. It will be good for our physical and mental health.

Critical thinking is a process to be used in all facets of our lives; personal, professional, and public. It’s not what we think, but how we think. It’s a constant inquiry and examination of beliefs and actions motivated by civility and respect. Critical thinking and the ability to question questions and becoming a critic of our own thinking should be an educational process learned from the very beginning of our reception of information. Let’s cultivate a healthy consumption of information and question its intent, so we can develop a very rational understanding of the event around us.

“A critical thinker is neither dogmatic nor gullible. The most distinctive features of the critical thinker’s attitude are open-mindedness and skepticism.” – Robert Todd Carroll

References:

Johnson, Clay. The Information Diet. O’Reilly, 2012 pp.2-5

Carroll. Robert Todd. Becoming a Critical Thinker, A Guide for the New Millennium 2^nd edition. Pearson 2005

Elder. L. Becoming a Critic of Your Thinking. Online Posting. www.criticalthinking.org 2004

Mind Tools. Critical Thinking. Online Posting. www.mindtools.com Mind Tools Ltd. 1996-2012