Still think green project management is a fad? #pmot

Posted on | November 18, 2009 | Author: | lindsayascott | No Comments

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That’s because you might not be looking at it with your “opportunity eyes” wide open!

Last week I went along to present at a North West eGovernment Group (NWeGG) meeting, part of their group is called Right Track NW, which is focused on “training, tools, support and sharing of good practice to improve Programme and Project Management skills and capabilities.” The group is for local authority programme and project managers.

One of the presentations, from Manchester City Council focused on the, *sigh*, green issues that local authorities are now facing. I know that most people would have switched off by now but these green issues mentioned are not only impacting council business but also the project management group within the council. The question posed in the presentation, “So what actually should we, as the organisation’s project specialists, be doing to support our organisation?”

The Programme Manager from the Manchester City Council’s (MCC) Programme Management Office group gave a frank, open and honest assessment of the situation: Essentially, no-one within the PMO has any experience, expertise or prior involvement with anything remotely “green”.

There is an expectation that the PMO have a responsibility to not only support new green initiatives, but also provide expertise in “greening up” projects, work collaboratively with other partners, understand who the new stakeholders are, enagage with clients and suppliers and ultimately providing supporting processes, tools and techniques that underpin it all.

The Programme Manager believes that green project management is not going to go away and there are wide reaching issues for the programme and project management community.

The MCC and its PMO team have been working on their green directive for the last 6 months and had some great lessons learnt to share;

Top level support and collaborative working – there are major disconnects between the strategy and the practical solutions
Clients and contractors don’t fully understand the issues and opportunities (“green bling”)
Programme and project management community awareness is very patchy – failing to communicate and train staff
Plenty of academics, lots of science, but no experts to guide organisational responses
Regulations are tighter, buildings greener, but carbon footprints are not shrinking

The practicalities the Council have already started looking at is their Gateway Review process, Stage 1 to include carbon saving scrutiny but it’s still crude at this stage. They’re also looking at their project delivery methodology to see which areas are going to be greened up and how exactly the green initiaitive will impact methods of delivery. At this time, the most proactive thing to do is start working with various green groups and partners to understand more about the general issue before beginning to focus on the impacts in project management. At the moment they feel like reluctant pioneers, because there is a real lack of expertise in green project management to draw on in the UK market.

So are you beginning to see an opportunity in the green project management space yet?

The specific issues for the Programme and Project Management community;

Many new projects (many of which we’ve never delivered an equivalent before)
Poor awareness of the concepts involved and their impact on business process / delivery methods
Little guidance and no training available in green project management
Notable absence of emerging best practice i.e., PRINCE2, MSP, MoR, BoK (no mentions of green at all)
Where are the opportunties and mechanisms to support collaborative working?

The challenge?

New key competencies in programme and project management are required to understand the mandates / briefs / design solutions / associated risks and stakeholder management will become an even greater challenge.

Arras People has been talking for a while about the green sector, the next area of challenge and opportunity for the project management sector. Where will the greened up project managers come from? Is this an opportunity to take advantage of the skills gap that exists in project management? If local authorities and other government organisations are facing the challenges today, how long before other sectors face the same issues?

This is going to be one up-and-coming area to watch in project management, but then again, should we be doing more than just watching?