allPM.com :: Trust Yourself to Save Energy By Steven P. Blais, PMP

Trust Yourself to Save Energy By Steven P. Blais, PMP

Published on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 - 03:14 PM

“Every project team should be on a quest to reduce the total energy cost of detecting and transferring needed ideas.”¹

The rest of this issue of allPM.com discusses “green” projects and the practice of managing projects that create earth-friendly products like ecologically sound buildings and the like. I’m sure that most of us would elect earth-friendly procedures in our projects when the options are presented to us. Unfortunately in the field of project management, that option is not a common one. It’s hard to identify, much less practice, green management when your project is to create the content for a website touting the company’s new product. Or you are managing a group of programmers engaged in writing software to generate new compliance reports for Sarbanes-Oxley. There is nothing in the PMBOK® Guide to advise us how to reduce carbon emissions during the initiation phase. There is no reference to using reusable components in the planning phase. The PMBOK doesn’t even suggest we write all those plans on recycled paper. And if you factor in the many hours we spend burning the midnight oil creating the plans on our computers, we wouldn’t be surprised if we were actually contributing to the problem by following the PMBOK.

As typical hard-working, deadline-meeting project managers what can we do in our jobs to help out?

It’s not just about saving gas and composting waste; the idea is to reduce unnecessary energy consumption. We want to achieve a positive equation: the amount of energy expended is equal or less than the value achieved by the expenditure of that energy. Translating that to your project, it means evaluating all the activities that you and your team are doing and reducing or eliminating all activities that use energy with no positive return to the project or the organization.

The Purpose behind the Paper

Just as the army travels on its stomach (a paraphrase of a remark attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte), a business organization lives and dies on its paperwork. After all, we all know that the job isn’t done until the paperwork is finished.

One place to start is the amount of project paperwork that we take for granted. Many of us can remember the US Federal Government “Paperwork Reduction” programs of years ago. While in some measures the programs were successful, the long-lasting effect was about equal to a crash diet. After a while the paperwork started to mount up again.

It is certainly a positive goal to reduce or eliminate the quantity of paper generated by our projects. The issue I’m addressing here is not “saving tree.” The act of documenting the project communications takes energy. That energy could better be used producing a higher quality product. And that’s the real culprit behind energy misuse.

Every document we produce takes the energy of one or more people to produce it, consumes the energy of the media (paper, computers, projectors), and takes the energy of the receiver to read or observe the content. We save energy with a phone call instead of an e-mail. We save even more energy with a face-to-face meeting.

Can you conceive of running your project based mostly on verbal status reports, plans written on a white board in a common area that could be changed by any member of the project team, a “Gantt” Chart consisting of “post it” notes identifying tasks that are moved around a calendar made up of three flip chart pages taped to the wall? How about calling the marketing people in to view the proposed web site on low-tech storyboards instead of slick mock-ups of screens made with some computer tool and printed out for each reviewer?

Project management is not preparing PowerPoint presentations, or producing pounds of paper. It is not managing Gantt Charts; it is managing people and process, and managing them both efficiently with minimal waste of energy. While the PMBOK® Guide does not specifically address running “green” projects, it also does not require that project managers produce project paperwork out of proportion to the work of the project itself. The PMBOK is concerned that information about the project is gathered and disseminated for analysis and action, not that the information is recorded on specific forms and reported in writing and PowerPoint driven meetings.

As Buckingham and Coffman point out in their study of great managers for the Gallup Organization, “a manager must be able to do four activities extremely well: select a person, set expectations, motivate the person, develop the person.”² Nowhere in the study of great managers did they conclude that a great manager produces really good status reports.

Paper Meetings

Here’s a typical example of the type of insidious energy expense associated with our project activities: the project status meeting for management.

Here is a typical scenario of the project status report meeting cycle:

Presenter sends out e-mail invitation with agenda
Presenter prepares PowerPoint slide presentation of status
Participants print out agenda to take to the meeting
Presenter prints out agenda and passes it out to participants at meeting (in case they forget to bring a printed copy of e-mail)
Presenter prints out PowerPoint presentation so everyone can follow along and take notes on the presentation
Presentation contains slide with agenda
Presentation contains slides with each new topic
Presenter reads the slides for the participants and answers questions if there are any
Participants take a few notes
At the end of the meeting, presenter collects undistributed agendas and PowerPoint slides and disposes of them, including those left behind by participants
Participants get back to their office and dispose of PowerPoint presentation perhaps after re-reading them
Presenter writes up minutes of meeting and e-mails them to participants and non-attendees
Recipients of minutes download and print them for off-line reading
Recipients read the minutes, find discrepancies and convene a meeting or conduct a series of e-mail conversations to correct the minutes
Once corrected, presenter and recipients dispose of minutes
Corrected minutes are printed and go into file for future reference amidst minutes of meetings collected over past seven years.

Consider this energy-saving alternative:

Jot a few notes about the status of the project on index cards (what have we done since the last meeting, what are we going to do before the next meeting, and what problems do we anticipate)
Send out the invitation to only those who need to be in the meeting stating the purpose of the meeting rather than an agenda
Hand out index cards at the meeting for note-taking (collect the unused ones at the end of the meeting for the next meeting)
Spend the time in the meeting discussing the project issues rather than making a one-way presentation
Write any action items from the meeting on index cards and hand them to the person charged with that action
Summarize at the end to ensure the objectives of the meeting were met
Trust that everyone in the room will remember what they need to remember about the meeting and dispense with post-meeting minutes

The message? Challenge every form of written communication surrounding your project to see if there is another, more efficient way of transferring that information. If the documentation created is not going to be updated and used on a regular basis to answer questions or solve problems, don’t create it in the first place. Do something more valuable with your energy.

A Matter of Trust

Documentation is used to substitute for trust.

Each time I remove a written document between us, I am removing a barrier. I am also saving energy. I am forcing the two of us to exchange information in a more immediate way and increasing our mutual trust that we can work out a miscommunication positively and with minimal use of energy.

The important thing isn’t the paper that is being used. It’s the energy and time that is wasted preparing the paperwork that could be used to create something of value for the customer or company. To paraphrase Ron Jeffries, “If a customer wants me to spend time documenting, I’d advise him what it will cost him in productive effort and let him make the decision on which is a more important and valuable use of my time.”

© 2008 allPM.com

Steve Blais, PMP is a consultant and educator living in Sarasota and Key West Florida. He has worked for 40 years in the field of computing. He is currently working with companies to create and improve their business analyst processes. He is the author of the IIL Business Analysis series of courses, and the forthcoming book, "The Beginning and End of Software Engineering: a guide for the Business Analyst."

¹ Alistair Cockburn, Agile Software Development, Boston, Addison-Wesley, 2002, page91.

² First, Break All the Rules, Simon & Schuster, 1999, page 59.

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