Page 162 -

136 • Green Project Management

eFFeCtive aCtions to aBate greenality issues

Corrective
Sometimes it is necessary, if not mandatory, to take corrective action
should the project’s greenality be jeopardized. Unfortunately, the impact
of that strategy may include additional costs, schedule and quality
impacts, as well as a potential to compromise the project’s greenality. As
we’ve mentioned before, when push comes to shove, greenality is an easy
target. Because it is a relatively new process, stakeholders may not have the
same priority set for greenality as they do for other aspects of the project,
especially cost. Because of that lower priority, it will be easier for them
to sacrifice, or at least recommend sacrificing, the project’s greenality. It
will be up to the project manager to continually emphasize the need (and
perhaps legal requirement) for project greenality, and the positive effects
greenality has on the project, both product and process. The reason for the
emphasis on both is because, while the stakeholders may not be as familiar
with greenality, they will relate to the product before they will relate to
the process. But for the project manager, it is a balance of both that will
make the project successful in terms of results and resource savings. It
will be especially discouraging to successfully manage the green aspects of
the project to a point, only to have the savings and success compromised
during project execution. One other criterion for corrective action is that
it should be done in a procedural way. One of the best ways to ensure
that happens is to use an abbreviated plan-do-check-act cycle (sometimes
called the Deming cycle or Shewhart cycle; see Figure 8.2). Corrective
actions should be planned with a disciplined process, then implemented
on a trial basis, evaluated to make sure they solve the problem, and then
standardized into the project.

Proactively building greenality into a project is an example of a pre-
ventative strategy.

Preventative
A much better alternative is to conscientiously monitor the project so that
the issues that need to be controlled are identified early enough to use a