Page 22 -

Introduction

In recent years, business seems to understand the message that green is
important—or at least that it will help sell products and services. Recently,
the authors were booking an online airline ticket on JetBlue. At the close
of the purchase, a choice came up. Did we want to offset the carbon we’d
be using on our trip by purchasing carbon credits? It would cost only a few
dollars. So, even an airline branded Blue is showing it’s Green.
We know, firsthand, then, that business is beginning to appreciate the
value of green. That’s of course in harmony with an increasing “green
wave” of awareness among the general population. In fact, there has been
much discussion surrounding the topic of green business but very little
about green projects, green project management, and green project man-
agers, and this is interesting to us because we see projects as the “business
end” of business. Projects are where business ideas become reality, after
all. Projects, by definition, use resources. Shouldn’t projects, therefore, be a
key area of any focus on green business?
We decided to try to fill what we see as a lack of attention to green
project management and focus the energy (excuse the pun), research, and
recommendations regarding green business as a microcosm of business
that is project management, consolidating it into this book about green
project management.
On our journey to do that, we felt we were literally one word short. We
needed a word that would communicate a project’s green-ness, or eco-
friendliness, or enviro-efficiency, or earth-awareness, without using those
clumsy-sounding hyphenated words. With our background in project
management training and quality, we decided to coin our own word,
greenality. It’s no coincidence that this word ends the same way as quality.
Greenality, like quality or granularity, is something that can be measured
along a scale. In the book we will make several parallels between greenal-
ity and quality. They have some striking similarities. We’ve chosen to
define greenality this way: “the degree to which an organization has con-
sidered environmental (green) factors that affect its projects during the
entire project life cycle and beyond.” It contains two project management
processes: (1) creating a plan to minimize the environmental impacts of

xxi