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42 • Green Project Management

300,000

200,000

100,000
0
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008
Figure 3.1
PMI membership growth: 1992 through November 2009.
energy and food. Isolationism is not an option. However, greenality faces
similar adoption issues to those that were faced by the early gurus of qual-
ity management such as Deming: misunderstanding of the costs versus
the benefits, strong leadership, and the “we’ve been doing it this way for
years” attitude among others. One thing we do have going for us is the rel-
atively new field of project management. Certainly, project management
has been around a while, as a discipline since the 1950s. The seminal event
for the discipline was the formation of the Project Management Institute
in 1969. Since that time the field has been growing in both popularity and
influence. Today, PMI has hundreds of thousands of members worldwide
(see Figure 3.1).
The critical mass of project managers can provide the strong leadership
in greenality efforts. What’s the connection? Project managers are the
ones who direct the consumption of resources in a project, and the ones
who can instill a life cycle mentality into the project from its inception (see
Table 3.2).
Joseph Juran spent more than 70 years in the quality field. His major
contribution is the Quality Control Handbook, still in use today after 48
years. He applied statistical methods like the Pareto principle (80% of the
problems are caused by 20% of the issues) to help companies understand
and improve the way that quality was managed. We feel, however, that his
most important parallel to greenality is his view that isolating the human
issues is the key to solving quality (greenality) problems. Specifically,
human beings are prone to resist change. Greenality thinking, like quality
thinking, is a change in culture. Once the resistance to change is under-
stood and addressed, greenality, like quality, becomes second nature. It
is designed in, not inspected in. Again, project managers are the logical
choice to lead the cultural change, because, by definition, leading projects
is leading change (see Table 3.3).