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54 • Green Project Management

1. A project run with green intent is the right thing to do, but it will also help the
project team do things right.
2. Project managers must first understand the green aspects of their projects,
knowing that this will better equip them to identify, manage, and respond to
project risks.
3. An environmental strategy for a project provides added opportunity for success
of both the project and the product of the project.
4. Project managers must view their projects through an environmental lens.
This increases the project manager’s (and the project team’s) long-term think-
ing and avails the project of the rising “green wave” of environmentalism.
5. Project managers must think of the environment in the same way that they
think of quality. It must be planned in, and the cost of “greenality,” like the cost
of quality, is more than offset by the savings and opportunities.

Figure 4.1
The five assertions of EarthPM.

To understand how the project manager manages the greenality of a
project, we must first understand the types of projects we manage in terms
of their greenality.
We discovered a spectrum of green among projects (see Figure 4.2). That
spectrum goes from “green by definition” on one side to “green in general”
projects on the other. Let’s look at these one by one.

green By deFinition
Green by definition (GBD) projects include those projects whose prod-
ucts or outcomes are “all about” sustainability or the environment. Here
we are talking about those projects devoted to saving energy, generating
clean energy, protecting natural resources, or preventing loss of species
and other outcomes along these lines. Generally, we can say that these
projects’ main focus is on the Natural Step issues.
1
One of the greenest of projects in this GBD category is the Green Project,
“a nonprofit organization dedicated to creatively promoting and encourag-
ing environmental sustainability in New Orleans.” The organization oper-
2
ates a building materials recycling store, with their supplies coming from
their own deconstruction and salvage operations, as well as contributions
from others in the community. The Green Project, originally the Mid-City
Green Project, was conceived as a multipurpose creative recycling center,