PM Network - February 2009

GREENING THE CITY

Amsterdam is officially up for the European Green Capital 2010 title. And project managers are doing their part to green up the city.

“Project managers around the world are all being asked to add carbon footprint reduction to their growing list of project objectives,” says Tom Bonkenburg at St. Onge Co. “Due to pressures from the government and the environmentally friendly culture, project managers in Amsterdam have been ‘thinking green’ for many years and are often on the forefront of this revolution.”

One of his clients, CityCargo, is trying to reduce the carbon footprint of inner-city logistics by using cargo trams and electric delivery vehicles to bring goods to local restaurants and shops.

“This has great appeal within Amsterdam since traffic, noise and exhaust are constant complaints,” Mr. Bonkenburg says.

international business, so this kind of thinking is a natural fit. When working in an internationally focused city like Amsterdam, I often see the need to be less [former GE chair] Jack Welch and more Dr. Phil [TV psychologist] .”

PROJECT MANAGER BE NIMBLE

As companies adjust their priorities in dynamic markets and challenging economic times, project managers must be able to swiftly shift project plans, says Peter Barnes. He is Europe, Middle East and Africa marketing manager for IT giant HP’s project and portfolio management center in Amstelveen, a southwest suburb of Amsterdam.

A veteran of the sector since 1984, Mr. Barnes sees a trend toward enterprise project management and says it reflects the fact that there is no such thing as a “pure IT project.”

“All projects are business projects, yet IT underpins all of them,” he says. “Project managers need to be aligned to the business and provide a bridge between business demand and IT supply. Demand management is essential to allow IT to get a grip on the full scope and range of business demand.”

Project managers working in the city need a more informed perspective on business goals, says Remco Meisner, project and program manager at Andarr, a project management and security management services provider.

With a client list that includes some of the biggest players in Amsterdam—Tele2, ABN AMRO, Nissan Europe, Borg Warner Chemicals—Mr. Meisner has a bird’s eye view of the city’s project needs. And what he’s seeing is an increasing need for project managers to connect the business goals of their employer with those of their customers.

“This change, in my opinion, is caused by the project management profession moving upwards in quality

level, while the organizations involved … are running behind,” he says.

Mr. Meisner also reports a tendency to deal with organizational issues through projects that “cross the borders of the value chain, including suppliers, customers and sometimes even other organizations.”

A certain portion of such large projects should be regarded as “programs” rather than “projects,” he says, but many companies are reluctant to change the language.

Could semantics suggest something about organizations’ prevailing attitudes?

“Perhaps organizations consider ‘programs’ equivalent to ‘extremely large and hardly under control’—I don’t know,” says Mr. Meisner. “The large projects are the most interesting ones, as they involve many new skills.”

Bigger projects emphasize the ability to understand organizational maturity, and also imply a link between project (or program) management and change management, he says.

“One might claim that today large projects or programs are in fact frequently about the actual implementation of organizational change,” says Mr. Meisner. “That is quite a development.” PM