Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam: This interview with Rich Maltzman was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans. Regardless of one’s opinions on green business and climate change, enterprises are now putting significant effort into achieving sustainability goals. Project management is the “business end” of business. In our interview with Rich Maltzman (http://www.earthpm.com/) we learn that we project managers must embrace our role in transforming our organizations to meet these goals in a larger “enterprise” sense. We begin by looking at a definition of "sustainable", why sustainability should really be addressed on a program/portfolio level, how Rich and his co-presenter David Shirley "reinvented the wheel" for sustainability and of course we close with lots of good recommendations on how you will be able to integrate sustainability on your projects starting today. Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: We are back live, well sort of live here at the PMI Global Congress 2013 in New Orleans and with me is Rich Maltzman. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: Hello Rich! Rich Maltzman: Hello Cornelius. Nice to be here. Cornelius Fichtner: I believe you have been on The Project Management Podcast™ before. A couple of times, yeah! Rich Maltzman: A couple of times. It's great to be back. Cornelius Fichtner: You presented yesterday afternoon on the topic of Project Management Making Ideas into Sustainable Reality and Dave Shirley was your co-presenter. Let's do a definition first of all. Sustainable, what does it mean, sustainable? Rich Maltzman: Sustainable means the ability to last and we're talking here about lastingness in terms of economics, in terms of people, in terms of ecology. So it's not just about green and saving the planet although that's a part of it. It's about lasting economic benefits, lasting social benefits for whatever project that you're working on and in fact our talk was in the track called Benefits Realization, which I think was a very good home for it. Cornelius Fichtner: Alright! And how did it go? Rich Maltzman: It went really well. I wish we had more people attend. I think we had about 40 and no one walked out. Cornelius Fichtner: So it's good. Rich Maltzman: In that way, it was sustainable. People sustained their seats and I think their attention and it was a conversation especially towards the end. We really engaged with people and got some good questions so we're very happy. Cornelius Fichtner: Alright! So how do I make ideas into a sustainable reality? Rich Maltzman: Well, a lot of the talk was about the definition of success and whether or not success is considered to be long term. As project managers, you can't see my hands here but we tend to put blinders on by definition and for good reason from start to finish --- project start, project finish. PMI tells us a project has a definitive beginning and end but does mean we don’t think about what happens to the product, the deliverable of your project over the long term? We don’t think so. In fact, we think we sometimes rob ourselves of risk identification. We rob ourselves of stakeholder identification and all kinds of things that if they're not even identified, no chance to improve them and to get benefits and also fight threats. They come from those. So that long-term view is a way to bring sustainability thinking inter-project management and that's really our core message --- sustainability thinking in project management doesn’t mean that you have to work on your project for 17 years after you've handed off the deliverable. But when I think about what happens 17 years later, that's going to help you. Cornelius Fichtner: And when we talk about sustainability, we focus more on the product itself. Rich Maltzman: That's correct, that’s correct. Corn
