Renewable Energy Continues to Grow

Buildings Magazine recently published an article "Renewable Energy Surges Ahead" which indicated that wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and hydropower are giving coal and natural gas a run for their money. While that may be good news on the surface the total percentage of renewable energy production is still is only 11.2% of total generation for 2012. 

While this is laudable and an important step for renewable energy, the important fact I saw was that over the report period of 2000 to 2012 renewable energy accounted for 56% of all new generation capacity. That in itself is pretty astounding. Most of that is reportedly from wind and PV solar.

These are impressive numbers, but for all the increased capacity from renewable sources, commercial buildings are only getting about 1% of their power needs from renewable sources. More reform needs to be done at the legal organization level of power generation. Many states regulate power generation for the benefit of large, centralized power companies. Most of their new generation from clean sources have come from large wind and solar farms at some distance from the consumer of power. This continues to perpetuate the centralized generation paradigm they are most familiar with. So much so, in some western states there is a movement from the utilities to stop roof-top solar PV installations because they say it is an unfair advantage to the homeowner to use their distribution systems without any cost. The reality of these arguments is that it really makes the utility distribution systems more effective and reduces the overall transmission energy losses because as the energy comes in from one house it can be immediately used by a neighbor close by. 

If distributed, clean energy is ever to work effectively our state governments are going to have to realize distributed energy production is in everyone's best interest, including the power generation companies. As the markets and technolgy change, so our utilities are being called on to change and grow too. 

If you support clean energy production and more sustainable power generation, then you should be in support of all generation, recovery, and conservation opportunities. One of those is to allow small groups of individuals and companies to form local power cooperatives which reduce transmission losses by generating power close to the point of use and encourage local diversity at the neighborhood level, rather than relying on singular power generation sources. That diversity also provides greater security and reliability for all users. 

To gain this benefit we have to change the state laws and regulations on the formation of utilities and power cooperatives. The large utilities don't want to give up their regional monopolies they have held for decades, but it's time we moved ahead and looked seriously and thoroughly at the benefits and risks involved with distributed, multi-source power generation. Write your state legislators about this issue and help them learn about the benefits of distributed power generation in your state.

Hospitals and a Barcalounger?? What happened to my hospital?

As an ex-CIO of a small healthcare insurance company. I remember attending some of the earliest conferences on the future of healthcare informatics beginning in 1984. The big discussion was the EMR or electronic medical record and privacy being implemented by HIPPA. Today you hardly go in any sizable clinic or community hospital without having some information collected about your health status which is stored in a form of and EMR. Even my small-town MD uses an Ipad to take notes for her records about my health and to look up information while we talk about a health issue. No she isn't one of those 'just out of school' MD's but in her 60's and ready to retire. So EMR's are in use and here to stay as they take on many different guises. UPDATE: Google announces diabetes monitoring with contacts

Is 57% waste real in delivery of projects in the Built Environment?

What is the highest portion of waste in construction projects?

It appears that rework tops the list. The data show that rework often has more than one cause. A recent CII study called "A Guide to Construction Rework Reduction" reveals that the biggest contributor to rework, at 25.4%, is scheduling, followed by issues related to materials and equipment (19%), design and engineering (14.6%) and instruction/monitoring (14.5%). Cutting costs too much can also drive rework. To save money, for example, some architects and engineers use old designs or templates for new projects, and those designs may have problems that were fixed on a previous job but remain in the original design and are passed along to a new one.

At the beginning of this year a conversation began between myself and collaboration principles of NoSilos.com. The reports from the Building SMART Alliance and the Construction Institute and others have been purporting A huge percentage of waste in our industry. While I cringe at the huge numbers, the reality is a lot of that number is infrastructure costs which are inflated due to the litigious nature of our business. Examples such as insurance, performance bonding and financing directly increase the cost due to the risky nature of the current methods we use to deliver Built Environment  projects. So eliminating these excessive costs will be difficult until lenders, insurers and risk assessment folks change their policies to favor less risky arrangements.

That said, the Cll study cited in the ENR article gives us a glimpse behind the numbers from yet another perspective. The study points out that rework, aka failure that manifests itself at the tail end of a project, is spawned by many different failure mechanisms. Bad schedules, materials, equipment, design, execution, supervision etc. etc. account for rework BUT most rework arises from more than one failure mechanism. Further, rework is merely the visible tip of the iceberg. The real failure points lie submerged and ignored.

If necessity is the mother of invention then crisis is the father of failure. And we see the father of failure sowing wild oats all over! And let us count the ways:

•  RFI's
• Energy
• Re-work
• Waste removal
• Poor site logistics
• Over priced construction materials
• Over priced construction equipment
• Poor delivery coordination
• and more, more, more.....

At NoSilos.com we have a metric we use called ROF or Return on Failure. Sort of like the Return on Investment metric known in the financial world, but in reverse. The value of failure compounded over time creates its own wave of increased cascade of failure. 

So how much can be reduced. Past experience shows a possible reduction on privately funded projects of at least 10% and more likely around 15% when we used a modestly integrated design and delivery process not even close to true IPD process. The key to these numbers was a combination of great communication, clear goals and some judicious use of technology to help make the process a bit easier. 

The bottom line, from our perspective, is that waste and inefficiency are known realities by key stakeholders in every sector of the economy regardless of their willingness to admit to the presence of the waste. We bring solutions to identify the differences between uncontrollable and controllable waste. What our clients do to reduce those costs is up to them. There is a vast opportunity for every company to reduce their ROF and increase their ROI to levels not seen before. 

Utility of the Future (UTOF) "Water Water where is it? There's not a drop to drink!"

A couple of months ago a report was issued entitled  “The Water Resources Utility of the Future: A Blueprint for Action.” was recently released by a coalition of organizations: The National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), and the Water Environment Federation (WEF).

Article linked from Water Efficiency Blog. http://www.waterefficiency.net/WE/Blogs/1619.aspx

Some of you know from reading previous posts on this blog, I have contended that diversified water treatment is as important as the diversified renewable energy movement which has been afoot for about the last decade or more. In my mind, it is unfortunate we have not paid attention to the underlying infrastructure and social connection good drinking water has on our communities. 

The EPA is warning us that in less than a decade or so, there will be significantly more cities in dire straits to provide safe drinking water in their communities. This report echoes this call to actions. Our current state rules on water production and the often arcane water rights laws which change from state to state often cause difficulties for the emerging, smaller scale treatment options available. Greywater rules are one other point of confusion where it is actually illegal to use this water at all and in most other areas it is severely regulated as a resource. Here in the desert SW we have a more open mind to the value of water, but only slightly. We may have some of the more forward-looking legislation in Arizona, but the public is not educated about the significant impacts these laws could have on our severe drought conditions.  

Using some of the recent filtration and treatment technologies which began in the NASA science labs back over 25 years ago we are beginning to see commercially viable solutions which can take briny water and turn it into higher quality water than found in our local utility pipes.

Yet setting water quality aside it is often more of a quantity problem and here is where the leaky pipe syndrome is raising it's ugly head. Some local utilities have a leakage rate over 30% in some network areas which is a huge burden for the overall system. Fixing far-flung and aging networks is expensive and so are put off until they go beyond being a nuisance to a health hazard. 

How will a diversified water treatment and production effort change the UTOF? Instead of larger, hard to manage and maintain, should we be be looking at smaller, more diversified and dispersed treatment and production solutions? 

UTOF report indicates we need a significant change in thinking and implementation of both the treatment and production sides of water. With more and more communities facing difficult water supply and treatment issues, these questions aren't for the future, but for us to grapple with now. To be sure they are difficult, complex, wicked problems and take the efforts of entire regions and the stakeholders of multiple communities to arrive at possible strategies and solution paths. No one process or solution will be a "silver bullet" in any community. 

This is another part to the connections of thoughts about the Built Environment and the elements surrounding the efforts we take as humans to change and shape the environment we work in. A string of ideas, in this instance relating to clean water, the environment and sustaniability of our communities and a possible picture of the water utility of the future UTOF.

Lean Startups and the Flow of Value-A lesson for the AECO Sector

Dave West recently wrote an article in ProjectsAtWork.com's June issue  that I immediately identified with. In fact he almost writes a parallel post to one of my original posts which is also one of the all-time favorite posts here on this blog. BIM & XPM-A Made Marriage.

Dave is currently the Chief Product Officer at Tasktop and one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment. He has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. As such, he knows of what he talks and it is a strong validation of the work I discovered somewhat by accident and happy circumstances over ten years ago.
Please read Dave's article here

Dave's mention of the Lean Startup movement, that is going through companies right now lead him to some interesting conclusions. As a mentor at our local Gangplank chapter in Tucson and having been through several Lean Launchpad  Startup workshops, I can attest to the parallels which Dave highlights. For the real focus on the Lean Launchpad is creating value and validation of a new idea using the minimum of effort to seek the greatest return. In a Lean Launchpad we don't go into big elaborate tests, but use simple tests to determine if an idea has merit in the marketplace. For me that was natural. I have been doing that in design practice for quite a while. Tweaking the context was easy for me to see how focusing on creating the greatest value using the least expensive means possible gave way to determine where the maximum effort should be spent as an idea matured and became validated.

How did all this resonate with me? I started using a variation of XPM and Agile back about 10 years ago in the design profession of architecture. The close parallels of SW development and working in the built environment design are quite scary. For that reason, and that it focuses on the value stream of information, the above rationale delivers very good results.

On my early journeys in this endeavor to find a better way to practice design I looked for ideas which would bring the design process together more efficiently. Since I'm not a purist on either the lean or agile side I just looked for what worked well and could be repeated over and over with consistent results. Creating a flow of information which delivered the value needed for timely decisions became our mantra. It reduced rework, it focused on the issue(s) at hand and set all others aside and above all was guided by the principle of keeping the end goal in mind.

Often, the project's end goal was modified along the way due to inconsistencies in assigning value in the beginning. But that is to be expected, since not all the value is known before a project starts. Discovering that new areas of value harvesting made more sense than staying with original ideas we were able to keep the project expectations in line and the Owner happy. More times than not, the final results were better than anyone would have imagined going into the project.

Who was responsible for delivery, everyone. If someone working on the project did not see it was their project to deliver value, they often were removed or isolated out to minimize their damage to the rest of the producing team.

As you can see, adaptability, collaboration, transparency, autonomy and focus on value were key components in our success.

Always remember "Collaboration is the Glue of Success"

NoSilos.com
Collaborative Construction Blog

This article is a continuation of conversations about how delivery of professional services in the Built Environment can change the way business is done. This article focuses on the change in focus from functional activity to delivery of value in every action and the need for all participants to own their part of the project delivery. It is a continuing String of thought with connections to project management, project delivery methods, change management and the continuing evolution of business delivery in our marketplace. 

Why Do Projects Fail? - A contrarian POV

Earlier today I came across an article entitled, "Why Do Projects Fail? - Learning how to avoid failure."  An engaging topic to be sure. Especially for me, since I'm in the business of helping folks deliver successful projects and managing the change which often accompanies those projects.

Well the article rounded up the usual suspects of project requirements, losing focus, disengagement, impossible deliverables, the wrong deliverables, the wrong project statement, governance and poor implementation. Now I'm not going to debate the importance of everyone of the stated reasons in the article, but I am going to take issue with the basic premise of a project' existence. The single item above which get's closest to this idea is the 'wrong project statement.'

Project Statements and Their Assumptions

We begin a project with the best intentions in place. Thinking that it will deliver clear benefits to it's constituent users and make their lives better. But hold on a minute. Who asked the question about why this idea came about in the first place. Why did they think this was a good idea? Who is the real champion behind this idea and why are they interested? What is the failure surrounding this project's initiation? What is the value of that Failure? Even more importantly, what causes the failure in the first place?

Did you catch on the Who, What When, Where, Why theme. As a long-time problem solver both in the singular and collaborative group context, often I've found few, if any, of the above questions or others similar have been asked and seriously answered. In many cases the key question is about the failure surrounding the genesis of the project in the beginning. More than once when looked at closely, this failure value question gets to the heart of where the real solution lies and more than likely, the solution wasn't what people thought it should be.

So the assumptions made at the beginning of projects are more likely to contribute to the failure of a project simply because the problem statement is all wrong from the beginning. It is of no consequence if there was complete engagement, perfect execution and implementation; in the end the project will fail to survive because it serves no real purpose of delivers any significant value and will be abandoned.

I mention this not from the perspective of building projects so much as the processes we use to deliver projects. Often our efforts to make our businesses more effective only continues to contribute to the confusion and failure within and between organizations. We find ourselves chasing rabbits, ghosts and digging holes for no reason. All the ineffectual, "Stupid" stuff many of us deal with daily.

The Challenge

So the next time someone proposes a project, find out if it can stand the scrutiny of the Who, What, When, Where and Why sisters. If it does, then likely you are on the right path and success is more likely than if you don't.


This is a continuing series of monographs and conversations about the Connections of ideas as Strings and Links of overlapping ideas dealing with project management, business management, business processes and project delivery.
Remember "Collaboration is the Glue of Success."

The Employee Tracking Tag and Construction Sites

Recently the Wall Street Journal ran an article about a technology which has been around for a couple of years which tracks the location and tone of voice of the wearer and then correlates the locations w/ time to show the types of interactions between people. The premise of this technology is to discover social gathering and interaction modes of people in a specific space. (Read the article here on WSJ).

It got me to wondering if this kind of technology could have an impact on the efficiency on a construction or mining or oil production or any other construction related site. You see all the studies I've seen referenced for this kind of technology is in the office environment. The postulate would be if we haven't seen any real productivity in these types of environments over the past 40 years or so, then it might not be all technology and planning that is the problem, people and how they work together are likely part of the problem as well.

If you think you have a problem with this, you are probably aware all smartphones have GPS tracking features in them and anyone can track you if they know your number. Also there is an expending market to track vehicles, pets, mental and dementia patients, the criminal's ankle bracelet  and a host of other tracking methods being introduced which adds to the growing collection of Big Data which surrounds us every day.

I also include here the public sentiment on these devices being used from the WSJ poll as of this morning

Read the article and chime in with your thoughts and experiences.

A couple of links to the technology providers

• Sociometric Solutions
• Boston Global
• Using GPS for Tracking People
• Alliance Tech, Meeting and Exposition Tracking

This article is part of a continuing series of posts which look at emerging technologies, big data and efficiency in the work place. Specifically the Connections between unlikely events and technologies which create Strings of these Connections to reveal emerging patterns of our new economy.