Obama's Sustainable Energy Initiative: Project Management Failures

Introduction: Government, Sustainability, and Project Management

As the global economy continues to suffer the devastating consequences of unchecked growth — in the form of a prolonged recession that has decimated the housing market — private enterprises and public policymakers alike have a vested interest in achieving a sustainable form of urban development. Seeking a balance between society's collective desire for environmental responsibility and the grim calculus of continually rising human populations has long been the goal of conscientious city planners, but the role of governmental intervention in this process has inspired considerable debate among politicians, social scientists, and real estate developers.

With the administration of President Barack Obama encountering resistance and ridicule after a significant investment in clean and renewable energy — a move many detractors viewed as a billion-dollar boondoggle — the issue of government entities actively promoting sustainable urban development rose to the forefront of the national consciousness. As a byproduct of the administration's stalled efforts to institute a nationalized sustainable building initiative, the critical importance that competent project management plays in ensuring a project's ultimate success or failure was also heightened. A comparative analysis between the administration's ongoing "green" projects and the tenets of modern project management will serve to highlight the administration's varied levels of efficacy in terms of proper planning, risk management, adherence to the critical path method, and other techniques that increase a project's efficiency and effectiveness.

Planning Failures and the Solyndra Collapse

Should elected officials utilize their political positions to advance the cause of building homes and cities through sustainable means, and does this active involvement on the part of government actually serve to help or hinder sustainable urban development? By conducting a careful review of recent research studies designed to assess how current governmental policies impact the industry of environmentally friendly urban development, it is possible to formulate an informed conclusion regarding the relative value of future policy decisions.

One of the most frequently repeated criticisms voiced by researchers studying the Obama administration's sustainability initiative concerns a foundational aspect of project management: methodical preparation and planning prior to launch. In the case of Solyndra — "the bankrupt Silicon Valley solar startup that received a $535 million federal loan guarantee" (Woody, 2012) before failing in spectacular fashion — a fatal flaw in the overall project management process is readily apparent. The concept of identifying project proposals that are equipped to succeed and thrive, while rejecting those that do not suggest future growth, is the responsible project manager's first priority. As project management experts have observed, "insufficient — or nonexistent — resource investments in a project are another warning sign that you should beware of, because projects without budgets, people, or equipment are risky from the outset" (Williams, 2008). The fact that governmental oversight failed to identify Solyndra as a poor investment during the planning phase points to unsophisticated and inexperienced project managers being permitted to make crucial choices.

Risk Management and the Role of Independent Assessment

Private developers have long decried the federal government's insistence that urban planning techniques be based on environmental factors such as the presence of threatened or endangered species, the resulting destruction of fragile ecosystems, and potential infringement on preserved parcels of land. While a seasoned project manager would readily identify these variables as risk factors during the risk management phase, the inability of concerned parties to remain objective often results in these risk factors being willfully ignored in favor of pursuing greater profit margins. Seasoned project managers know firsthand that "when risk management is effective, it results in fewer problems, and for the few problems that exist, it results in more expeditious resolutions" (Schwalbe, 2011). With many of the sustainable building projects launched during the President's first term languishing amidst regulatory delays, it is clear that a thorough period of independent risk management was never conducted.

Instead, the role of risk management was effectively left to the very real estate conglomerates and corporate developers seeking to relax federal legislation restricting unchecked commercial construction. These parties often cited their reliance on sophisticated computer modeling programs, asserting that objective scientific analysis supported their contention that development would result in minimal impact to the surrounding environment. While these predictive programs may be useful from the perspective of private developers, the governmental agencies tasked with guiding the Obama administration's sustainable energy initiative should have made a strategic investment in independent project management to ensure the impartiality of their findings.

In order to emphasize the importance of legitimate risk management during the planning phase of any complex project, it is informative to analyze the empirical studies produced by unaffiliated parties with no vested interest in the project itself. Urban design and planning professor Paul Waddell conducted a study in 2002 designed to assess the efficacy of the most widely used urban planning models, through a rigorous comparison of those models to the UrbanSim model developed by himself and his colleagues. Waddell's findings, published in an article entitled "Modeling Urban Development for Land Use, Transportation and Environmental Planning," take governmental recognition of "the effects of transportation on land use and the environment" into account, as well as "the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), which mandated that metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) integrate metropolitan land use and transportation planning" (Waddell, 2002).

After comparing the complex set of parameters used to determine the growth planning of many major American cities to the more environmentally mindful parameters of the UrbanSim system, Waddell concluded that governmentally created analytical tools are typically unable to keep pace with those developed by private firms. He attributes this phenomenon to an increasingly hostile political arena in which policy decisions are not made with expediency, asserting in his concluding remarks that "the challenge of balancing multiple objectives and agendas within urban areas in the U.S. and abroad have grown increasingly intractable politically, and this work represents a small effort to contribute to more deliberative and informed metropolitan governance" (Waddell, 2002). The work performed by Waddell and his colleagues demonstrates the relative simplicity of assessing and managing a project's risk factors when objectivity is ensured, and the discrepancy his findings reveal suggests a conscious choice on the part of government agencies more interested in fast-tracking preferable projects than in vetting them for inherent risks.

Conclusion: A Chain Reaction of Project Management Failures

When the totality of the President's proposed sustainable energy program, and its associated initiatives launched to varying degrees across America, are considered from a project management perspective, it becomes clear that a series of project management failures ultimately undermined the program's ability to succeed. First, the project was hastily devised and not properly planned — a mistake that provoked a chain reaction of further shortcomings. Second, a concerted effort toward risk management was never seriously engaged in, leading to embarrassing calamities such as the Solyndra debacle. With an impaired ability to recognize risk factors and react accordingly, the administration repeatedly identified flawed companies as candidates for targeted investment, a tendency that would not be permitted to occur under an experienced project manager's stewardship.

Lastly, those in charge of directing the federal government's strategic support of sustainable energy enterprises consistently failed to procure support from their ostensible allies in municipal and state government. Without the guiding principles of modern project management to protect it from inherent risks, cost overruns, and the other dilemmas posed by complex projects, the administration's well-intentioned efforts to promote sustainable building and energy production proved to be fundamentally flawed.

References

Campbell, S. (1996). Green cities, growing cities, just cities? Urban planning and the contradictions of sustainable development. Journal of the American Planning Association, 62(3), 296–312.

Duerksen, C. (2008). Saving the world through zoning. Planning: The Magazine of the American Planning Association.

Ingram, G. K., Carbonell, A., Hong, Y. H., & Flint, A. (2009). Smart growth policies: An evaluation of programs and outcomes. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Schwalbe, K. (2011). Information technology project management (6th ed.). Boston: Course Technology Ptr.

Tibaijuka, A. K., United Nations Human Settlement Program. (2009). Planning sustainable cities: Global report on human settlements 2009.

Waddell, P. (2002). Modeling urban development for land use, transportation and environmental planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 68(3), 297–314.

Williams, M. (2008). The principles of project management (1st ed.). Collingwood, Victoria, Australia: SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

Woody, T. (2012, October 12). Solyndra files $1.5 billion antitrust suit against China solar companies. Forbes.