Allocating and Managing Constrained Resources
This chapter provides a variety of techniques for monitoring the resources used within your project. The emphasis is on human resources, but the principles can be applied to any project resource.
Resources and the Triple Bottom Line
When making decisions about resources, you may naturally focus on what will allow your team to finish a project as quickly and efficiently as possible. As a result, you might be tempted to make decisions that use more fuel than is strictly necessary, exploit cheap labor, or pollute a local lake. But that approach fails to take into account the longer view on personal and organizational responsibility that lies at the core of the sustainability movement.
John Elkington introduced the term triple bottom line (TBL) as a way to broaden corporate thinking about the cost of doing business to include social and environmental responsibilities. Rather than focusing solely on profit and loss, Elkington argued that organizations should pay attention to three separate bottom lines:
One is the traditional measure of corporate profit – the "bottom line" of the profit and loss account. The second is the bottom line of a company's "people account" – a measure in some shape or form of how socially responsible an organization has been throughout its operations. The third is the bottom line of the company's "planet" account – a measure of how environmentally responsible it has been. The triple bottom line (TBL) thus consists of three Ps: profit, people, and planet. It aims to measure the financial, social, and environmental performance of the corporation over a period of time. Only a company that produces a TBL is taking account of the full cost involved in doing business.
More and more, organizations are incorporating sustainability concerns into their long-term strategies, in part because their customers demand it, and in part because the sustainable choice often turns out to be the profitable choice. If you are lucky enough to work for an organization that is fully invested in its triple bottom line, you will be encouraged to make resource allocation decisions that reflect sustainability concerns. If your organization isn't there yet, consider staking out a position as an agent of change, educating colleagues about the benefits of the triple bottom line. You can start by educating yourself. The following resources are a good first step:
- Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business: In this 1999 book, John Elkington first introduced the idea of the triple bottom line. (Note that it was originally titled Cannibals with Food Rakes, and often shows up with that title in web searches).