In our first book, Green Project Management, we wrote about GreenTouch – a consortium of telecom service providers and equipment vendors, developers, programmers – many of whom directly compete with one another for business – working together on a focused goal to reduce the energy consumption of 'the network'.  That is, everything between your eyes and my keyboard, and the stuff that stores and transmits the bits and bytes as I type this blog post.

GreenTouch recently announced that their astounding target of 1000x energy use reduction (not a 10% or a 25% reduction, but a one-thousand times reduction, was not achieved.

(pregnant pause)

What was achieved instead was a TEN THOUSAND TIMES reduction.  This is pretty impressive.  Let's put it in automotive terms: this is like taking 3.6 million cars off of the road.  Forever.

And it makes a point – I would say an exclamation point – about what we've been saying for years about project management, technology, energy, and the 'triple bottom line'.  The point: you don't have to be in the electric utility or petroleum industry to make a difference in sustainability.  You don't have to be in the pharmaceutical business or the food industry or the agricultural area to make a difference on toxins or nutrition.  You have to think long-term.  You have to think beyond your project's outcome – or in this case, work on a project that has a focused long-term goal.

These guys made changes in software protocols – SOFTWARE PROTOCOLS – for example, to make huge differences in how optical amplifiers turn on and off and that 'little change' had far-reaching positive consequences.  They worked on metering and dashboard tools for network managers, and so on.  These types of changes were (as you can see by the results) were highly effective.

Have a look at this non-profit's press release and video.  I hope it inspires you.  It inspired us and is one of the reasons we wrote the follow-up book, "Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success".  Enjoy.

 NEW YORK, June 18, 2015 – GreenTouch™, the global consortium dedicated to dramatically improving the energy efficiency of data communications networks, today announced its final results and unveiled new tools, technologies and architectures to improve the energy efficiencies of communications networks in years to come. During a celebratory event in New York, GreenTouch revealed that its new approaches can improve energy efficiencies of mobile-access networks by more than 10,000X – an achievement far exceeding the original goals of the working group.