The phrase Triple Bottom Line or 3BL may not be something you hear often in your release planning meetings. It was coined back in 1994 with a focus on an organization’s social, environmental and economic responsibilities.

At a recent PMI EMEA session in Amsterdam, Anne Larilahti, MsC spoke about the project manager’s role in implementing 3BL.

She called on project managers to demand that GPIs (Green Performance Indicators) be integrated into projects, and said the best way to get buy-in is to provide solid evidence of the ROI.

I believe GPI is much more akin to agile than waterfall as the tenets of agile complement environmental sustainability quite well. We can each do our part to help the environment, and below are my suggestions for planting green agile seeds:

1. Keep it simple – This is the easiest and most straightforward way to keep the agile release within a small carbon footprint. Since we are building out features in iterations, the chance of you creating a monolithic product of waste is slim.

2. Incorporate a lightweight GPI Service Feedback Loop – One of the benefits of the SaaS movement is the increased availability of multi tenant services with a reduced the carbon footprint. There is a good chance the software you are building is web enabled in some fashion, so take time with your Product Owner to evaluate a low cost GPI service integration. At a high level the GPI offering should include a web services api and have analytics baked in to measure empirical data.

3. Create Green Product Backlog – It is likely that you’ll need continue to build out revenue driving features within your product. Once you’ve chosen a GPI service, I recommend creating GPI themed user stories for your Green Product Backlog. Pick 1 or 2 stores per sprint and work them into the next code release. You can even create a GPI Epic for overall progress tracking.

4. Share your data with Stakeholders – Your GPI user stories should organically appear in the retrospectives, but once you have enough data over a few sprints I suggest putting together a presentation for your stakeholders. Being environmentally conscious is not a fad, however it does have a great deal of market inertia. Sales will no doubt find a way to communicate how environmentally responsible your organization is to help boost revenue.

This Green Agile movement is only going to succeed if we share our success stories with one another at local agile chapter meetings, conferences, etc. If you have a case study or experience with integrating GPI-like elements in your agile framework please share them below. I will do my best to help you spread the word!