Top 10 Mistakes Guide

Saving money and improving environmental performance through energy and water savings requires a good way of measuring what's going on at your city, town or county.  Whether you're just starting out or you've been measuring and reporting energy, water, greenhouse and environmental performance for years, it' good to know about common costly mistakes and how to avoid them.

Mistake 1: Not setting clear goals

If you're going to collect and report energy, water or environmental data you should know why. Otherwise there is a great risk that it becomes just one more administrative task for your staff to complete and that the resulting reports are merely documents that no-one has time to read. The best way to ensure against this is to set goals and measure only the things that help you reach those goals.

It’s helpful to start by asking whether you’re measuring and reporting in order to meet compliance requirements or to encourage improvements in organizational performance. The scope and methodology will vary in each case, with compliance driven reporting usually having a tighter scope and a stricter methodology. The other major question is whether or not the measurement and reporting is once-only – for example, for a specific project – or needs to be repeated. You can be more ambitious with a once-only project; however, if the goal is continuous improvement then the reporting program must consider consistency and affordability along with other primary requirements.

For example, the goal of increasing accountability for energy and water consumption across departments requires different measurement and reporting than does the goal of reducing peak monthly energy demand at your largest facilities. For another example, setting broad targets and focus areas for reducing your organization’s greenhouse gas emissions requires a different scope and methodology than joining a carbon-trading exchange.

Reporting systems that need to be ongoing should be based on business goals. These include setting improvement targets for individual facilities or divisions. Setting goals helps you get and keep the attention of facility managers and other staff.

Organizations are particularly prone to making this mistake because they have historically been – and may still be – primarily driven by environmental compliance. They apply a strict compliance mentality to measurement and reporting, even for projects or initiatives where a more lightweight approach would suffice.

Mistake 2: Biting off more than you can chew

Many organizations embark on over-ambitious measurement and report-ing regimes. The result is usually that the project gets bogged down in the design phase because stakeholders can't agree on the what, how, and when of the measurements. If the system ever gets implemented it often fails soon after because staff don't have the time or confidence to complete their tasks.

It's better to have a simple system that works reliably than a complicated one that doesn't work at all. That doesn't mean the system will be so simple as to not be useful. There are outsourced measurement and reporting services that can provide comprehensive and relevant information much more efficiently than can be achieved using internal staffing.

Remember, the goal of any reporting system is to alert you to problems and opportunities and enable you to make better and quicker decisions to overcome or capitalize on them. Even if you are ambitious about the range and depth of issues that you want covered it still pays to start off simple. People in your organization will accept incremental improvements to a simple system that's already running smoothly because they will trust that you aren't wasting their time.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘scope creep’. For example, you want to survey your employees to find out approximate greenhouse emissions from employee commuting. The survey could be completed with three questions, but some-one decides to add twenty extra questions including personal questions about where people live and their weekend driving habits. The employees find this offputting and the survey response rate is very low. Scope Creep adds time, complexity and expense, and threatens your ability to meet core goals.

Mistake 3: Sweating the small stuff

No matter how well you've designed your measurement regime there will be times when you can't get all the data or you can't get it on time. A common mistake is to stop everything and dedicate all resources to rectifying the problem. This is akin to a company refusing to release quarterly profit figures because there's a box of pencils missing from the stationery cupboard. The flow of information to decision-makers stops and stakeholders lose confidence in the reporting regime.

A colleague sums it up well, if not too elegantly. "Too many people are hung up on measuring the greenhouse impact of a banana peel rotting on an office trash can, while ignoring that their HVAC system is left on all weekend".

If there is a problem, spend a little time considering whether the problem really matters before you hit the panic button. (In compliance speak, they call this materiality). Is it worth missing out on all the other useful outputs of your system just because a few pieces of data are missing? It is important to address problems but it's vital to understand that, especially when it comes to the completeness of large data sets (such as when you have dozens or hundreds of utility bills), there are diminishing marginal returns. Trying to collect the last 2% of missing data can take a lot of time, has no guaranteed outcome, and probably has little effect on the accuracy of your reporting or the soundness of the management decisions you base on it. It's also useful to keep in mind that some problems are solved more easily with the passage of time.

This mistake is often related to over-reliance on engineering solutions (see Mistake 4) and to much emphasis on software (see Mistake 8) ...

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