Ethics in project management

An interruption to the normal broadcast.

I was just at Seth Godin’s blog where he has posted an article about ethics in marketing.

It got me thinking that you should apply the same principles to your project work. Have you even quit a job or changed a project’s direction because of the ethics involved. Have you thought about your values and how they align with your job?

The PMI has a standard for ethics that you sign up to when you join. Here’s a top level summary.

Member Code of Ethics:
As a professional in the field of project management, PMI members pledge to uphold and abide by the following:

• I will maintain high standards of integrity and professional conduct
• I will accept responsibility for my actions
• I will continually seek to enhance my professional capabilities
• I will practice with fairness and honesty
• I will encourage others in the profession to act in an ethical and professional manner

You can (ad should) read the full PMI ethical standards here. But you shouldn't stop there. Ethics extend beyond your professional relationships to your relationship with your community and the world at large.

You should take time to reflect on what your values and ethics are and how they affect your professional decicions. They are yours and you control them and how you applythem, but you should know them.

Project Management
Business Analyst

Ethics at work

CIO has an article on ethics;

"...the moral center of every company lies within its leaders. Those leaders are and should be held to higher standards of ethics and morality—because they are leaders."

Please take a moment to read the article. I am not advocatng their opinion, but do want you to be thinking about ethics and the way you work.

Ethics are critically imporant to your career. They are also critically important to you personaly, as the decisions that you project workers make have major impacts on other peoples' lives.

Project Management
Business Analyst

Ethical Analysis

The last few month's I've been considering what area of business analysis is overlooked and, if I put a little effort into it, where I could possibly add a significant portion of information in the form of a publishable book. One area that keeps coming up in my mind is ethics for those in the business analysis role. The IIBA has an official code of conduct for CBAP recipients but no official code of conduct for business analysts. Doing a quick Google search for Business Analyst Ethics returns nothing more than job queries and a link to a single certification for analysts. If this is any indication of the state of study regarding this topic, the field is wide open.

My interest in the subject was peaked even further last week when it came out that a Google engineer was fired for having used his privileged access to inappropriately spy on minors and other customers. Almost every company that has hired me as an analyst has given me access to a significant portion of their sensitive data (and I have always respected that trust, never having breached that trust). But it is obvious that breaches are possible and it is an issue that every company and every project team member should consider.

It is ironic that, when I decided to write this post earlier today, only an hour later, today's OneFTE comic came out:



Sadly, this isn't far from what could be when ethics are divorced from access. I see that there are several avenues that an analysis of ethics in analysis could take.

First, I could see a discussion about the source of our ethical standards and how they can be a reflection of our societal values. Some cultures may have differing views regarding data security and what is considered theft, so a review of these differences may be appropriate as well.

From there, the topic could branch out into how ethical standards could apply in the areas common to most analyst roles. Items such as stakeholder interaction, data integrity, system integrity and process integrity could be included.

Lastly, I think the discussion needs to look forward towards the future as our job as analysts will be changing in the not too distant future. As technological processes continue to mature, how will analysts continue to provide value to the organization? What about the impact of massive data centers on our environment and will analysts help drive down the energy utilization by keeping our stakeholder's expectations in check?

The biggest roadblock to me compiling this information, besides a day job, this blog and a family, is the question of would anyone actually take the time to read all this? Yes, a hungry audience is not the reason I would pick to write on the subject, but its always nice to know someone might actually read the work once it is complete! (Kind of like we all wish for our stakeholders to actually read our requirements documents!)

So what do you, the readership of BetterProjects.net think?

Ethical dillemas for Analysts

1.  Here is a question at BATimes (login required) about what you would do if you felt a project was urposely delivering a product that would;

Be functionally worse that the legacy system it replace, and

Potentuially brach accounting or other regulatory rules.

What would you do? Click through and offer an opinion.

2.  Amanda Becker provides three real life ethical dillemas at BNet and asks you to say how you would handle it.  You get to compare your results to others, and to what really happenned. 

Ethics are harder in practice than in theory and the best ways to arm yourself for tough decicions are to practice your ethics in safe scenarios *such as role plays or surveys) and to know your moral compass.

While we are on the topic, have a look at Caveman's flickr page (The source of this post's picture) where he describes the US Office of Giovernment Ethics (and browse the comments while here.

Lead by example

How can the team know what is right or wrong if you don't lead by example?  What are some simple and concrete things we can do with our team mates to help set the tone?  If I were to hand you a checklist it might look something like this;

• Set clear priorities
• Deliver the right sense of urgency to the team
• Be clear about accountabilities
• Encourage people to escalate problems quickly
• Clearly define the qualify standards you are working to
• Discuss the ethics and values that you and the team have
• Identify barriers to cooperation

But these are the things that are important to me and are based on my experiences and values.  What's your list?

On Guilds in Modern Times

The History Lesson
A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade (Wikipedia.)

 Guilds were usually organisations that had an early form of accreditation and membership, often in the form of something called “letters patents” issues by the local lord. The result of this is an exclusive right to deal in a particular area. The guild would charge members a fee to join, and in return members would receive a right to practice their craft within certain jurisdictions.

As ‘professional’ organisations members would swear an oath of allegiance to the guild, much like members of modern organisations like PMI sign on to an ethics standard that implies certain behaviours and allegiances to the profession above and beyond the guild members’ other obligations to the customers.

Guilds ensured their dominance over labour markets by ensuring certain quality and performance standards were met through professional standards and through the apprentice, journeyman, master model. This model had a variety of consequences including the control of labour which ensured premium wages for guild members, and eventually a proliferation of specialisations within the guild.

This fragmentation eventually led to the end of guild dominance of the professions, as subgroups competed for dominance in their market.

There is a general view that the guild was essentially a racket which stifled innovation and creativity within industries. It was a classic example of the status-quo maintaining it’s power rather than seeking advancement in skills and techniques that would benefit the industry and the community it served. Guilds primarily served their members to the disadvantage of both later generations and the community or customers they serviced.

The Guilds of Today 
Today many guilds still exist, especially in the creative industries. Some guilds wield large amounts of power, such as the groups that manage and protect the interests (including intellectual property) of writers and artists.

We can see that guilds can still be overly focused on the short term goals of protecting the status-quo over being responsive to future members and the communities they purport to serve.

Newer guilds (like in the software craftsmanship movement) don’t tend to have the tremendous amount of power and influence that large and established guilds demonstrate and wield, but they clearly have that tendency.

So when we talk about guilds in the software craftsmanship or IT domain what do we mean?

The term was pressed into duty because we wanted to draw on the strengths of the master-apprentice model. We want to acknowledge that the most effective way to transmit complex knowledge or knowledge of complex information is through mentorship, and oral tradition.

I have two questions out of all this;

1. Are we stealing the word and re purposing it? Or are we in the business of building up a power base with a view to protecting member interests over the world around us? 
2. Is the Master Apprentice model the best one for where we want to go, and are the assumptions that underlie it valid? Can you help?

Project management ethics

Here is a real scenario that you could face.  How would you handle it?

You've won a contract to do a multi-million dollar project for a US DoD agency.

Your team is a team of excellent project and software professionals who have worked together for several years and consistently beaten the odds delivering high value solutions on or very close to budget and planned times.

You are based in Australia (or Canada, France, Germany, Brazil...) and in your country it is illegal to discriminate against staff based on their race.  Racial discrimination is anathema to you anyway, as you are looking for the best and brightest and your experience is that race has nothing to do with talent or motivation.

So you wouldn't think for a moment of getting rid of Johnny Tran, you ace security expert, born in Vietnam, but who moved to your city at age 2.  Or Sara Kahn, an excellent data analyst who moved here six years ago as a refugee from war ravaged Afghanistan.

But now you have a contract that requires you do not employ people born in certain countries due to US security concerns.

What do you do?  Let Sara and Johnny go?  Decline the contract?  Break the law?

The answer for some agencies in Australia has been to apply for exceptions to the law.  Is this an ethical response?

(I guess this is the industry that builds killing and maiming devices in the name of making the world a safer place.)

So project people.  What would you do?

Inspiration for this post was Background Briefing at abc.net.au

Project Management Ethics

Maybe one or two or you are working in what Carnegie Mellon might call a 'level 0 capability maturity' organisation. (Or maybe level 1.)

What you probably find is a lot of organisational politics and a lot of busy work and bad decision making.

In this context it is hard to get things done, and particularly to deliver complex projects near budget and approximating the target benefits.

So what do you do? Choose to not participate in a project doomed to cost and schedule over-runs, or do you get stuck in to it?

And if you do choose to run this sort of project how do you manage the dilemma of knowing you are going to let the client and stakeholders down at some point?

Photo by Eduardo Amorim and CC @ Flickr

Some thoughts on ethics for project managers

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Project Management
Business Analyst

8 (not so) Random things about me

Mike Ramm of the blog Stop and Think! tagged me with my first meme; 8 Random Facts About Me. Because it's my first...

I have to post these rules: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves which others do not know about them. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog and post these rules. At the end of your 8 random facts post, you must select 8 more people and leave a message at their site that they have been tagged.

1.
Despite my day job, I have an ongoing relationship with the legal profession. My first job out of university (B.Bus) was as a law clerk and I began but did not complete a law degree. A few years ago I took leave from my day job for a few months and helped my mother start up a law firm. She and my brother both work there now. I am also currently writing a thesis on how project management is a useful knowledge set for lawyers managing client cases.

2.
My Myers Briggs personality type is: ENTJ. According to the website where I did the test I should be a manager in business or education. “ENTJs have a natural tendency to marshall (sic) and direct.” So I appear to be in the right business. Steve Jobs is an ENTJ. Do the test yourself and see what it says about you. Project teams are all about balancing various strengths so that the team as a whole can do more effective work that individuals. Diversity in teams is good. Of course you need an ENTJ to run things : )

3.
According to Quinn’s Competing Values theory I am a relatively balanced manager/worker, but I secretly think my self assessment is biased and I am really oriented to risk taking. I am currently working at a bank though, so I can’t be that innovative. The Competing Values theory is fascinating to me as it highlights the importance of understanding corporate culture as a key success factor in managing change. I highly recommend reading about it and I will be posting on it in the not to distant future.

4.
I am 90% of the way through the Master and Commander book series. 19th Century naval command bears almost no resemblance to modern corporate project management, but would probably be more effective. Especially with regular cannon practice and the occasional flogging.

5.
Speaking of books, years ago I was reading Dune and thought the descriptions of the mentat though process reminded me of how full my head was getting with the details of a project I was working on.

6.
I began planning and preparing for a dot.com business 12 months ago and I still have not got it up live. Over the course of the year I have outsourced the technical work, but have needed assistance in planning and pulling together suppliers. I have worked with four people, three of whom have dropped out due to other interests. While I am researching and writing these posts I am procrastinating doing work on that project.

By the way, the latest assistant on my cunning plan is Callan Robinson who has also recently opened a new business retailing art at Zimprints which is selling canvas prints by Sydney photographers. If you want to support a budding entrepreneur and a cadre of artists go to his site and buy a print or four.

7.
I find sharing knowledge and enabling people very rewarding. I find delivering clients projects a combination of challenging, frustrating and satisfying. I find corporate culture stifling. As a result I am planning a 6 month break for the corporate world after this current job ends.

8.
As you can see I am often running multiple projects on top of the day job. Sometimes too many. The biggest project I am curently working on is a new (first) baby, due next month.

So,
Memes are an interesting way of introducing your readers to new bloggers, so now I tag the following bloggers, who I admire and recommend to you. And maybe they respond with a post and forward the meme.

Maybe.

1. Fadi at PM Hut
2. Adrian at Modern Analyst
3. Scott at Tyner Blain and Nexus
4. Jonathan at Jonathan Babcock
5. Josh at The PM Student
6. Rajeev at Portrait of a Business Analyst
7. Chris at The Business Ethics Blog
8. Rowan at Fortify your Oasis

Project Management
Business Analyst