• Senior Application Project Manager
• PROGRAM MANAGER - PERMANENT...
• IP Telephony Architect - Cisco VoIP
• NETWORK MANAGEMENT SPECIALIST
• Project Manager

Project management in the ethics era

Karen Mather and Leah Einfalt, Information Age

10/04/2008 12:53:35

On the eve of the 21st century, Business Review Weekly carried an article entitled "How Business Chiefs See a New Century" by Michelle Hannen, reporting that Australia's leading business executives saw ethics as an emerging critical success factor for their enterprises.

They attributed a new focus on ethical correctness to the ever-increasing volume of global capital that necessitated far greater expertise in corporate governance. It was suggested that it would not be overstating the case to dub the start of the new century the "ethics era".

Certainly, nowadays higher levels of activity are detectable around ethical rule books and ethical training in corporations, government agencies and professional organisations; modern education courses have sacrificed technical teaching time for ethical tuition, and ethics institutes show up in healthy numbers when Googled.

In this new "ethics era", ICT project managers may be stimulated to increase their focus on professional standards (more comprehensive testing, for example) and on professional trustworthiness (more accurate reporting of status and issues, for instance).

We know, to our great discomfort, that former inadequacy in these ethical matters contributed to resounding 20th century ICT disasters, such as the USS Vincennes' radar defence system that shot down an innocent plane in 1998, the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine that fatally overdosed patients in 1997, and the Confirm project that had squandered nearly four years and $US125million by 1994.

It would be comforting, now, if rising ethical sensitivity was leading to declining project failure. Yet ICT calamities still abound. As described by David Wilson of the University of Technology, Sydney, One.Tel's computerised billing system played a significant role in that company's demise: the development of the billing system was shoddily conducted, producing minimal documentation, and it was only delivered on time through the inducements of completion bonuses that encouraged staff to sacrifice quality for time.

An even more recent example can be seen in the Chrisco Hamper fiasco in December 2007. A faulty system upgrade resulted in thousands of clients not receiving their pre-paid Christmas hampers (valued at $350 to $1100 per hamper) in time for Christmas. Both of these examples demonstrate that comprehensive testing and candid communication to stakeholders are still nowhere near the required standard.

We agree with Simon Rogerson, who leads the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in the UK, when he suggests that ICT project management practice needs to be enhanced to cover the ethical issues surrounding the software development process. In the 90s, Rogerson briefly sketched a mapping of certain basic ethical principles over a generic project management methodology, Structured Project Management.

We now propose an update of Rogerson's suggestion and localise it for our Australian readers by mapping the ethical principles from the Code of Ethics of the ACS over the best practice project management methodology, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). We then consider whether an enhanced version of PMBOK that included ethical checkpoints might reduce the risk of the types of ethical failure that appear to contribute to project failure.

We have chosen to illustrate our point by means of PMBOK because of its credentials. In 1986 the Project Management Institute (PMI) first published PMBOK as its recommended methodology for formal project management in any sector (not just ICT). The methodology is also used by PMI for the rigorous examination of project managers who seek formal recognition of their expertise via accreditation from the Institute.

PMBOK is so well regarded that it has now been adopted by the International Standards Organisation, as well as by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineering as its standard, IEEE 1490-2003. The most recent version of PMI's methodology is the third edition of PMBOK that was published in 2004.

It defines nine distinct types of management expertise ("knowledge areas"), each of which contains a number of formal processes. These PMBOK "knowledge areas" are: project integration management, scope management, time management, cost management, quality management, human resource management, communications management, risk management and procurement management.

The "processes" within each of the nine knowledge areas are activities directed at a specific result. Take, for example, the knowledge area of project quality management: the processes within this knowledge area are intended to ensure that all work undertaken by the project team produces a quality result, and that quality improves continually.

The main quality management activities are described under the headings of quality planning, quality assurance and quality control. PMBOK decomposes the activities into the inputs to be acquired, the tools and techniques to be applied to the inputs, and the outputs to be produced by a project manager who wishes to manage project quality successfully.

Inputs include standards that project work will be measured against, techniques include methods for measuring conformance to the standards, and outputs include charts and graphs for tracking, depicting and reporting the extent of conformance.

Like the ACS and other professional associations, PMI has a Code of Ethics that binds its members. Elements of the code form part of PMI's certification examination. Yet there seems to be no clear relationship between this Code of Ethics and PMBOK, which leads us to suggest that project management methods would become more effective if they referenced ethical principles.

Since the ACS Code of Ethics is more familiar to us, we shall use that, rather than PMI's Code of Ethics, to overlay PMBOK, in the attempt to establish the viability of our theory. The ACS Code is currently undergoing review, so may change soon, but it serves our purpose even in its current form, which lists certain values and ideals that ACS members must embrace. The two most relevant values for the present discussion are:

4.3.2 Competence: I must work competently and diligently for my clients and employers.

4.3.3 Honesty: I must be honest in my representation of skills, knowledge, services and products.

Untruthful communication about project status and issues is well-documented as a major contributor to the failure of the Confirm project; and that seems to be the case, too, with One.Tel and Chrisco. Concurrent issues with lack of professional competence in testing (at least) then probably guaranteed disaster.

Whilst insurance against such professional pain is offered, to some extent, by standards such as PMBOK, where project communication and project quality are meticulously managed, even better protection would come from interweaving ethical standards with the management standards. The ethically enhanced methodology would empower and repeatedly remind project managers and team members that they are obliged to resist pressure to compromise professionalism.

In our example, an ICT project manager who follows ethically enhanced PMBOK processes for quality management and communication management would find that the inputs to the process include not only standard PMBOK items such as company policies and rules for legal compliance but also two other inputs: the ethical principles that have been adopted by a) the organisation sponsoring the project and b) the relevant ICT professional organisation with which the project team members are associated. The relevant PMBOK inputs are shown in the table, left.

PMI will be publishing the fourth edition of PMBOK in 2008. We hope that it will represent an advance on the current edition, where the term "ethics" appears just twice.