Project Ethics

Haukur Ingi Jonasson, Helgi Thor Ingason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138409293
• eBook ISBN: 9781351908535
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How relevant is ethics to project management? The book - which aims to demystify the field of ethics for project managers and managers in general - takes both a critical and a practical look at project management in terms of success criteria, and ethical opportunities and risks. The goal is to help the reader to use ethical theory to further identify opportunities and risks within their projects and thereby to advance more directly along the path of mature and sustainable managerial practice. Project Ethics opens with an investigation of the critical success factors in project management. It then illustrates how situations can arise within projects where values can compete, and looks at how ethical theories on virtue, utility, duty and rights can be used as competence eye-openers to evaluate projects. The reader is challenged to think of their project management experiences where questions of competing values surfaced, and mirror them in short vignettes taken from real practice from all round the globe. Finally, a new method is introduced, based on classical ethical theory, which can help project owners, project managers, project teams and stakeholders, to identify, estimate and evaluate ethical opportunities and risks in projects.

Chapter 1
The Critical Path of Project Ethics

What is Ethics?

Ethics can be defined as the discipline, often classified as a sub-discipline of philosophy, that is concerned with what is good and just for individuals, groups, organisations and society. The discipline investigates the nature of our well-being and happiness, the appropriate pathways to our prosperity, our obligations, and, related to all this, the rights that we owe to ourselves and to one another. In modern society, ethics defines how individuals, professionals, corporations and societies choose to interact with one another.

The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethos meaning ‘character’, and the discipline has been constantly developed through generations of philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, Avicenna, and the Renaissance and modern philosophers. Ethics has to do with morality, but morality can be said to be a reality – norms, ideas, attitudes – that is just there for good or for bad, just like the communication systems that we employ in our day-to-day behaviour and in our language. Whether we like it or not, we all partake in the moral reality, by thinking about moral issues and making moral choices. We do so even when the choice is to avoid making any choice or being ignorant or apathetic on moral issues. Every time we think of what we did in the past, what we should be doing now, or what we should be doing in the future, we are thinking to some extent about our morality. Morality, however, is not ethics. If morality is the lived ethical domain, then ethics is the principled investigation of that domain.

Ethical guidelines are derived from experience and observation of the long-term wider consequences of actions. The field is constantly evolving as our technologies advance, and our collective wisdom grows as the facts surrounding negative events emerge over time. Outside scrutiny by fellow professionals and/or the wider public and the formation of a consensus opinion is often the final arbiter in these matters. For example, failing to abide by an ethical code of practice can be detrimental to the reputation of a professional and can seriously damage their career advancement and prospects.

A recent example is the phone hacking scandal in the UK that led to the overnight closure of the News of The World newspaper, which had been in existence since 1843, with sales of several million copies weekly. The critical factor in this was the unethical methods used to gather information and the cavalier way in which the families and friends of serious crime victims were treated. This overstepping of ethical boundaries was subsequently severely dealt with in the court of public opinion and it is likely that the repercussions of this scandal will continue to reverberate for some time yet, requiring a number of senior managers to defend their actions surrounding the whole affair. Other examples include companies such as Raytheon, BAe Systems, Siemens and Enron who have suffered reputational damage, impact to their business, sometimes to the point of collapse.

The recent banking collapse in Iceland is another example where unethical behaviour resulted in a negative outcome, in this case national bankruptcy. A comprehensive and damning 2,300 page report published in early 2010 by the Icelandic Truth Commission, headed by Icelandic Supreme Court Judge Páll Hreinsson, catalogued a whole range of unethical behaviour involving bankers, senior politicians and regulators. A complex web of cross-holdings and compromised lending decisions, involving the majority owners of the banks in question, was laid bare as well as a series of regulatory failures, which masked the reality that ‘weak equity’ accounted for 70 per cent of the banks’ reported core capital. As a result, other investors were duped on a wholesale basis, and the international reputational repercussions from these events will cause problems for Iceland for many years to come.

These examples show what can happen when ethical boundaries are crossed and are exceptional cases rather than being indicative of normality. It is now the case that a comprehensive code of ethics is to be found at the heart of most modern professional fields with medical practitioners, engineers, accountants and project professionals in different jurisdictions each having their own tailored version. These codes are formed from a combination of general ethical theories and experience derived from within those fields. There are a number of situations within professional practice where ethics are particularly important and some of these are listed below:

• Where client confidentiality is of paramount importance.
• Where bad decision-making can have direct serious consequences for others.
• Where outcomes are difficult to measure and/or assign responsibility to and bad decision-makers can hide behind the consequent ambiguity.
• When negative outcomes only occur long after the initial acts have occurred and the people responsible have sufficient time to distance themselves from their bad decisions and actions.
• When concepts of fairness and justice in dealing with others are easily overlooked.

If, for example, you are one of a number of employees within a large organisation with access to a large amount of personal data relating to customers or clients, there may be a temptation, either through unintentional complacency or by deliberate design, to use this information for something other than its intended purpose. If done discreetly, it may be almost impossible to be caught doing this, and consequent negative outcomes for the person whose data was compromised may not be traceable to the original source. But these cases occur nonetheless, and this is a phenomenon that is not all that uncommon worldwide. In order to safeguard against this type of behaviour, a strong ethical culture from the top to the bottom of an organisation is essential, as well as vigilance on the part of other employees.

In the remaining sections of this chapter we will focus on current thinking in the field of project management, and discuss how project ethics has been dealt with in the project management literature to date. A number of basic ethical concepts will be introduced, as well as a review of some current ethical guidelines and a discussion about the results of a recent survey on the perception of ethics in the business community in Iceland.

The Discipline of Project Management

Project management is a general term that covers a multitude of different roles across a range of sectors. The essential shared aspects of these roles are the willingness to take responsibility for delivering a set of outcomes, and the competence to organise and deliver those outcomes. The term can refer to either the management of individual projects, which tend to have defined time periods and aims, a programme which consists of more than one project having related aims, or a portfolio where there are a number of projects that will have unrelated or loosely related aims.

In modern times, project management has come to represent a unique discipline with its own special field of study, having emerged in the 1950s with the development of techniques like the Programme Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM). In particular, it has been influenced by the demands of industry and the military to establish, define, plan, schedule, execute and control complex projects. Ever since then, planning and scheduling, managing budgets and evaluating quality has been the main focus of project management practice, research and development. This is often displayed in conceptual form as the Iron Triangle, which has the aspects of time, cost and quality at each corner.

A crucial part of the development of project management as a discipline has been the way of thinking about project success. The questions that have been asked, and are still being asked, are:

• What is a successful project?
• What should be the success criteria in project management?
• What are the contributing factors to project success?
• What makes a successful project leader?
• What is project failure and what causes it?

Given its origins, it is evident that technical considerations have been given the highest priority in the project management literature and the three basic success criteria of the Iron Triangle (time, cost and quality) form the basis for the formal decision-making process. This approach, however, has been criticised for being inadequate for a variety of reasons by a number of authors (see, for example: Shenhar, Levy and Dvir, 1997; Shenhar, Dvir, Levy and Maltz, 2001; Atkinson, 1999; Baccarini, 1999; Pinto and Slevin, 1988). Atkinson (1999) defined project success both in terms of the Iron Triangle, that is, in regards to the outcome, and the project management success, that is, in regards to the process. Bryde (2005) admits that the conventional parameters of project success are constrained by the practical difficulties of assessing success using more subjective success criteria. These criteria could, for instance, be defined as the logical, ethical and/or aesthetic attributes of either the project process or the project outcome.

It has been assumed that better scheduling techniques would lead to greater project success and that if a project exceeded its due date or budget, or the outcome did not satisfy predetermined performance criteria, the project was assumed to be a failure (Belassi and Tukel, 1996). So far so good. However, something might be missing from this picture. Should the sense of virtue of the project leader, team, organisation, or society after they have accomplished their project be taken into account? What about other utility criteria and opportunity costs? What about whether things were done according to a vague or biased sense of duty? What if the project violates the rights of stakeholders or interested parties?

It is often said that success can be the greatest enemy of innovation. This is because it can lead to the perpetuation of false beliefs about what is actually required to achieve success; one can become blind to the importance of other factors if one relies on too narrow-minded an approach in the future. We will keep this in mind as we explore project success and speculate on how to link ethical theory to project practice. Could it be that in the attempt to define project success we are leaving out something essential development?

This book has two main objectives: one is to investigate how project success has been defined and measured within the project management field; the other, our main purpose, is to explain how project leaders can consider ethical factors as critical to upholding project management as a professional endeavour. Even though ethical considerations might often be difficult to measure in terms of either quantity or quality, we should not overlook measuring the things that we should be measuring, just because other things are more easily measurable. Ethics is also talked about in absolute terms: there is a single right and wrong. The very fact that it is a dilemma means that this single truth may not be the same for all stakeholder groups. Therefore, the decision and the reasons for it must be communicated clearly.

Project ethics is related to the concept of higher values in our awareness and dealings, and is guided by what is considered to be of benefit to society as a whole. This area is the main focus of this book but, if one went further, one could additionally invoke spirituality as a guide in our role as project leaders. In this case, spirituality is considered to be an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his or her being; or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. A ready example of project management guided in this fashion is evident in the works of missionaries of the world’s major religions. Whether one agrees or not with the aims of their endeavours, it is undeniably the case that huge outcomes have been achieved with spirituality as the main guiding force. There is an argument to suggest that spirituality might help project leaders sustain meaning, culture and joy in their project teams. This topic is outside the scope of this book but is certainly worth exploring in greater detail.

The Critical Path

The term critical path is among the most fundamental concepts in contemporary project management. It usually refers to a mathematically based algorithm that is used to schedule a set of project activities so as to optimise the use of time and resources (Kelly 1961). Defining the critical path is a standard practice in professional project management.

Owing to its importance, the critical path method has often been considered to be a symbolic milestone and a starting point for the establishment of modern project management as a formal discipline. Traditionally, project management has focused on the quality of the project outcome, and its time and cost. This has meant that in order to guarantee an acceptable outcome, the project leader would deploy a work breakdown structure – a well-defined list of all tasks that had to be completed within a project in order to reach the desired outcome. This took into account the understanding that certain tasks and a certain sequencing of tasks were more important than others for delivering the project within a given time. Identifying this critical path of tasks through the project became an important management tool and marks the origin of project management as a sub-discipline of operations research and engineering management.

However, this concept of a critical path, defined purely by considerations of quality, cost and time, may seem to be overly restrictive. As a result, someone coming from the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences might ask if there are any other types of critical paths in projects, in addition to time? If so, could these other paths be at least as critical as the system of tasks that are being connected along the project life cycle?

Recent trends suggest that other critical paths can be identified and, in the last decade or so, the project management community has focused a great deal on documenting the critical paths of good communication, good leadership and good understanding of how people think, behave, collaborate and operate. Indeed, topics like emotions in projects and sustainable project management seem to be gaining increased interest in the project management community. This is only natural, as the time has come for the profession to open its eyes more to the global community and to the wider world of psychological and social realities.

The International Project Management Association (IPMA), founded in 1965, the UK Association for Project Management (APM) founded in 1972 and the Project Management Institute (PMI), established in 1984, are organisations that oversee and promote the awarding of competence-based qualifications in project management. These qualifications provide a benchmark for the recruitment, training and development of project management staff and are recognised by businesses and organisations around the world. The aim of this book is to add to the current project management literature by elaborating on the subject of project ethics within the field of project management, and prompting and assisting the reader to answer the following questions:

• How well are project leaders aware of ethical success factors in their projects?
• Do project leaders truly measure the success of their projects in terms of time, cost, quality, and customer satisfaction?
• Do project leaders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Critical Path of Project Ethics
• 2 Outcome-Oriented Ethics: Virtue Ethics
• 3 Outcome-Oriented Ethics: Utility Ethics
• 4 Process-Oriented Project Ethics: Duty Ethics
• 5 Process-Oriented Project Ethics: Rights Ethics
• 6 Project Evaluation and (Ethical) Risks
• Conclusions
• References
• Index
• Advances in Project Management