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Project Ethics: A Matter of Choice
David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Is it acceptable for experienced project managers to put up with irrational orders and pass them on to their teams, even though in their best professional judgment the objectives can’t actually be delivered? What constitutes the ethical responsibilities of project work?
Several years ago, I was invited into one of the large mortgage bundling ... errr, banking operations to visit with their project managers. I learned that several of their largest projects were working on developing a response to what they called The Perfect Storm. I asked, and they described the perfect storm for me:
One of these days, probably not tomorrow, these artificially low interest rates will rise, the bubbled-up real estate prices will fall, frantic new home construction will slow, home equity value will shrink, foreclosures will increase, and faith in these questionable mortgages we bundle and pass on will plummet.
I checked back last month to see if the current sub-prime mortgage crisis had come close to fulfilling their perfect storm scenario. The response: “The current situation is much, much worse.”
The first project I ever participated in started as a straightforward package implementation and was managed into a catastrophe. I remember wandering into my division VP’s office just after that final “go or no …
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