Ethics and project managers in an era of digitalization

 

Ethics and project managers in an era of digitalization

Digitalization of organizations in private and public sector is perceived as a natural move that organically was created by the technological advancement of the last 10-20 years. This shift at strategic and operational level bring changes to the organization and their people, from the work environment, and work style, to culture, technological adaptation, tools, communication, learning, with direct impact on the current employee, and their leaders.

As leaders, project managers and their teams are engaged in this wave of changes, and transformations that impact them.

With access to technology, with projects co-located, with virtual work environment becoming a norm, practically project managers and their project team manipulate and use information using in-house systems, communication platforms, and very often social media.

In this blog, I encourage you to join me in a generic case, hypothetical, that describes a social media situation, and does not refer to an instance.

As project managers, we comply and obey the PMI Code of Ethics, the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct  , the code of the organization that employs us, and sometimes the code for

our profession.

Emily is a senior project manager at a federal government department and currently manages a large team engaged in the delivery of an IT project. Emily is very proud of her team and very keen to usually complete timely and successfully the projects she manages. Emily is a top-notch specialist, well respected in her field, with PMI certifications, well known for her ethical values and her ability to “speak truth to power”.             

Most recently Emily worked on a status report of the project she currently manages; here, she explicitly demonstrated the difficulties and challenges of the project, that is over the budget, behind schedule, has unexpected changes in the business requirements; Emily also detailed the authority challenges she is faced with, as a project manager, in dealing with the executive group of decision-makers.

Emily is very involved in social media, and she is present on almost all the current platforms.  She is engaged in numerous professional networks, where she actively interacts, on a weekly and sometimes daily basis with peers and her network, work colleagues, and the professional community.

In a recent blog, Emily wrote about the challenges project managers in federal government face on each project they manage.  Emily described very vividly in her blog the challenges she and her team are facing and presented a real picture of the recent difficulties she and her team is dealing with.    Emily expressed her personal beliefs on the work environment, the organization and the success of projects, and complained about the short-sighted decision of senior management. Emily asked her network to comment and as days went by Emily saw an increased volume of responses from users of various social media platforms who started to comment, critique, offered ideas and views and making direct and indirect connections with Emily’s current job and project. Emily found herself in an overwhelming situation!

Do you think that Emily’s’ recent blog, her social media interest and her active presence on social media have something to do with ethics and the values of respect, responsibility, fairness, and honesty?

How should project managers behave on social media and what responsibility do they have to their team, and their employers?

What do we want project managers to know about the Code of Ethics and use of social media?

Is Emily in breach of the Values and Ethics Code?

As project managers, we have a conduit aligned to the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/ethics/pmi-code-of-ethics.pdf),

“As practitioners of project management, we are committed to doing what is right and honorable. We set high standards for ourselves and we aspire to meet these standards in all aspects of our lives—at work, at home, and in service to our profession.”.

For more ethical resources please visit: https://www.pmi.org/about/ethics.

Lily Murariu M. Eng. DBA in Project Management(c) 

Canada