Seek the Truth!

Introduction

In the January 2012 edition of PM World Today, in my article entitled “Guiding Principles: Commitment to ethics and values can empower leaders of teams, projects, programs and organizations,” [1] 10 principles to guide project management professionals in their work and careers were discussed.  One of those principles, honesty, is included in literally all codes of conduct, codes of ethics and professional standards as important for professional behavior.  This emphasis on being honest, telling the truth, for individual behavior, however, is not enough to have the desired positive impact on project results or organizational performance.

What happens if you are honest, but those around you are not?  What if someone on your team provides inaccurate or misleading information?  What if one of your key resources is not as qualified as claimed, or has provided dishonest background information?  What might be the result if one of your suppliers or contractors lies, provides misleading estimates or bids, or delivers inaccurate or misleading status reports?  What if your key stakeholders, including executive sponsors, have hidden agendas, or stop supporting your project without informing you?  Do these things happen?  Yes, all the time. 

This article is about the general importance of honesty, and the potential impact of dishonesty, on programs and projects, and some steps that project managers and PM professionals can take to protect against this significant risk.  I am not suggesting that dishonesty is widespread, but it may exist in various forms – for example, lack of critical information, distorted or misleading information, mistakes, delayed reporting of critical information, and outright lies.  And lack of accurate information can doom a project or a project manager.  If you are responsible for an important project, with significant budget or impact on your organization, or responsible for the lives or careers of other people, you need to make sure that the information you are receiving from others is the truth.  A passion for honesty reflects more mature project management, can reduce risks and can lead to more successful results.

Some Aspects of Project Management where Honesty is Critical

By their very nature, projects involve many uncertainties.  However, those uncertainties can often be identified.  At the same time, information that is used for project planning should be as accurate as possible; information reported or used during the implementation of a project should also be as true and accurate as possible, or bad decisions can result.  Project management is serious business.  Inaccuracies are common, but dishonesty should be unacceptable.  Here are some aspects of project management where honest information is very important.

Scope – What products, services, tasks and work are to be completed on the project?  One of the first and most important tasks for a project manager, or a project team, is to define, estimate and describe the project scope of work.  In many cases, and for large projects, work planning is a repeated or even continuous task.  The information used for developing a project scope of work comes from many sources, including project team members, performing organizations, suppliers, consultants, sponsors, consultants and historic documents.  But is all that information accurate or true?  Where did the specifications or requirements come from? Are they complete or based on the correct assumptions?  Where are the risks?  What information is missing, has been withheld or has not been included for some reason? 

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