I won’t stoop to an Anthony Weiner tie-in. I won’t stoop to an Anthony Weiner tie-in. I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t …
Oh, hello there. Welcome to Part 2 of our review of a moral cesspool. No, not that cesspool. We’re talking about project management as described by Scott Ambler in his recent article, “Survey Shows Unethical Behavior Rampant Inside IT Development Teams,” (Dr. Dobb’s Journal, 5/3/2011).
Last week’s column set the stage by reviewing three relevant ethical principles and distinctions:
- Deontologism vs Consequentialism: Whether to judge ethics based on the action itself or its consequences.
- Corporations as moral entities: They aren’t. They’re presumptively amoral (not immoral) entities whose “ethical” guideposts are profits and shareholder value, and whose ethical boundaries are whatever the law and applicable regulations allow.
- Employee ethics: When acting as employees, human beings are their employer’s agents, subordinating their own ethical code to that of their employer. This includes how they work with their employer.
Now we’re ready. Mr. Ambler lists four areas of questionable ethical practice: Budgeting, scope management, scheduling, and quality.
Here’s where development teams are guilty with respect to budgeting: “Padding the initial budget (effectively deceiving stakeholders as to the actual expected costs); requesting extra funds at the end of the project even though they’d committed to a fixed budget; or reworked the initial estimate to align with the actual results at the end (effectively ‘cooking the books’).”
The complaint about scheduling is parallel: Padding, extending, or re-working it even though flexibility wasn’t negotiated up front.
Scope? Project teams change it even though flexible scope wasn’t initially negotiated.
Quality compromises? Done to “get the team out of trouble.”
Deontologically speaking, these practices are all either deceptions or failures to live up to commitments, and therefore, wrong.
Take context and consequence into account, though, and you’ll arrive at a different conclusion.
Here’s what project managers face all the time: Bad business sponsors. Some don’t understand the role, some reject it, and some adopt a company-defined bad version. Regardless, bad sponsors make project failure more likely.
Project managers balance five parameters in trying to survive the experience: Budget, schedule, scope, quality, and risk. It’s a zero sum game because when you’re planning a project you’re dealing with a period of time called “the future.” Some business sponsors appear to be unaware of its most significant property – uncertainty. How the future will play out … whether one team member comes down with the flu at a critical juncture; another “calls in rich”; or an infrastructure upgrade outside the project team’s control changes the development environment in unpredictable ways … isn’t known and can’t be built into the project budget and schedule before the project launches.
Competent business sponsors understand this annoying property of the future. When untoward events happen they collaborate with the project manager to make appropriate course corrections.
The others? They consider the initial “negotiated” budget, schedule and scope to be commitments … contractual obligations with the force of holy commandments, inviolable no matter how the future turns into the present (and then the past where 20/20 hindsight reigns supreme).
Which is why padding is mandatory. With competent business sponsors it takes the form of clearly identified contingency allowances. With incompetent business sponsors? Smart project managers insert covertly named items in the budget and tasks in the schedule to achieve the same purpose.
Project managers who don’t successfully pad have to take other steps when bad things happen. Are they unethical? Of course not.
First and foremost, the sponsor is acting as the company’s agent so his/her behavior defines the development team’s ethical obligations, not Mr. Ambler’s standards.
Second: By Mr. Ambler’s standards, all of the available choices are unethical. As changing the scope, schedule, budget, or quality are, in his eyes, unethical, the only remaining alternative is a deathmarch. This leaves the budget, schedule and scope intact, although the ethics of insisting on a deathmarch are, for some of us, more questionable than padding a budget.
And ethics notwithstanding, deathmarches cause fatigue and stress, leading to poor quality, and increasing the risk of complete implosion.
Ambler’s analysis fails to take this lesser-of-evils conundrum into account. When all of the available choices are bad, judging a choice in isolation is ridiculous.
Finally, self-defense and protecting others are widely accepted to be acceptable justifications for all sorts of situations, up to and including killing someone.
Seems to me that when good project managers have to contend with bad business sponsors, “self-defense” is describes their best choices perfectly.
Unethical? Hardly, especially as the supposedly more-ethical alternatives all lead to far worse consequences.
“and whose ethical boundaries are whatever the law and applicable regulations allow.”
In theory, that’s what corporate lawyers and marketers would claim, but in practice, that boundary is extended by their estimated ratio of profit to penalties paid (please excuse my weary sarcasm).
In “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art”, Steve McConnell brings forth all sorts of industry data that shows that the problem with software development estimation is underestimating, not overestimating. Customers just want the software when you promise to give it to them because they base all sorts of other business planning decisions around it, and if you underestimate, you cut corners, cause all sorts of quality problems, and deliver late because of the rush. If, on the other hand, you overestimate and get the project done early, your customers are delighted. In addition, when you overestimate, you almost always get the project done faster than you would have had you underestimated it.
Another thing McConnell states you need to be aware of in project management is the cone of uncertainty, which is +- 4.0 for your estimates at the beginning of a project. As you gain ground on the project, the cone of uncertainty narrows, and you re-estimate at given methodology milestones.
Therefore, overestimation is certainly not an ethical violation by any means.
Brilliant analysis. But … In every budget I’ve ever put together, both in the private sector and in government, I include a line item for 15% called “Contingencies.” This is the only line item that I have never had questioned. Surely, I must have had some incompetent project managers, so I wonder whether “covert” line items are really necessary. A deontologically-oriented sponsor would hold me to that 15% figure come hell or high water, but I don’t think there is anything implicit in that philosophical leaning which would make an adherent adverse to a line item called “contingencies.” Maybe part of the problem lies in project managers who are reluctant to admit that their projections are imprecise and require a fudge factor?
A competent sponsor will accept the contingency line, no questions asked. In my career I’ve had “contingency” challenged more than once. The challenge (I’m not making this up!): “What’s that for?”
Answer: “If I knew, I wouldn’t call it ‘contingency’. I’d call it ‘Jill gets the flu.'”
The conversation didn’t improve. In retrospect I’d have been better off calling it “Voltage conversion surcharge.”
Ha! That brings back memories!
I had a project (not managing, just being a grunt doing something his boss wanted done). This was our conversation:
Boss: When will you have this complete?
Me: No later than Friday next week?
Boss: Next week? Why so long?
Me: I always plan time for the unexpected.
Boss: Like what?
Me: If I knew, it would not be unexpected.
My boss was not impressed…
Re: “effectively deceiving stakeholders as to the actual expected costs”
Is it more ethical to “pad the budget” or to offer the near traditional “total success estimates” that are nearly always exceeded. A better description of “pad the budget” is “budget for unknown, unknowns” or “budget for things the boss doesn’t want to hear about,” or “stuff the team will think of in a few months that must be done.”
Every good project manager has a kitty. Experienced project managers have larger kitties than the new folks and are better able to hide the kitty.
I’m not quite sure what you are trying to say. Are you trying to say that “padding the budget” (per your example) is consequentialism and therefore consequentialism is appropriate in some situations?
Or are you saying that “padding the budget” can be considered immoral but in fact, isn’t always true?
To me you’re applying a known “immoral” verb incorrectly. Padding the budget means (to me), knowingly adding figures to something you KNOW will just be profit for you. Adding fudge-factor figures is different. It’s not immoral, it is acceptable and is even a deontologistic (is that a word?) action.
Or am I missing the point?
-Rick
This column reminds me of something an old friend of mine, perhaps the best project manager I’ve ever know, once said: “You cannot succeed at a large project because when you’re done everyone will be dissatisfied with some part what you’ve built, but you can certainly fail. Your job is to prevent failure.”
I suspect much of what he says that is “unethical” may be “the way the business is run.”
I would have liked to see what the correlation is between business practices and IT practices.
For example, if every time-line for a project is automatically halved by “the powers that be,” at a company, is there a collation with IT doubling their estimates on how long the project will take to complete?
Bob is 100% correct on this matter. It’s unethical to lie or otherwise misrepresent the true status of the project. It’s unethical to be willfully blind to risks, issues and unknowns. Everything Ambler thinks is unethical is how conscientious and ethical project managers try to deal with the inherent uncertainty of projects.
Question for Scott Ambler: is it ethical to willfully ignore well-known professional practices and therefore mislead your sponsor and other stakeholders about project risks and likely outcomes?
Furthermore, I don’t make ironclad commitments on my projects because I’m a project manager not a fortune-teller. And my sponsors and stakeholders don’t want me to spend months and months working on the perfect estimate, which will never be perfect anyway. They want my teams to get to work now. I promise them that I will give them best effort, the most accurate status that is possible and the best forecasts to completion. That is the best that anybody can honestly do. Perfectionists don’t make good project managers.
Some thoughts:
1. Bob, thanks for completely misrepresenting my point. Most others, thanks for not taking the time to read the actual article.
2. The primary point that I was making, which you seemed unwilling to point out in your analysis, is that although individually these “practices” may be a good idea at the time when we knowingly do them on a regular basis without coming clean on them then yes, they are clearly ethically challenged.
3. The article provides an analysis of the data which shows that it’s quite common to commit to something up front, such as specific scope, cost, or schedule, and then later in the project (OK, sometimes almost immediately) break that promise. Yes, there’s reasons for doing so. But, when we consistently do so, including those “ethical PMs” one person mentioned, then in effect we know there’s a very good chance that we’re lying to our stakeholders the next project we do. I believe we can do a lot better than that, and the first step is to stop making excuses and choose to change our behaviors. It won’t be easy.
4. As to the point about bad business sponsors, the prime reason they’re “bad” is they don’t understand the implications of what they’re asking for. We need to educate them, something I point out in the article. Also, not sure how professional it is to blame “incompetent business sponsors” if we’re not making a concerted effort to help them become more knowledgeable.
5. You’re thrashing a lot on padding the budget, but not so much on the myriad of other questionable practices such as cutting promised scope, cutting quality, and others discussed in the article.
Anyway, your rant was entertaining.
It’s amazing that people wouldn’t mind being lied to by people who serve them like Weiner. I mean if he’s willing to shame the people close to him such as his wife, who are you for him to think twice about shaming?
So I’m curious. You’re singling out Weiner. Have you wandered over to PolitiFact recently? Ask yourself whether the politicians awarded multiple “pants-on-fire” ratings … lies about policy issues … don’t deserve your anger more than a guy like Weiner.