“Project Management Ethics and more” with Jeff Furman

In this week’s episode of Project Management Paradise, Johnny speaks to lecturer, trainer and author Jeff Furman about project management ethics and more.

Jeff trained 1000’s of Project Managers towards getting their PMP certification over a number of years to date as well as diversifying into training for many other certifications such as training he delivers at the US Army bases. Jeff is also a lecturer in NYU (New York University), where he aids in delivering a total of 8 courses in areas of ethics and project management;

• Basic PM
• PMP Prep
• Persuasive Presentations For PMs (New Course I developed for NYU SCPS)
• New: EARNED VALUE MANAGEMENT (1-Day Intensive)
• New: CRITICAL PATH METHOD (1-Day Intensive)
• Communications Management (part of 10-Day PM Summer Intensive certificate program)
• Principles of PM For Construction Professionals (for Schack Institute of Real Estate, certificate program in PM for Construction Professionals)
  as well as a course, he developed entitled “ethics in project management”

In this interview, Jeff shares some insights regarding project management ethics in addition to some great gems from his book – The PM Answer Book.

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Excerpts from Episode 24: Project Management Ethics

“everyone thinks I’m the good one but some bad people are unethical”
Jeff explains how the above quote is not factually correct as many ethical people are pushed into performing unethical activities. “How do you say no to your boss or customer?” It is easy to say that the long term is more important than any short-term benefit but you have to ask the question,

“what do you do when it’s you?”.
Jeff also considers how project managers are often pushed into giving a presentation on their project to persuade a customer or even a senior staff member. This can often be one of the biggest challenges for a PM and they can tend to just go through slide after slide, death by PowerPoint effectively. Jeff believes persuasion is key for these presentations and to be persuasive you need to engage with the audience and keep them interested. – “Engagement is the key to success”.

There is changes coming to the PMP exam in the coming year in line with PMBOK 6 which includes a lot of agile references. Jeff believes that incorporating Agile with Agile is the way forward right now. He also believes that Scrum Agile is really taking over, especially in New York and with a lot of traits from Waterfall, could be the “new wave in project management”.

One last point that Furman makes to his students to engage them in the process is everyone “can usually think of an incident in your live where it could have gone better – there is usually an ethical issue at the core”.