PMI PMP Project Management Professional – The PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

1. Section Overview: Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Welcome to this section on the PMI code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. You will have questions on your exam about ethics that are related to this PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. In the past, this was its own category of questions. Not anymore. Now these questions are integrated into the different knowledge areas. So it’s not as clear-cut that this may be an ethics question on the Code of conduct, that it’s integrated. Just like in your role as a project manager, you make ethical choices. So the exam’s the same way. It’s not a separate category. Thank you very much. We’re going to talk about this PMI code of Ethics and Professional conduct.

It’s not a terribly long section, but it’s an important section that we need to understand the responsibilities to the profession about complying with PMI’s rules and policies and being honest, advancing the profession. We have responsibilities to the customer and the public. We’ll talk about truth and honesty, about eliminating inappropriate actions and then respecting others in the works of others, so that we don’t, for example, copy someone’s test questions directly out of their book and then claim it as their own. And then we’ll talk about downloading the PMI code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. So a lot of things here. It’s a pretty straightforward assignment, though, and a pretty straightforward section. So let’s hop in and knock this out now.

2. Responsibilities to the Profession

When you apply to pass the PMP exam, you’ll fill out the PMP exam application. As part of this application, you must agree to abide by the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. So this is a document that’s part of all PMI certification applications. The PMP and the CAPM, the PMI ACP, it’s universal to all of the certifications. You have to agree to its terms, and we’ll walk through those in a moment. If you’d like to read this, you can hop out to PMI. org, and then you can search for the PMI code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. It’s a PDF document, and you can download it, or we can just walk through it right now. The first part is the responsibilities to the profession. As project managers and members of PMI, we have a responsibility to the profession of project management. We need to abide by the organizational rules and policies, and we’re talking about PMI right now.

So on our exam applications, you must be honest and truthful in what you put down in your exam application. As far as test items go, you can’t tell people what test items are. So you can’t write down things and sneak out answers or share with others what the test items are. The answer sheets, talking about the six sheets of scratch paper that you’re given at the prometric center, you have to return all six sheets. You can’t sneak one out, right? You have to leave it with the proctor and then continuing certification reporting are PDUs. Once you’re a PMP, there’s honesty in the reporting of your PDUs that you can’t claim a PDU if you didn’t actually do it.

There also needs to be responsibilities to the profession. So as a project manager and as a PMP or a CAPM, we have some responsibilities here that we will report violations when there is clear and factual evidence. When you have clear and factual evidence. So suspecting that someone cheated or suspecting that you have these questions from the testing center and someone says they’re real live, doesn’t mean that they’re exactly real live. You need to have clear and factual evidence. If PMI audits you or they ask about a colleague that’s being audited, you must cooperate with PMI on their queries. It’s part of our responsibility. As a member of PMI, we always disclose the appearance of the conflict of interest. So a great example would be I have a company and I sell hardware. I sell different video hardware and different audio visual hardware. And my organization where I work, this is kind of my moonlight gig, selling this hardware over here.

But my primary job, they need to buy some of that type of hardware. Well, my organization has no conflict of interest, so even if I get a tiny little margin on it, or even if I say I’ll sell it to you at cost, that could be a conflict of interest. So I must disclose the appearance even the appearance of a conflict of interest. So I could say, hey, you could buy this from my organization, I’ll sell it to you at cost. No profit margin for me. We’ll just pass it through. Well, the other people, if they know that’s through me, they may say, oh, Joe’s making a profit on that. It’s a real conflict of interest. He’s influenced that decision to help himself. So even the appearance of the conflict of interest has to be disclosed in our role as a professional, the professional practice here, we have to have truth in advertising and sales. We can’t say that I’ve been doing project management since 1945 if obviously I’m not. So we need truth in advertising and truth in advertising in our sales.

And this includes when we make cost estimates or schedule estimates that we don’t sandbag, we don’t give a very low price and then get the project and once we’re in it and the price keeps ratcheting up, that we want to be truthful and honest and be fair and ethical. We have to comply with the laws and the regulations and the ethical standards of the country where that project is being held. So if I’m working in France, I adhere to those laws and regulations and even to some extent the ethics and the customs. But there’s a rule of precedence here if I’m working in the US.

Again, the laws, the regulations and the ethics in Japan, they have a different set of laws and regulations and so on. So each country is a point of making you have to understand, you need to do research and understand what are the laws, the regulations and the ethics of that company. So that helps me behave there. I also want to have an advancement of the profession. So I disperse the code to other project managers and my project team members and I respect the intellectual property of others. So this means if an individual were to blatantly plagiarize the questions from my book and publish them as their own, they would be violating the code of ethics and professional conduct. So we don’t do that. So intellectual property is to be respected.

So you can pick up on that if you want. Maybe that happened to me, maybe it didn’t, I don’t know. But advancement profession is we respect the rights of others. We have a responsibility to the customers and to the public that we need to be truthful in our experience. And as I mentioned a moment ago, truthful in our estimating. The customer is considered to be in charge. The customer is the most important person in the project. And if they want to make additions to the project and they’re willing to pay for it and willing to give us time and it’s reasonable, then they’re in charge. There’s also a confidentiality relationship between a client vendor or the project manager and the stakeholders. And some of the information that our project manager is privy to.

So Privity describes the confidentiality that I don’t go blab to everybody. What this confidential information is that I need to keep some of that to myself or keep all of it to myself and not communicate and share things. That is not for the public, it’s not for the whole organization to know. We also have a responsibility to customers and to the public about avoiding the conflict of interest. So kind of that same idea of can I buy or purchase for myself? I want to refrain from accepting inappropriate compensation. So I always follow the laws and then the customs of the country. So you want to understand you have to do some research here to understand what are the laws, the regulations, the ethics and the customs. But I follow that order of precedence. There some terms you need to know. A few extras here for you. The Superior Wharf Hypotheses is a hypotheses that basically says the language that you speak affects how you think. So we may both come to the same conclusion, but if you speak German and I speak English, then we have two different ways of thinking to get to the same conclusion. So this was the subpoenas and by understanding the language I’m better to understand how people think and operate and act in that culture.

Culture shock is that initial reaction to a Ford environment. So the first time you go to a new place, whether it’s a huge city like New York or Paris or a very tiny city like Bullsholds, Arkansas, which is in the middle of nowhere, you kind of have that culture shock. You’re not really used to what’s happening. There’s a lot of moving things or not moving things. So you have this culture shock. It’s the initial where you just feel disoriented and kind of overwhelmed. So we want to combat culture shock by doing research and understanding what to expect when we get to that forward environment. Ethnocentrism is where I measure other cultures by my own.

Usually with the attitude that my culture is better than that culture. So I mentioned this place in Arkansas. So you go to this little tiny town in Arkansas, you might be from a big city and you think oh, it’s kind of backwards here. It’s like 1950s here. It’s so slow here with the attitude that where you’re from is better. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different. But Ftochism is just that measurement where you put down other people’s culture based on your own culture. The inverse of that could be true as well. Maybe you are from a small town and you go to Paris and the first time you’re in Paris it can be just overwhelming. It’s beautiful and everyone’s so sophisticated and it’s Paris, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. It’s a fabulous city, but it can be kind of overwhelming. And then you think oh, I’m really backwards and these people are so far advanced to me, how can I possibly work here? Contribute here. You’re measuring your culture by others. That’s also ethnocentrism some exam tips for you. If you don’t know what to do, you get one of these ethical questions.

So there’s five things you can do when you think about these questions. First off, you always follow the laws of the country. No bribes, no inappropriate compensation, nothing illegal. Follow the laws of the company I’m sorry, of the country. The second thing is, then you follow the company policies. So it may be perfectly fine in the country you’re in to accept a gift for 200, $300 or as much as you want. But your company has a policy that no gifts over $25 or no gifts, period. So you would have to say, I know it’s legal, but I know I can’t accept that.

So you have to politely turn down that gift because you can’t break the company policy. Then customs, if it’s not illegal and it’s not against your company policy, then you can follow the customs. So the customs may be you get a little gift at the end of the project, and that’s fine as long as it’s not illegal and it’s not against your company policy. If your company policy says no gifts and they want to give you a gift at the end of the project, you have to politely decline it. You can’t accept it and then donate it, or can’t accept it and give it back later. You can’t accept it because then it’s the appearance of impropriety. So your customs have to be in alignment with the company and the laws of the country and then your own personal ethics. If there is no law against it, there is no company policy, but it’s not really a custom. But they want to give you a new sports car with your project decision. You might ethically feel like, well, this is a bribe. So then you go by your ethics, and if you still don’t know what to do, you say, what would an angel do in this scenario? So sometimes you choose the most restrictive will help you with these ethical questions. All right, so that is our review of the exam tip for the PMI code of Ethics and Professional conduct.

3. Section Wrap: Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibility

In this section, we talked all about the PMI code of ethics and professional responsibility. You went out to PMI’s website and downloaded a copy of this document, and you printed it out and read it. When you think about the PMP exam, it’s a pretty scary exam, and it’s really tempting to search the web or to go into some reddit groups or to even purchase some less than scrupulous products to help you earn the PMP. My only advice here is you want to be very careful about where you get your questions from and sharing questions because you don’t want to be in violation of the PMP Code or the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, that you want to make certain that you aren’t sharing things that someone has stolen.

And so that breaks even if you don’t know it, that breaks the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. You also want to be very careful in your news groups and your Facebook groups and whatnot that you don’t share particulars about the exam. Well, I had this one question with this term and yada yada, that’s pretty much a violation of the Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibility. So you just want to use caution and use some common sense here. I’m not going to give you a big warning. I don’t think anyone’s going to come chase after you.

But we want to just be careful of what we share online, that we don’t accidentally put ourselves in an uncomfortable position with PMI. All right? So that’s a little coach to you, just a tiny little worry. I wouldn’t fret over it too much. Great job finishing this section on the PMI code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. We discussed this document, which you can download from PMI. org, in fact, you did in the assignment, and then you read through that document. But we talked about the responsibilities to the profession and the rules and the policies and about being honest and ethical in advancing the profession.

We talked about our responsibilities to our customers and to the public and how that aligns with these Code of Ethics. Talked about eliminating inappropriate actions and respecting others and the work of others, including questions in their book. And then we talked about as a PMP candidate that you want to be careful, that you want to respect others and adhere to the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. So a really important section, albeit a small section, but great job, you knocked it out. Let’s keep moving forward.