Ethics: always a sound strategy

Dennis Comninos & Chris van der Hoven

Strategic project management is a pitifully misunderstood term, often confused with the project management process. But, in reality, it deserves a lot more attention. Long before you even think of managing a project, you start by managing your strategy—which means choosing the right project in the first place.

In the case of countless ill-advised undertakings throughout the world, efficient project management has not necessarily boiled down to good business practice—it has simply been a more efficient way to lose money.

Although not all organisations realise it, solid strategy often comes down to ethics.

The parallel between ethics and strategy is not new. Consider the example of German industrial giant Bosch, who for a time focused on implementation (project management processes) at the expense of project selection (project portfolio processes). This had a strong impact on the company’s well-known ethos of quality and value for money. They could get a product to market faster than any of their competitors, which was fine when the right products were selected. But when poor projects were chosen and raced to market, without consideration for sound quality values or the needs of the consumer, it resulted in a faster turnover of inferior products—and a faster loss of profitability.

So where does strategic and ethical project management come in? It is in the strategy underpinning the project itself; often, crucially, the selection of the right projects. And we mean ‘right’ in both

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