Legal & Ethical Implications of PLM

There are actually quite a few fascinating legal and ethical implications surrounding the practice construct for PLM. The reason for this is simple; Program Management Offices (PMOs) are the places which control funding, contracts and oversight for almost all IT projects and many other types of projects as well. Thus, PMOs by nature are the organizations charged with managing legal or liability issues. Liability issues encompass a wide spectrum of topics including, but not limited to:

• Financial liability due to non-performance
• Financial liability due to negligence
• Legal liability due to contract disputes
• Legal liability due to product failure or non-compliance
• Legal liability due to security breaches, information privacy failure
• Legal liability due to information freedom of speech related issues

Because of these and other related issues, PMOs are the places charged with supporting or conducting risk management or risk assurance processes. These processes though are only as effective as the data which support them. Risk Management is one of the sub-processes supported by the PLM “meta-process,” the idea being that all risks are related to tangible requirements and all requirements are then related to projects, programs and portfolios. So, PLM is both an enabling technology as well as a way to help place issues in their proper context within the larger enterprise picture. Given its focus, there could be potentially significant liability issues associated with PLM as a solution.

IT and ethics are generally not discussed in the same context. The reason for this is simple, people who work with data understand how easily it can be manipulated and in many cases clients are specifically interested in seeing data manipulated to suit various agendas. The introduction of the ethics discussion can often become very uncomfortable for the many folks who aren’t aware that this is happening and this is perhaps the main reason it so seldom occurs.

The management of organizations is an extremely subjective exercise, there isn’t a clearly defined comprehensive canon of ethics per se, just specific legislation here and there to prohibit or restrict certain practices that have been found to be problematic. From a service provider perspective, the key thing to keep in mind for PLM is that any set of decisions will be better served if the right data is available to the right stakeholders at the right time. Ultimately, the folks running the ePMO will determine the rules that focus on issues and data important to them. If an organization chooses to ignore critical data or attempt to change the nature of data provided to them then that clearly falls outside of the boundaries of liability for the PLM service provider.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

What is Project Management ?

Project management is generally viewed as a methodology primarily designed to manage (human) resources and schedules. As evidenced by the PMbok, project management is often extended to cover much more than that. However even if Project Management is extended in this fashion it still relies primarily on the data sets inherent within any typical Project Management software packages. That data is constructed around task definition, timelines, resource data and other variables or flags such as what might represent a critical path. The term ‘Critical Path’ refers to that set of tasks which is deemed (by someone) to be crucial to the overall success of the project. Anyone who has worked in a PMO and sat through some sort of status meeting can attest though, the problem with this data comes into play whenever the question “why” is asked. Why is the project running behind schedule, what is the problem that has led to the overrun?

There is no project management methodology or software that sufficiently prepares a manager to answer those questions. That manager is wholly at the mercy of someone else to explain the cause of the problem as none of that information will be accessible (by design) within the project management software. PLM recognizes that half of a picture is not 50% good, it can be 100% worthless as often times the poor data that we do have may indicate success when in fact the project is failing. Determinations of progress are extremely difficult to make in most situations using only project management software as there is no tangible method for assessing the true complexity of any given task if that task is essence only a placeholder representing a larger set of requirements data not available.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.