Introduction:

This month’s blog entry explores the complex relationship between project success and project leadership.  Risk of failure is potentially higher for IT projects than commonly acknowledged and, by all accounts, it would appear that success hinges less on strict adherence to methodology than on leadership.  Leadership, of course, assumes manifold forms, but in the context of this discussion I narrow it down to its core:  the moral/ethical responsibility of project managers to "tell it like it is," so that appropriate decision-makers can make effective decisions in a timely manner.

This is the third and final part of the Project Management Leadership series, the first of which was published on 8/18.  Here we make the link between success, leadership, and ethics explicit.  Ethics in project management elude rigid definition,but realism (rather than optimism) is critical to every organization's ability to think critically and to maximize the opportunities for effective and timely decisions at every organizational level.