An Ethical Reckoning for Project Management
The PMI Code of Ethics is our foundation, built upon four core values. It distinguishes between aspirational standards (the ideals we strive for) and mandatory standards (the rules we must not break). Understanding this distinction is key to proactive ethical risk management. Click each value to learn more.
This speculative timeline details an AI project's rapid development and catastrophic ethical collapse. Use the interactive timeline below to explore each key milestone. As you select an event, the "Ethical Autopsy" dashboard will update to show how the project failed against our core values.
To prevent such failures, we must integrate ethics into our project lifecycle with the same rigor as engineering. This requires augmenting our standard project controls with new, ethics-focused artifacts and processes.
A formal document to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate ethical risks like algorithmic bias, model misalignment, or negative societal impact.
Formal stage gates where project progression is contingent not just on technical milestones, but on passing predefined ethical and safety criteria.
Translate the abstract goal of AI "alignment" into measurable metrics. Track and report on alignment and safety with the same priority as budget, schedule, and scope.