Ethics And Responsibilities Section Of Your PMP Exam (Professional Code Of Conduct)

Hello and welcome guys. In this video, I am going to show you what you need to know about the Ethics and Professional Code by PMI, and this is a part of your PMP exam, so it's important that you read over this code of conduct before your exam. So to get a copy of this guide, you can just Google PMP Ethics and Professional Code, and then the link will come up inside of Google, and this is a free download, so, and it's available in multiple languages. So go and get yourself a copy of this. This is not a part of the PMBOK Guide, but you still need to know it for your exam. Now, there are 4 sections to this Code of Conduct: Responsibility, Fairness, Honesty, and Respect. However, I'm not going to dive into each of these 4 sections because on your PMP exam, you're not going to get a question where they will just say, what's line 3 of the Responsibility section in the Code of Conduct? No, they're not going to test you on that. They're going to give you situational questions see if you can apply the code of conduct into actual situations. So my focus for this video is to show you some of those common scenarios that you'll be given and know how to approach those questions. If you do want to read over the code, it's a free download on Google. I don't think in this video I need to reread that guide to you. And then the last thing I'll mention is that within each of these 4 sections, there are the mandatory standards and the optional or aspirational standards. So the mandatory standards are things that you must do as a PMP-certified project manager, and the optional standard is what you should do, what you should aspire to do. Okay, now let's take a look at some scenarios. You may be given a situation where it says you're in a foreign country where the government officials are expecting bribes as payment in order to get this project moving along, and then you'll be given 4 different choices. One of the choices may be just to take the bribe or to give the bribe but under the table, make sure no one sees it. And another of the multiple choice questions could be do not take the bribe, and then something else completely irrelevant as a 4th choice. Now, whenever it comes to bribery, you do not take or make any bribery payments. This is against PMI's Code of Conduct. Now, this situation could be that you are on the board where you're deciding whether or not to give someone a job, or it could be a procurement contract, and then the other party who's applying for this job or this contract is a family member of yours. It could be your sister, your brother, your sister-in-law, your uncle, brother, whatever, right? Now, if this is the case, then you have to disclose the conflict of interest. The 4 choices you might be given is that you ignore it, You don't disclose that this person is a family member of yours. You award the job or contract to your family member without considering the other parties. The correct answer in this type of questions is that you do not engage in this conflict of interest. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't be on the board deciding whether or not that family member could win this job or contract. It just means that you have to disclose this conflict of interest to the relevant stakeholders. So telling your board or your company that, hey, look, this is actually my sister or my brother-in-law, just so that you know there is a conflict of interest here. And if they still decide that they want you to be part of the decision-making process, then you can absolutely go ahead and be a part of that. But it's very important that you disclose That conflict of interest. Where it tricks people up in this, this type of question is people think that they have to excuse themselves from these situations right away, which may not necessarily be the case. You have to disclose the conflict of interest first, and then the next step is to decide whether or not you should still be on the board or not of deciding who wins this project or contract. Now, next scenario you might get is your project is delayed or there's a cost overrun and you can cook up the numbers a little bit, then present it to stakeholders. This is a big no-no. You have to present the stakeholders with accurate numbers, even if there's a cost overrun or a schedule delay. So you have to always give an accurate representation of what's actually going on on your project to the relevant stakeholders. Another big thing with PMI is copyright. And protecting other people's copyrights. So do not take credit for someone else's work. If someone on your team did the work in question, be sure to give them credit for their contributions. And this leads nicely to the next point, is that whenever you do want to use someone else's work, make sure you get their written permission that they're allowed to— you're allowed to use their work to avoid any copyright claims and so forth. Now, if you notice something that violates PMI's copyrights, then report this to PMI. So for example, if you notice that someone took their PMP exam and then right after they took the exam, they posted 10 of the questions that they saw on the exam onto the internet, that's a violation of PMI's copyright. Or maybe you saw someone distribute the PMBOK Guide illegally, that's a violation of PMI's copyright, and you will report that to PMI. However, if you see a workplace violation, so for example, you saw someone on your team who's PMP certified stealing or lying, you would first report that to the appropriate management. So you may be given a scenario that says something like a PMP certified project manager was caught stealing or lying in the organization. Who's the first person you should report to? It could be like management, PMI. And then your project sponsor or your project team. The correct answer here is appropriate management. You want to report it to the manager first because this is something that happened in the workplace. Maybe after that you can report this to PMI, but the first person that you should— the first line of defense if this happened in the workplace is you have to report that to the appropriate manager before you report this to PMI. If it's a PMI violation, so something to do with the PMP exam or some of PMI's trademarks or copyright, then you will report that first to PMI. And always accurately represent your skill set. You may be given a question where you're asked that there's a new job on the market, however you don't have the skills yet to obtain that job. Should you go for that job or not. Now, you can still go for that job because that's how we all grow. If you are never given those opportunities to grow and expand your skill set, you never get to the next level, right? So PMI is not saying that you can't go for those jobs that you haven't done before, where it's a stretch project or a promotion for you. However, you have to accurately represent your skill set. You can't bluff. You can't say you have those experiences that you don't already have, so you can't exaggerate your experiences to get a job. If you accurately represented your skill set and the stakeholders still feel like you're the best candidate to get this promotion or get this stretch project, then you can absolutely go for it. You just cannot exaggerate your experiences. Always engage in good faith negotiation. A lot of times you're going to have contractors and procurements in your project. You always have to engage in good faith negotiation. Part of that is giving all of the potential bidders on your project equal information, so not favoring or giving extra information to a particular contractor and not giving other people's bids to other contractors so they know what to bid on. And lastly, respect cultural differences. Because you are a project manager for a large project in multiple different countries, you're going to have team members from all over the world, and it's important that you tailor your communication so that people from other cultures will be able to relate to you and understand what they have to do and contribute to your project. So respecting other people's Cultures is a huge part of the ethics and responsibilities for you as a PMP certified project manager. Okay, so that was a quick walkthrough of some of the most common types of questions that you may encounter in the ethics and responsibilities section of your PMP exam. If you like this training, be sure to sign up for a free 1.5-hour training where I will teach you how you can obtain your PMP or CAPM certification. In the next 6 weeks. To sign up, simply go to www.examspm.com-free. I'm going to break down the step-by-step process. Look, this is a free training and you do not want to miss this. I guarantee you, when you walk through this training, you're going to learn something new. And there's a couple freebies that I'm going to give on the call as well, including our ITTO guide, which is a great study tool to have. So join us for this free training. Thank you so much for listening to this lecture. The link is also in the description box below. Be sure you click on that. We have a couple of times this week. I can't wait to see you on this training. Look, it's going to be a lot of value. I'm going to show you how all the ITT is linked together. I'm going to give you your study plan. I'm going to give you with a guide with everything to walk over on your own time. It's going to be a really great training. Training. So I can't wait to see you there. To sign up, go to www.examspm.com-free. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you again soon.