Ethical Issues Faced By Employees Of Occidental Engineering In Operation Safe Skies Project

Occidental Engineering Case Study 

Wayne Davidson is a software engineer in the aerospace division of Occidental Engineering, a large  engineering firm. For the past two years he has been working as a test engineer for Operation Safe Skies, a  project to build a prototype of the next generation air traffic control system. This project, which is funded  by a contract from the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), is a very important one for Occidental. With all the  cutbacks in defence spending, the aerospace division has been losing business. The Safe Skies project has  provided much needed business, and could lead to a much larger contract if successful. Mindful of its  strategic importance, the company had bid very aggressively for the original contract. In fact they had "low? balled" it, bidding less than it would take to do the work properly. They felt that was the only way they  could beat out their competitors, who were just as hungry for the work. Because of their somewhat shaky  financial position, the company was not willing to take a loss on the project, so the project has been  underfunded and understaffed. Nevertheless those working on the project have made a heroic effort,  working eighteen hour days seven days a week to meet the deadline, because they know how much it  means to the company, not to mention their own jobs. They are now very close to success. A version of the prototype has been completed and turned over to Wayne for testing. He has run extensive  simulations on it and found that it works as it should except for one little problem. When there are too  many aircraft in the system, it will sometimes lose track of one or more of them. The "forgotten" aircraft  will simply disappear from the screen, there will be no trace of it anywhere, and it will be ignored by all of  the collision avoidance and other safety tests. Wayne has been working with the software designers to  identify the cause of the problem, and they have traced it to a subtle error in memory allocation and reuse. They are confident that they can fix it, but it will take a month or more to do the redesign, coding and  testing. 

What do you think about Wayne's decision?  Was it ethical? 
 

Identified Ethical Issues

The study is based on description of ethical issues that employees of Occupational Engineering are suffered due to bidding to get Operation Safe Skies Project. The project is based on facilitating air traffic control into US. The study discusses the ethical challenges that both project manager as well as testing engineer faces due to issues into Occidental. Due to identified issues, they are concerned with development of the software which would track the air traffic system. In this report, the ethical issues are identified; potential consequences are identified to the stakeholders, potential breaches of the PMI with the ethical standards. The identified ethical dilemma is resolved and recommendations are suggested to the organization.

Identification of ethical issues in Occidental Engineering case study

Following are the ethical issues which are identified into the case study of Occidental Engineering:

1. As per the ACS (Australian code of ethics), it is required to provide first priority to the public interest as compared to business interest. However, in this case, it does not meet with the ethical conduct. Occidental Engineering is not concerned about effect of software product they build (Drumwright & Murphy, 2014).
2. The employees of Occidental Engineering are working for more than 18 hours a day each day which is against the ethical rules (Warren & Burmeister, 2017). The employees are forced to work for more than their shift time. It is taken as an ethical issue.
3. The organization is not taking into consideration the financial situation; therefore it affects the ethical integrity of workers very badly (Harriss & Atkinson, 2015).
4. There is no promotion of healthy as well as safety rules of the organization; therefore the employees are affected by the working environment of the organization. Health and safety standards are not maintained properly 

Identification of potential consequences to stakeholders accept the bids and risks

In case if the software engineer, Wayne Davidson missed the deadline to fix the issues, the government should take possible steps against it. It is caused due to some unavoidable circumstances. If the deadline is missed, then the client faces various issues such as it will firstly affect the client’s reputation. The existing issues into the air traffic control system harms integrity of the client towards the current stakeholders (Braswell, McCarthy & McCarthy, 2017).  As there is no raise of project fund, therefore it affects the efficiency of the proposed system. It is stated that it was bad decision to accept lower bid to get the air traffic control system. It is due to the reason that the organization does not consist of financial resources to support the proposed project. Due to accepting of aggressive bid, it affects the organizational culture. It affects the view of workers towards the organization.    

Identification of potential breaches of PMI ethical standards by project team

There are two types of breaches into PMI ethical standards such as confidentiality as well as conflict of interest. Confidentiality breaches are occurred when the professional leaks the information about the project related information, design and business deal (Reamer, 2015). On other hand, conflict of interest is occurred when there are some misunderstanding and communication gap among the test engineer and project manager. 

Examination of PMI code and identification of requirements in the case study

Following are the PMI code which added value to the ethical conduct for the profession of project management.

PMI Ethical Standards

Honesty: Wayne Davidson is working properly with their co-workers to meet the project deadline (Pollock, 2014). The issues are being identified regarding realistic agreement of the project.

Responsibility: It is the responsibility of project manager to deliver final software on deadline into the contract. It is also responsibility of test engineer to test the software products and analyze the testing results (Reamer, 2014).

Respect: Wayne Davidson as well as other workers have right to treat each other with respect. Wayne has taken a knowledgeable and informed stance into the organization. Each of the workers is responsible to take stance against one who will not follow the PMI codes (Leicester, 2016).

Fairness: It is the issues regarding meeting the deadline, but the workers are trying hard to complete it on time with delivering of proper software (Warren & Burmeister, 2017). 

Recommendations to resolve of ethical dilemma

Following are the recommendations for Occidental Engineering to resolve their ethical dilemmas:

Follow ACS code of professional conduct: The organization should follow this particular code to resolve the ethical issues. The first code is to provide first priority to public interest than business interest. The second code is that the employees should work for 8-9 hours in a day into the organization. The third code is that the workers should be honest and fourth is to maintain a better working environment with stakeholders. The fifth is that the occidental engineering should develop company along with the staffs and sixth is stakeholder’s satisfaction associated with project development.

Management support: The employees of Occidental Engineering should discuss their problems and ethical issues with various administrators and management level on top level so that they can take it at highest priority to solve it on time. 

Conclusion

It is concluded that both test engineer as well as project manager are concerned with development of software used to track the air traffic control system. The test engineer identified that there are some issues into the system due to presence of huge number of aircrafts. The project has consisted of limited resources as well as time to complete it on scheduled time. The report discussed the ethical issues along with consequences of the issues on the stakeholders. The result of bidding is also discussed with lower cost which affects the reputation of the company. It is recommended that the organization should follow of ACS code of professional conduct to resolve the ethical dilemmas. The ACS code of ethics should help the Occidental Engineering to follow the code so that the organization should success into maintaining a reputation. 

References

Braswell, M. C., McCarthy, B. R., & McCarthy, B. J. (2017). Justice, crime, and ethics. Taylor & Francis.

Drumwright, M. E., & Murphy, P. E. (2014). Ethical Issues of Social Marketing and Persuasion. The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing [3 volumes], 175.

Harriss, D. J., & Atkinson, G. (2015). Ethical standards in sport and exercise science research: 2016 update. International journal of sports medicine, 36(14), 1121-1124.

Leicester, N. (2016). Ethics in the IT Profession: Does a Code of Ethics have an Effect on Professional Behaviour?.

Pollock, J. M. (2014). Ethical dilemmas and decisions in criminal justice. Nelson Education.

Reamer, F. (2014). Ethical issues and challenges: Managing moral dilemmas. Conservative Christian beliefs and sexual orientation in social work: Privilege, oppression, and the pursuit of human rights, 233-256.

Reamer, F. G. (2015). 18 Ethical Issues in Social Work. Social workers' desk reference, 143.

Warren, M., & Burmeister, O. K. (2017). Research on Applied Ethics involving emerging ICT technologies. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 21