IT Culture For Information Technology Project Management: Ethical Dilemmas And Resolutions

Defence on the Ethical Ground and Key Issues during the Aggressive Bid Acceptance

Discuss about the IT Culture for Information Technology Project Management.

The key focus of this report is to make a thorough discussion on the application of the ethical philosophy in the workplace environment of the IT companies. Therefore, this discussion also aims to illustrate the aggressiveness of the bid in the project of software development, which involves few significant ethical issues or ethical dilemmas associated with the project execution. Thus, the principles of the ACS code are also portrayed in this aspect. On the other hand, the requirement application of the “ACS Code of Professional Conduct” is also aimed to be highlighted in this report. Additionally, this report also discusses the resolutions in order to mitigate the ethical dilemmas along with the aggressiveness of the bid. This report also demonstrates the duties of the project manager and the test engineer 3 days before the project delivery is due.

Occidental Engineers is agreed for tolerating any negative impact on the software development project in terms of reputation and revenue as this organization is going through a shaky financial condition (Ellett, 2012). Thus, Operational Safe Skies has been understaffed as well as underfunded. On the other hand, the employees working under this project have given their complete effort in terms of completing the whole project within the committed deadline to the client provided by this enterprise. Nevertheless, this kind of aggressiveness can form some key consequences in the ethical aspect.

• This bid aggressiveness can create an obstruction on the way of the ultimate success of this particular software development project (Barry et al., 2014). Since, the test manager has not taken into account for performing testing after the completion of the execution of the project, so, if any errors are encountered after the project delivery then it would result in the negative impression in the reputation and negative impact in the revenue of the enterprise.
• Additionally, employees can also suffer due to the bid aggressiveness. While working in this project, the workers can face some health problems due to the heavy work pressure (Bowern et al., 2016)
• Thus, the organization would face problems the most as a whole by losing competition with the other organizations if any error would be detected after the project delivery as the test engineer has taken a decision for not to apply any testing approach on the software as the enterprise has very short time to deliver the project.

Occidental engineers would thus loss its competition with the other competitor organizations if any bug would be detected after the project delivery (Burmeister, 2012). Therefore, most significant fact of this particular scenario is that the workers who are providing their complete effort to accomplish the project would face huge problem due to such bid aggressiveness of this project.

Deborah Shepherd, the project manager should have few key duties 3 days before the delivery of the project is due. These are as follows:

• The project manager should fix an exact timeline and the work estimation for this project.
• Deborah should also prepare the documentations required for the client requirements as well as should translate these necessities into the specifications of the design (Leicester, 2016).
• The project manager should focus to notice whether the project testing has been performed or not because testing is very important for a project.
• The project manager should make a specific routine for the activity to deliver the project within the committed timeline. It is important to make plans and schedules about the activity accomplishment of the operations as per the timeline (Lindley et al., 2013).
• On the other hand, major duty of the project manager in this project is for assuring the proper delivery of the project with the high quality level and on time.

The test engineer should also have the following significant duties towards this project before 3 days of the project delivery is due:

• the test engineer should report the issues before delivering the project to the client
• Wayne should have the ability to understand the master test plan as well as project plan
• The test engineer of this project should acquire data those are required to perform the project testing (Schwalbe, 2015).
• Wayne should report the outcomes of the testing to the stakeholders as well as reply to the returned reports of bug.

Wayne and Deborah should uphold as well as advance the effectiveness, honour and dignity of being professional as being the members of the Australian Computer Society. Additionally, it needs the conformance to few key values of ACS in addition to being a good citizen and acting within the law (Lynn & Salzman, 2015). These are as follows:

• Professionalism– Workers should increase the ACS integrity as well as respect of its member for each other
• Primacy of the Public Request – Workers should place the public interests on the sectional, personal and the business interests as well.
• Professional Development – the employees should focus on the enhancement of their own professional development as well as that of their staffs (Sackey, Fältholm & Ylinenpää, 2013).
• Enhancement of the Life Quality – Employees strive to increase the quality of life of the people influenced by the employee work.
• Honest – Employees should be honest at their workplace, in product, knowledge and in the skills of representation as well.
• Competence – The employees should work diligently as well as competently for their clients.

Responsibilities emphasized by the Test Engineer and the Project Manager

Some key ACS codes of Professional Conduct should be considered by the test engineer and the project manager as per the scenario.

• Primacy of Public Interest – Deborah and Wayne should follow Public Interest Primacy during the project accomplishment.
• Professionalism – The test engineer and the project manager have to try to increase the ACS integrity because it is sufficient to current scenario (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2015).
• Competence – Deborah and Wayne should consider competence by working diligently and competently for their clients.
• Professional Development – The test engineer and the project manager should keep the awareness regarding the professional development of the employees.

The project manager and the test engineer should make an application on the identified ACS codes in the above section during the delivery of the project. The application of the ACS Codes of the Professional Conduct is necessary in regards to the proper execution of the project (Vardaman, Gondo & Allen, 2014). Therefore, Deborah and Wayne have to consider few significant ways to apply the ACS code of the Professional Conduct.

• Primacy of the Public Interest – The Test Engineer and the Project Manager should focus on the business and the workers who are working hard to complete the project in regards to place public interests.
• Professional Development – the project manager should focus on the professional development of the workers so that the employees could get huge motivation to accomplish the project (Wiltermuth & Flynn, 2013).
• Professionalism – Wayne and Deborah should be able to understand the use of the integrity of ACS codes of Professional Conduct in order to build the proper professionalism
• Competence – In terms of maintaining competency, the test engineer should do testing before the project delivery.

Few significant ethical consequences have been recognized in this particular project. All the ethical dilemmas or issue encountered during this project execution can simply influence the reputation of the organization and the competitive advantage. Thus, Wayne and Deborah should make a consideration regarding few following essential techniques for addressing the ethical consequences.

The proper planning process should be made primarily in order to complete an IT project in a proper way so these kinds of ethical issues can easily be mitigated.

Employee health care should be a significant concern for the project manager because; the workers are giving their complete effort to accomplish the project. Deborah should approach the higher authority of the organization so the employees can get the extra benefit for their hard work.

At least one testing strategy should be performed by the test engineer on the software that is developed after the execution of the project. Therefore, he should not ignore testing application for the short timeline of the project. The test engineer should apply at least one testing approach on the software that is very time efficient so that it can be determined very easily whether any bug is available or not.

On the other hand, the ACS codes of Professional Conduct should be properly followed by Deborah and Wayne. 

Conclusion

The entire discussion has provided an exact illustration on the ethical dilemmas those have been encountered at the time of the project accomplishment. Therefore, this report has also interpreted a clear view on the possible mitigation techniques in order to address the ethical consequences associated with the bid aggressiveness. These resolution techniques are actually identified based on the ACS codes of professional conduct. Thus, at the end of the study, a conclusion can be made if Deborah and Wayne apply the mitigation approaches so it would be easy for the employees to accomplish the project with the actual timeline.

References

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Bowern, M., Burmeister, O., Gotterbarn, D., & Weckert, J. (2016). ICT Integrity: Bringing the ACS Code of Ethics up to date. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 13(2).

Burmeister, O. K. (2012). Applying the ACS code of ethics. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, 32(2), 107-120.

Ellett, A. J. S. (2012). Human caring, self-efficacy beliefs, and professional organizational culture correlates of employee retention in child welfare.

Ferrell, O. C., & Fraedrich, J. (2015). Business ethics: Ethical decision making & cases. Nelson Education.

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

Lindley, D., Aynsley, B., Driver, M., Godfrey, R., Hart, R., Heinrich, G., … & Wilkinson, K. (2013). 11. Educating for professionalism in ICT: Is learning ethics professional development?. Professionalism in the Information and Communication Technology Industry, 3, 211.

Lynn, L., & Salzman, H. (2015). Engineers, Firms and Nations: Ethical Dilemmas in the New Global Environment. In Engineering Ethics for a Globalized World (pp. 15-33). Springer International Publishing.

Sackey, J., Fältholm, Y., & Ylinenpää, H. (2013). Working with or against the system: Ethical dilemmas for entrepreneurship in Ghana. Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship, 18(01), 1350005.

Schwalbe, K. (2015). Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Vardaman, J. M., Gondo, M. B., & Allen, D. G. (2014). Ethical climate and pro-social rule breaking in the workplace. Human Resource Management Review, 24(1), 108-118.

Wiltermuth, S. S., & Flynn, F. J. (2013). Power, moral clarity, and punishment in the workplace. Academy of Management Journal, 56(4), 1002-1023.