Ethical
Situation Analysis
Review the
scenario below and develop a complete analysis of the situation as outlined in
the assignment directions.
Scenario
You are employed as a project manager with a company frequently subcontracted to produce code for various U.S. government entities and affiliates. Traditionally, code that is developed for one federal department could be reused for another if approval is obtained by the former.
One day, your company is contacted by a
privately-owned commercial corporation, FlyHigh, to create code for an
avionics-related image processing effort. Since the code requested was almost
identical to one used for a past project, a member of your team decided
to, once approval had been obtained from the government, reuse the code.
After permission was granted through email, however, another
team member brings to your attention that they realized the approving party, a
law agency that was contracted by the government, lacked a complete
understanding of who would benefit from the reused code.
You want to contact the government directly to ensure it
had been informed of all vital aspects of the contract, but realize doing so
could result in the initial approval being revoked. Your team with then
have to re-code the work in progress for FlyHigh, increasing the contract bid
up to two million dollars.
Understanding the contract between your company and FlyHigh is
on the line, should you move forward with clarifying the situation to the
appropriate party?
Assignment Directions
To complete your analysis of the scenario provided, follow the
steps outlined below.
1. Identify the facts of
the situation.What facts do you need to know in order to decide how to act in this situation?
2. Determine the ethical
issue.Is there some actual or potential harm involved for an individual group? Does
it involve considerations of justice or right?
3. Determine the
available alternatives.Given the facts, what are your options?
4. Who will be affected
and to what degree?How much weight does each stakeholder's claim deserve? Make sure you
consider the future behavior of your team here as well.
5. What are the ethics of
the alternatives?Apply three of the six ethical theories to each of the options you've
identified. How will you decide if the theories point to different
alternatives?
6. Determine the
practical constraints.Are there any obstacles to choosing the course of action you are proposing?
What are the future implications for the members of your team? What priorities
are you modeling?
7. Implement and justify your course of action.What steps are necessary? How will you communicate your course of action to the rest of your team? Incorporate both your personal ethics statement and lessons learned from your ethical role model, when appropriate.
Paper Format
Your paper should be well
organized using appropriate headings (Introduction, Analysis,
Conclusions/Recommendations) and reference any cited works in APA style. In
your paper, include the following:
1. A Cover Page showing
your name and the title of the paper.
2. A very short
one-paragraph introduction where you identify the issue and state your result.
3. A very short facts
section. All facts must have proper APA citations.
4. No more than three
pages of text where you answer the questions.
5. A short conclusion
where you tie up your answers into a concise conclusion.
6. A citation page.
Ethical dilemmas are nearly inevitable in any
workplace, and workers always have to do right by the ethical guidelines of
their organizations. In the scenario, a project manager working for a company
contracted to develop a code for various U.S. government entities faces an
ethical dilemma. This dilemma involves a private corporation, FlyHigh, that
wants to reuse a government code, but it may jeopardize a contract. Additionally,
the reusing of the code by the commercial corporation had been approved by the government
agency. Still, despite this, they did not fully comprehend who would benefit
from the code.