Program: Professional Year Program
Course:
Assignment: 1 Professional Environments
Topic: Ethics, Professionalism and Governance
Available: Week 3 open
Due: Week 4 close (Saturday midnight AEST)
Read the 3 Case Studies below and select ONE as the basis of your analysis and discussion. Please indicate clearly which Case Study you have chosen.
Case Study 10 – Jobs for You – Employment Agency
Jobs For You is an employment agency that specialises in filling short-term, casual labour requirements. The company has recently been involved in several court cases where employees claimed they had been unfairly terminated or treated. Jobs For You used several defences in different cases. In some they said that a short-term labour hire company like theirs could provide no guarantees of work for anyone. In another case they argued that they had offered work to the employee on many occasions and the employee had continually refused because the client site was too far away or the pay was insufficient. In another case they claimed the employee was too drunk to go to work that day. In each case the company produced diary notes of phone calls and interactions with the employees, which they maintain on their database, as evidence.
Word of this spread and some employees became so concerned by what Jobs For You’s files on them may say. They appealed to national privacy legislation to view their own records.
This caused great concern to Jobs For You’s management, in case the employees might say the company was making false or discriminatory claims. Management has now instructed their HR staff to be very careful in everything they record in the database. They still want to be able to record the truth, as they see it, but are very concerned that the notes may be considered rude, insulting or discriminatory if read by the employees. And so they instruct the Recruitment Manager, Stella, to devise a set of codes to be used in the notes to represent statements such as, ‘never hire this person again’, ‘difficult to work with’, ‘can’t be trusted to turn up on time’ etc, so they would be meaningless to the employees (and lawyers) and couldn’t be used in court against the company.
Stella is concerned over what she considers are the ethical and privacy concerns. Management has told her there are no ethical issues involved and she simply needs to determine a set of codes that allows Jobs For You to record notes about workers without fear of being sued by employees.
How should Stella proceed?
Case Study 4 – Quality Assurance Case
A small software company is working on an integrated inventory control system for a very large national shoe manufacturer. The system will gather sales information daily from shoe stores nationwide. This information will be used by the accounting, shipping, and ordering departments to control all of the functions of this large corporation. The inventory functions are critical to the smooth operation of the system.
Jane, a quality assurance engineer with the software company, suspects that the inventory functions of the system are not sufficiently tested, although they have passed all their contracted tests. She is pressured by her employers to sign off on the software. Legally she is only required to perform those tests which have been agreed to in the original contract. However, her considerable experience in software testing has led her to be concerned over risks of the system.
Her employers say that they will go out of business if they do not deliver the software on time. Jane contends if the Inventory sub-system fails, it will significantly harm their client and its employees. If the potential failure were to threaten lives, it would be clear to Jane that she should refuse to sign off. But since the degree of threatened harm is less, Jane is faced with a difficult ethical decision.
Case Study 2 – Conflict of Interest
Michael is the IT manager in a government department with more than 500 staff members and six branches across Australia. His department has decided to acquire an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. A request for proposal (RFP) for the procurement of the software has been advertised in a number of Australian newspapers. Two local companies have responded to the advertisement and have sent their offers to the department.
When Michael has examined the offers, he has found that Company A’s offer is slightly better than that of Company B. To his surprise, Company B’s offer has been made by Steven, who is his best friend, and the general manager of Company B.
Although the initial cost of Company B’s software appears less than that of Company A, Company B’s software may require some modifications which could eventually increase the total cost.
To complicate matters, Michael has received a phone call from Steven, urging him to favour his offer as he needs this work.
Discuss briefly how Michael’s friendship with Steven causes an ethical problem. Follow your brief discussion with a recommendation on this issue. Be sure to support this recommendation with reasons informed by your research and thinking on the ethical issues identified in your discussion.
Assignment Task
From what you have learned during Week s 3 and 4 of your Professional Environments Course, discuss ethical, professional and legal issues which you consider arise from this scenario. Make some recommendations of actions which could be taken to resolve the situation and/or to minimise the chance the scenario may recur. Support your answers with relevant references (as well as the Codes and Laws).
Things to Consider in Your Assignment:
• You should list at least 3 clauses from the ACS Code of Ethics and up to 5 clauses from the ACS Code of Professional Conduct, you think are specifically relevant in deciding how to resolve the situation. Make sure that you refer to the most up to date ACS Codes which are available on the ACS website – www.acs.org.au.
• You should also list any relevant Australian legislation that you think applies to this scenario.
• Your analysis, discussion and recommendations should use the framework you selected in Week 3 – Solving an Ethical Dilemma.
Your assignment should be 400 -500 words in length (excluding your code lists, legislation list and references).
You may need to undertake a small amount of research, however, most information you will need is available via the seminars and their references. Also,
• use a cover page – as per the suggested template,
• use in-text referencing,
• use complete Harvard Notation, submit in “Word” format or equivalent format that can be readily opened in MS Word, keep your formatting simple: Arial 11pt, 10pt after paragraph, single line spacing, headings in bold, maximum 2 indent levels/bullet levels. Do not use page borders, word art, page backgrounds or similar extraneous decoration
• Your uploaded file name should identify you as part of its name – e.g.
PE_Assignment1_William_Smith.
Marking Guide
Marks will be awarded using the following guidelines.
• 15% meeting the procedural requirements, including, spelling, grammar, number of words, document formatting,
• 30% how logically and thoroughly you identified and described professional ,ethical and legal issues arising in the scenario,
• 30% how well you developed your recommendations and supported them with relevant, correct referencing,
• 20% how well you convinced the reader that you understood the issues,
• 5% did the material generate interest in the reader?