Ethical issue: falsifying your profile on a social networking site Stakeholders autonomy publicity veracity 1: Yourself You have the duty to maximize the right to make your own decisions. You have the duty to take actions based on ethical standards

PRIVACY RELATED MATRIX

Privacy-Related Matrix

Student Name

UMUC

Professor’s Name

Situation

Organization gets one software development project. Client made the contract along with requirement of high confidentiality during development. Unfortunately one of developer shares the Project plan with unauthorized person during the project development. He realizes his mistake and tells the truth to the project manager.

Below ethical dilemma matrix identify all the actions expected from all stakeholders.

Ethical dilemma: Project plan shared with unauthorized person during the project development phase
Stakeholders	Veracity	Confidentiality	Beneficence
1: Developer	He/She have the duty to tell the truth of accidentally sharing of project plan to outside to project manager.	He / She has duty to maintain privacy of this incident details from others and action taken on him/her.	He /she the duty to do good for him/her by accepting the fault and keeping this private to maintain organizations public value.
2: Project Manager	Project manager has the duty to tell the truth to the Sales manager and Compliance Team in the organization.	Project manager has the duty to respect privacy of information and action for developer who shared the plan outside world and to maintain privacy about this incident.	As project is half way done, it’s good to complete the project even with extra terms of customer to maintain commitment to sales manager.
3:Sales Manager	Sales manager assume that the project manager has the duty to tell truth if anything goes wrong with project and their duty is to tell the client about this incident in detail.	Sales manager has the duty keeping this incident private in order to prevent any type of harm to organization and client.	Sales manager has the duty to convince customer for proper actions on this incident and future prevention and deduction in project cost to give benefit to customer.
4: Client/ Customer	As a project owner client has duty to take appropriate action (could be legal or adding any beneficial terms on existing contract) as per their contract with organization and notify their actions to the sales manager.	Client has the duty to respect privacy of organization and keep this incident information private and actions taken on the organization by him.	Client has duty to accept the apology from sales manager and should keep the contract of project development intact with some additional terms in order to doing the recovery of this loss.
5: Organizations Compliance Team	As an employer of that person they must confirm to organizational policy and take appropriate steps against that violation of confidentiality as per the policy	Employer has the duty to keep this incident secret and maintaining the privacy of the details of developer.	As an employer, get the detail of that person with whom developer shared the plan, and prevent him to share it further to protect company value in market.

(1) I choose this dilemma as Project manager has to choose between two equally unfavorable options. One side is that if he will disclose this policy breakdown with higher management it is sure that the developer has to lose his job and company has to face the customer reaction on other side if he hide it, then he is saving one’s job but its ethically wrong and if in future customer came to know about this then it will be a disaster situation for company.

Two ways to react are:

He should just hide this information from sales manager to preventing organization from losing the project and defaming and saving that developer form termination. His act of hiding this incident is justifiable as he is keeping the organizations image intact and by completing the project getting profit for organization.
On the other way to maintain the trust with sales manager or customer he should tell the truth about incident even company losses the project and its market value goes down.

So here Project manager has to deal with both ways and find out the ethically correct way to handle this dilemma.

(2) “A brief definition of Normative Ethics – It is a classification within western philosophy that attempts to derive its standard of right and wrong from subjectively interpreted social behavior” (Normative Ethics, 2013). As the act judged by Normative Ethics are actions that have already happened and are then being interpreted by the observer to be "honesty," "lying," or others.

I choose these three principles to take the positives even form this unfortunate situation. Judging this incident by these three principles is the best way to help the organization and customer.

Veracity – I choose this as all stake holders has the duty to tell the truth to resolve the issue.

Confidentiality - As due to this issue, if they don’t maintain confidentiality, customer and company has to face lose. To keep their image intact in market it responsibility of each stakeholder to maintain confidentiality.

Beneficence – Its duty for each to think to do good for others and their self.

As per these ethics, decision of telling the truth, eventually will help the organization.

(3) Analysis of the research used to identify the actions in the matrix:

“Project managers need to identify and interact with key organizations and individuals within the project systems environment. This management process is necessary to determine how the stakeholders are likely to react to project decisions” (Dudash, n.d.). As incident has been occurred, now job is to find out the best way to handle it. As per the research Project manager should choose the way that prevent organizations image from defaming, also keep the project development intact and by that customer also keep trust in organization and got the desired product with proper confidentiality.

All the actions and matrix are having one common goal of ethical way to solve this situation without causing harm to both entities Organization and Client. If the entire stake holders perform the action which are in matrix then this critical incident could be handled in the best way keep the all ethics intact. As per the policy developer will be terminated, but as he told the truth and helped the organization in the end, may be compliance team did not mark anything bad on his/her relieving letter. Client will also accept the situation and will be glad that complete incident shared with him in time and organization took proper action against culprit and prevented future confidentiality breach.

Here Project manager should tell the truth to handle this situation in ethically correct way.

References

Dudash, R. (n.d.). Software Stakeholder Management. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/5656067/Elam

Normative Ethics. (2013, October 13). Retrieved from http://www.ethicsmorals.com/ethicsnormative.html