Roles And Responsibilities In Engineering Projects: An Essay.

Discuss engineers' roles, responsibilities and the need to employ principles of sustainable development.
Your roles and responsibilities to work on in your team and how that relates to what you have read in the Trevelyan textbook. Relevant example and references are encouraged to use to justify your statement.
What do you understand by the term sustainability in engineering? Discuss one way in which sustainability can lead to a 'better' engineering solution? How did you define ‘better’? Relevant example and references are encouraged to use to justify your statement.
Your values are important in determining how you might respond if you found yourself in a situation of ethical conflict. Try to identify at least two values that you believe have an impact on how you live and work. Relevant example and references are encouraged to use to justify your statement.
Manage information and documentation.
4. Having many members of a teamwork on a project together means that you can achieve a great deal more than, if you were working by yourself. However, it also creates some challenges. One challenge is ensuring version control of reports and drawings. What processes have your team put in place to share information and ensure that everyone works on the most recent version of a document?
Communicate effectively across a range of contexts.
It is important as a professional that you learn to communicate appropriately with a range of stakeholders and mediums. Email is one medium that is commonly used in current practice. Give an example of an email you have sent to either your team or facilitator that demonstrates your ability to communicate effectively and professionally. What do you think makes this an effective communication? Give an example of an email that you think is unprofessional it does not need to be a genuine email, you can write a mock email.

Sustainability in Engineering

For successful completion of any type of project, effective team work is very much important (Martinelli and Milosevic 2016). While considering the project in the engineering field value of the team work increases more. As per my thinking to complete any type of engineering project successfully all the individual engineers in the team must follow and properly execute their roles as well as their responsibilities. As an engineer while I am working on a project with fellow team members, I must ensure my roles and responsibilities towards the project and the team. As I have studied the “Trevelyan textbook”, if I am playing the role of the project leader as an engineer then I must specify the roles of the other team members and the goals of the project. I must be always focused on creating working environment that will lead to the project success. As per the textbook “Trevelyan”, as an engineer I also need to play the role of the project planner in which my responsibilities will be planning, designing and organising the whole project. While I am working on a project there can be various types of issues and problems. As an engineer I must carefully handle those issue and problems to mitigate them properly.

The term ‘Sustainability’ in engineering defines that it is the designing process in engineering which uses the resources and energy sustainably (Stansinoupolos et al. 2013). In other words it is a type of engineering which does not compromise with the current natural environment, leaving ability to the generations of the future for fulfilling their own needs.

The sustainability is leading to better engineering solution by not compromising with the nature and by achieving four goals. These four goals are the materials management, waste reduction, product enhancement and the pollution prevention. One prior example of this type of sustainability is the Photovoltaic Ombriere SUDI. This is a typical autonomous mobile station which uses the solar energy to replenish the energy of the electric vehicles (Nykvist and Nilsson 2015). By this sustainable innovation those four goals are achieved which was mentioned previously.

I found this better because first of all this is using a renewable energy. As the sustainable engineering is using the renewable energy, the non-renewable energy sources are not depleting which is good for the present nature and the future generations. Also, in this way the waste and the pollution is reduced and the overall product is enhanced.

While working in the engineering field, engineers can face various types of ethical conflict. In such type of case their moral values are very much important as this can help them to respond in this kind of situations. Such values are the honesty, determination, truthfulness and neutrality.

While working, the engineers may face various situation in which they might be benefitted by performing some unethical tasks but they must never do any type of unethical work for their own benefit. This is the honesty which the engineers must posses.

Determination is another moral value for the engineers (Staub 2013). As per me, in an ethical conflict situation, the engineers must determine the ethical way of performing some particular task. Determining the ethical way will easily deal with the ethical conflict.

One Way Sustainability Leads to Better Engineering Solutions

Every engineers must always speak the truth whenever they face some ethical conflict (Gibson, Tanner and Wagner 2013). According to me, speaking the truth does not only tackles the ethical conflict but also it helps in the better relation building which are important to build a better workplace.

Neutrality is one of the main factor of dealing with the ethical conflict (Noddings 2013). According to me, neutrality is important for dealing with the ethical factor because it resists the engineers to take any type of biased decisions. Thus always ethically correct decision are made.

While working as a team there can be various type of challenges in the team. One of this challenge is the version control. For this information and documentation needs to be managed.

As per me there are various options of sharing the information among the fellow team members. The main requirement of sharing the information is the effective communication among the team members. For an effective communication open meeting is the best option which will easily share the information within the team (Austin and Pinkleton 2015). Another process of effective information sharing is the emails. Through the emails anyone can be contacted at any time and the information can be shared easily.

To ensure that everyone is working on the most recent version of the document, process of the version control can be used. This version control are two types which are the Centralised version control and the Distributed version control.

In the centralised type of version control, every users get the own working copy and in this system only a central repository available (Gadd and Newman 2016). As the data will be modified through the central repository it will be visible to the other team members and they can proceed with the work according to the modification.

In the distributed version control, every users got the own working copy and own repository (Shirey et al. 2015). There is also a central repository. Users need to store their modification in their own repository and need to push the modification to the central repository so that others can see the modification. The user also need to pull data from the central repository to see the modification of the other team members.

To: Alex Hunter, Junior Team Footballer

From: Bob Walker, Senior Team Manager

Date: 20/08/18

Subject: Transfer to Senior Team

Dear Mr. Hunter,

Your recent performance in the junior team was great and it has pleased me very much. You are the main reason behind the recent success of our junior team. Thus considering your current performance in the junior team I am happy to inform you that the management has decided you to promote to the senior football team. Hope you also wanted the same. Please reply me on your decision whether you want to join the senior team or not, so that we can proceed further on this situation.

Sincerely,

Bob Walker

Considering the above email, it is perfect example of the effective communion because the email is containing proper subject for the recipient’s assistance. Also the email not only elaborated the main subject but also guided the reader what the sender wants from him. Thus it can be considered as an effective communication where all the aspects of the communication is clear.

To: Alex Hunter, Junior Team Footballer

From: Bob Walker, Senior Team Manager

Date: 20/08/18

Dear Mr. Hunter,

I am informing you that you have been selected for the senior football team. So, please reply us soon for further discussion.

Thank you,

Bob Walker

The above email is an unprofessional type of email because first of all the subject of the email is given. So, the reader might face difficulty in understanding the email properly. Also, in this email why the footballer got promoted is not mentioned which will surely create a question in the reader’s mind why he got promoted which is an example of the unprofessional communication. Also, what reply the sender wants is not mentioned in the email. Such things making it very unprofessional communication.

References:

Austin, E.W. and Pinkleton, B.E., 2015. Strategic public relations management: Planning and managing effective communication campaigns. Routledge.

Gadd, M. and Newman, P., 2016, October. Checkout my map: Version control for fleetwide visual localisation. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on (pp. 5729-5736). IEEE.

Gibson, R., Tanner, C. and Wagner, A.F., 2013. Preferences for truthfulness: Heterogeneity among and within individuals. American Economic Review, 103(1), pp.532-48.

Martinelli, R.J. and Milosevic, D.Z., 2016. Project management toolbox: tools and techniques for the practicing project manager. John Wiley & Sons.

Noddings, N., 2013. Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. Univ of California Press.

Nykvist, B. and Nilsson, M., 2015. Rapidly falling costs of battery packs for electric vehicles. nature climate change, 5(4), p.329.

Shirey, R.G., Hopkinson, K.M., Stewart, K.E., Hodson, D.D. and Borghetti, B.J., 2015, January. Analysis of implementations to secure git for use as an encrypted distributed version control system. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 5310-5319). IEEE.

Stansinoupolos, P., Smith, M.H., Hargroves, K. and Desha, C., 2013. Whole system design: An integrated approach to sustainable engineering. Routledge.

Staub, E., 2013. Positive social behavior and morality: Social and personal influences. Elsevier.