BCS Northampton: All Quiet on the Ethical Front: Behaviour and Professionalism in Project Management

Northampton BCS Group

Thursday 10th November 2016 7:00pm

10th November 2016 - All Quiet on the Ethical Front: Behaviour and Professionalism in Project Management

Room NW205 Newton Building, Northampton University

Speaker: Brendan D'Cruz

Alistair Godbold stated in an article entitled Are You an Ethically Mature Project Manager? (APM Blog, July 2014): As our projects become more complicated and complex, and our activities span many countries and cultures through the supply chain or during roll out, the potential for conflict and differences on ethical views increases. The range of stakeholders we deal with is becoming wider; project initiators, investors, policy makers, sponsors, project leaders, members of project teams - all of whom are likely to face a broad range of issues. In many instances the managerial problems we used to face as technical challenges now often have an ethical dimension requiring reflection on individual or communal values. There is also the increasing importance of the long-term reputation of the business to consider which is becoming increasingly important.

This interactive session will explore how the issues of ethics, professionalism and compliance are being dealt with by professional bodies, and what this means for individuals operating at the front when delivering projects, programmes and business solutions. In particular, the session will consider:

* Codes of conduct - do they really mean anything?

* Competence standards - are they appropriate, and how can you evidence them?

* Project corruption - what is it and why does it matter?

* Professional behaviour - what are they, and how can they be enhanced?

* IT-enabled change initiatives - are we doing the right things right?

* A series of ethical dilemmas will be presented to participants during the session, and there may be occasional context and imagery derived from the First World War.

Arrive 7pm for drinks and biscuits, with 7:30pm start

All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

development of Ad-Hoc Robot Networks

Neeraj Jalan

The dissertation presents the project of integrating and analyzing of communication behaviors into a group of Lego robots, interacting with each other, with the help of wireless communication medium in Bluetooth. The purpose of the work is to create the ad-hoc network of Lego robots, by the use of this wireless technology, and introduce the elements of Behavior Based robotics. The fact that Mindstorms NXT systems (Lego robots) support Bluetooth enabled communication, means these systems can be used as a basis for creating complex, communicating artifact for introducing behaviors in them. The report has also focused on gathering the background information about the NXT system forming a good prototype of robots, and its great flexibility with LeJOS NXJ as programming platform. The result is implementation of developed work, using Lego Mindstorms NXT as robots, and LeJOS NXJ as programming environment. The task was approached with Lego robots fetching the information from environment, and other Lego robots as input; and processing this information to produce an output, to move in a purposive way in a group. It was noticed that implementation of several behaviors to single Lego based ad-hoc network had shortcomings, due to the complexities with the communication technology and limitations of the NXT systems. Thus, more than one Lego based ad-hoc network was implemented to demonstrate the combination of two or behaviors successfully.