Engineering Ethics and Safety Quiz

Module 5: Technical Communication

• Good communication skills are essential for engineers and engineering students
• Effective communication requires a framework of audience, purpose, and context
• Audience considerations include what the person or group knows, needs to know, and wants to know
• Purpose includes objectives and goals; most common are to inform or persuade
• Context includes factors like format (report, poster, presentation), location, time, and resources
• The 7 Cs of communication (clear, correct, concise, concrete, complete, courteous, considerate) help ensure effective communication

Module 5: Professional Ethics

• Students and working engineers have ethical obligations. Similarities exist between student and professional ethics, despite situational differences.
• Navigating ethical dilemmas takes practice.
• Key Concepts of Ethics, Morals, and Values:
  • Values: subjective beliefs and standards used to judge right from wrong and good from bad.
  • Morals: widely held societal values regarding right and wrong.
  • Ethics: organized and agreed-upon principles of conduct for a group.
• Morals, values, and ethics relating to academic integrity:
  • Most people value truth, fairness, and honesty. Copying someone else's work is dishonest.
  • Students are bound by school policies for academic integrity.
  • Policies are starting points for academic integrity investigations.
• Engineering Codes of Ethics:
  • Provide general principles for guiding behaviour and decisions.
  • Vary slightly depending on the regulatory region (e.g., provinces and territories) but are generally similar.
  • Tenets are guiding principles and not detailed instructions.
  • Paramount consideration is the safety, health, and welfare of the public and the protection of the environment
• Conflict of interest: a situation where a personal benefit could arise from work done for a client or employer. Disclosing it to a supervisor is the first step.
• Ethical Dilemmas: situations in which one must make a decision, where every choice has undesirable aspects.
• A structured decision-making process is helpful for resolving ethical dilemmas:
  • Recognize the dilemma
  • Gather information to clearly define the problem
  • Generate alternative solutions
  • Evaluate and select a solution
  • Optimize the solution
  • Implement the solution

Module 5: Working in Teams

• Teamwork is essential for all engineering jobs.

• Effective teamwork develops with experience.

• A team is a group who work together towards a common goal. Team members rely on each other's contributions for success.

• Key factors of effective teams, according to a Google study:

  • Dependability
  • Structure and clarity
  • Meaning
  • Impact
  • Psychological safety.

• Teams with higher psychological safety are more likely to:

  • Generate diverse and creative ideas.
  • Partner with others
  • Admit mistakes
  • Be rated as effective by executives
  • Bring in more revenue
  • Be less likely to leave the organization

• Team development stages (Tuckman Model) :

  • Forming (polite, uncertain)
  • Storming (tension, disagreements)
  • Norming (understanding, quality relationships improve)
  • Bad Norming (unhealthy behaviours)
  • Performing (cohesive, supportive relationships, efficient work)

• Team Roles and Collaboration:

  • Teams require a mix of leaders and followers.
  • Common roles can be shared
  • Leaders and followers, roles can vary among tasks through the project.
  • Conflict is common and possible a source of new ideas and improved decisions.
  • Approaches for conflict resolution (e.g., assertive, cooperative approaches)

Module 5: Health and Safety

• Engineers must protect the health, safety, and welfare of people and the environment. This is paramount.
• Hazards are potential sources of harm
• Risk is the probability of that harm occurring. It depends on severity and likelihood.
• Systematic tools for risk identification:
  • Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA)
  • Hazards and Operability Analysis (HAZOP)
  • Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)
• Measures for mitigating risks, including:
  • Elimination
  • Substitution
  • Engineering Controls
  • Administrative Controls
  • Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
• Importance of standards, codes, and regulations for health and safety
• Standards are voluntary guidelines.
• Codes are similar to standards but are mandatory.
• Regulations are the mandatory rules and requirements.

Module 5: Managing Projects

• Projects are sequences of tasks completing a particular goal in a fixed amount of time
• Project definition involves determining what needs to be accomplished. Common elements include project scope, deliverables, and timelines.
• Importance of a project plan which are manageable subtasks organized in a logical flow.
• A task is a unit of work to be completed within a timeframe.
• Project management tools like Gantt charts help monitor progress and identify potential delays.
• Project closure: involves delivering the project, archiving materials, and evaluating the team process
• Debriefing project teams after completion is important as it allows for learning and improvement of future projects.
• Costs in project management can be: actual costs and costs committed.

Module 4: Sustainability Framework

• Sustainability is human civilization's ability to exist with the earth's natural systems indefinitely.
  • Sustainability considers the environment, society, and economy
• Three pillars, environment, society, and economy must be considered in sustainability initiatives.
  • Environment: maintaining the earth's natural system, includes clean air and water, biodiversity
  • Society: meeting the needs of people while respecting human rights
  • Economy: allowing organizations and people to thrive
• United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: a list of targets, adopted in 2015.
• Overlapping regions represent synergies in sustainability, including:
  • Bearable (e.g., urban green spaces) -Viable (e.g., resource efficiency) -Equitable (e.g., job creation)
• A common approach to assessing sustainability is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA):
  • Goal definition and scope
  • Inventory analysis
  • Impact assessment
  • Interpretation
• Streamlined LCA (SLCA) is a qualitative assessment for assessing products and processes.
• Integrating sustainability into engineering involves recognizing that sustainability is a property of a system, not just an object. Every stage of a product's life has an environmental impact that needs to be addressed.

Module 4: Systems Thinking

• Every engineering project has interacting components within a larger environment. To thoroughly understand a product/process, a holistic perspective known as "Systems Thinking" is essential.
• Systems thinking emphasizes that parts of a system often behave differently when isolating as compared to when operating in concert with other integral parts of a system
• Simple systems (e.g., a spring) are deterministic (predictable behaviour with a clear cause-and-effect). Complex systems (e.g., a traffic network) are non-deterministic (behavior contains a fair amount of randomness and feedback)
• Systems can be analyzed at different spatial, temporal, and organizational scales.
• Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are helpful tools for understanding relationships and feedback loops within complex systems.
• CLDs can help in identifying potential impacts of disturbances or changes in systems (resilience).

Test your knowledge on the key principles of engineering ethics and safety protocols. This quiz covers essential aspects like conflict of interest, responsibilities of engineers, and the effectiveness of safety equipment. Enhance your understanding of ethical decision-making within the engineering field.